Tiger Lick
Startled that his sovereign immortal body’s non-conflicting dao marks and tough ancient desolate beast flesh still suffered the tongue’s damage, Fang Yuan activates rank seven Immortal Gu Precaution, already fused into vajra shell. A new vajra shell replaces the old at once, using time path mortal Gu to erase precaution’s usual ten breath delay so its effect starts the instant the move activates. The tortoise shell thoughts harden and the divination tortoise’s body darkens with a metallic light. Black Tigress licks again from a distance. The new wound is smaller, the size of a fist, light and free of black smoke, while the earlier wound has stopped smoking and now spreads very slowly. ch. 1353
Black Tigress turns on his head next, and the numbing blow is no light injury, so Fang Yuan pulls his head in and then his limbs and tail, leaving only spinning tortoise shell thoughts to expand his defense. Her continued licks do little. Fang Yuan works out her method by reasoning like a fireball’s targeting: fog for sight and then reeking fog for smell both fail to stop her strike. He concludes the killer move reads taste, since each activation needs her tongue. He reasons that she is aligned with Shadow Sect, which holds food path true inheritances, and that only such a non-standard path could pierce his divination tortoise defense. Testing this, he turns the shell burning hot, and she cringes from the heat, then turns it salty, and she recoils in disgust. ch. 1353
Realizing he is countering her move rather than preparing a new one, Black Tigress switches to dark green fist qi that does little damage but whose rule path Gu shake his body at every hit, her attempt to stop him using an immortal killer move. Ba De, suspicious of the delay, transmits in anger for Fang Yuan to stop hiding and kill her, asking if he has feelings for this White Rabbit. Fang Yuan ignores him. Attacking would draw heavy suspicion and likely expose the identity he wears as Wu Yi Hai, so the battle drags out and a hundred thousand tortoise shells simply ring him instead. Privately, he reasons Shadow Sect is fighting to save Spectral Soul’s main body, that Zuo Ye Hui remains only partly controlled, and that the rank eight Gu Immortal Purple Mountain True Monarch has not yet appeared. Fang Yuan decides to conceal his identity and wait for his chance at a Shadow Sect he has long wanted destroyed and never once beaten, trusting his reverse flow protection seal against a rank eight foe, and judges this occasion a grand one. ch. 1353
