Oppressive
Watching Gu Yue Ye humiliated, Jiang Ya feels secretly pleased and envies Fang Yuan’s freedom to ignore social pressure, while Gu Yue Ye, controlling his anger for the sake of the vitality leaves, warns Fang Yuan that everyone eventually needs a favour from someone else and asks him to think how he would feel treated the same way. Fang Yuan privately dismisses talk of human relationships as leverage the weak use on each other, a demonic path thought he keeps to himself, and decides to simply set a price: sixty eight primeval stones per leaf. ch. 146
Gu Yue Ye protests the price and mentions that the clan’s own vitality leaf supply is entirely controlled by the medicine hall clan elder Gu Yue Yao Ji through connections he cannot draw on, offering sixty stones instead, and Fang Yuan responds by raising the price to seventy and then, as Ye keeps arguing, to seventy two, warning that every further word raises it further. Gu Yue Ye finally agrees to buy five leaves, has Jiang Ya carry the payment on the spot, and is told to collect the leaves from Jiang Ya in three days. ch. 146
Once Gu Yue Ye leaves, Jiang Ya warns Fang Yuan that the old man is vengeful and will not forget the humiliation, but Fang Yuan is unconcerned, reasoning that the clan must shed its old and weak the way a wolf pack expels the crippled and sick to survive on limited resources, and that even fifty vitality leaves, not the five Gu Yue Ye just bought, would not guarantee an old recalled Gu Master’s survival in a wolf tide. He sets new terms for Jiang Ya, limiting him to arranged visit times and ordering the standing price of vitality leaves raised to seventy stones, over Jiang Ya’s worry that the increase will draw accusations of profiting from the clan’s crisis, which Fang Yuan dismisses. Fang Yuan judges that with the red steel Relic Gu soon to bring him to peak stage cultivation, he must now act oppressively rather than stay low profile as before. ch. 146
Half a month later, lightning wolves attack in waves and force Gu Masters into retreat; leading a Xiong clan group toward Gu Yue village, Xiong Jiao Man watches Xiong Yuan Zhen die of his wolf wounds before he can finish the confession she senses he is trying to make. With four bold lightning wolf packs closing in, more than her group can fight through, she orders a retreat into a valley behind them and sends her two giant bears, one brown and one black, to hold the wolves off. ch. 146
The black bear is overrun after killing dozens of lightning wolves, and its Bear Enslavement Gu, a rank two Gu able to control ordinary bears but not a bear king, which has at least a hundred bear subordinates even at its weakest, flies back into Xiong Jiao Man’s hand. Trapped in the valley and waiting on a Signal Gu call for reinforcements, the group hears a voice from the cliff above: Fang Yuan looking down at them, a sight that leaves the seven surviving Xiong clan Gu Masters first relieved, then visibly conflicted. ch. 146
