Chapter 147

Trapped by four bold lightning wolf packs he had lured there himself, hoping to let the group die and later harvest their Gu worms for merit points, Fang Yuan looks down at Xiong Jiao Man’s stranded seven and offers his tree vine as an escape route, but only for a price: one Bear Enslavement Gu and seven hundred primeval stones for all seven lives. The Xiong Gu Masters call this shameless and protest that they are alliance mates, yet accept once Fang Yuan reminds them reinforcements may never come in time, and the group escapes moments before the Chi Shan group and two other reinforcement parties reach the valley, summoned earlier by the Xiong group’s own call for aid. Jiao Man swears she will remember the humiliation. Fang Yuan shrugs it off and leaves. ^{ch. 147}

Jiao Man leads her six surviving Gu Masters to Gu Yue village, explaining that lightning wolves have besieged the Xiong clan for six days, and Chi Shan agrees to bring the request to the clan leader. The group is sent to the bamboo building for treatment, where the healing effort is run by Gu Yue Yao Le, a rank one Gu Master still young enough to blush at being praised. ^{ch. 147}

Venting about the price Fang Yuan charged her, Jiao Man draws a flood of complaints from the watching Gu Yue clansmen: he sold a vitality leaf for eighty primeval stones, refused a Gu Master who asked to join his group and had the man insulted publicly for asking, and spent his parents’ inheritance on one red steel Relic Gu before snatching a second from Bai Ning Bing. The clansmen praise the late Gu Yue Qing Shu as humble and kind and call Fang Yuan’s own brother Fang Zheng his opposite in temperament. Jiao Man asks why no one has taught Fang Yuan a lesson. The room falls silent. The clan’s own experience is that whoever confronts him ends up worse off than before, so his standing as head of the wolf tide’s new rising stars rests on nothing but the fact that he fights harder than anyone else. ^{ch. 147}

Hearing all this, Yao Le resolves to ask her grandmother, medicine hall elder Gu Yue Yao Ji, to discipline Fang Yuan. Yao Ji promises to look into it once her granddaughter has gone. Left alone, she admits to herself that her real grievance predates the complaint: Fang Yuan once refused to sell her a Liquor worm she wanted for a Gu fusion, and his raised vitality leaf prices now cut into the profits she draws from controlling the clan’s Nine Leaf Vitality Grass supply. ^{ch. 147}