Demonic nature
Before Yao Le can react to what he told her, Fang Yuan strikes her unconscious with a chop to the neck, activates the Stealth Scale Gu, and both vanish from the forest. She wakes tied to a rock in a dark mountain cave, her arms bound behind her and a rope looped around her neck, every Gu worm she carried already stripped from her and refined into Fang Yuan’s own. ch. 151
Only fifteen and unable to break the ropes, Yao Le grows more frightened the longer she is left alone, imagining Fang Yuan means to trap her and let her starve for speaking against him to her grandmother. She cries out for Yao Ji, and by the time Fang Yuan returns, her fear has curdled into open hatred of him. ch. 151
Fang Yuan arrives with a captured black bear at his side, controlled through the Bear Enslavement Gu taken earlier from Xiong Jiao Man. He tears her clothes from her while she screams and struggles. She braces for an assault. ch. 151
Instead he steps back, and the black bear’s paw snaps her neck in one blow. One moment she is alive; the next, a corpse. The starving bear begins to eat her on its own, needing no command from Fang Yuan’s Bear Enslavement Gu. ch. 151
Fang Yuan watches unmoved, reasoning that he has passed beyond attachment to self and others, so her death means no more to him than a fox’s or a tree’s. Only strength decides anything in nature, he concludes, and carrying that clarity far enough is what makes a person a demon rather than a Buddha. ch. 151
