Chapter 152

The black bear devours Gu Yue Yao Le down to bone and marrow, forced under Fang Yuan’s Bear Enslavement Gu to swallow the girl’s intestines, brain, and shattered bones. The Man-beast Life Burial Gu’s recipe demands it: the beast must consume its victim whole for the best chance of success. The human victim must be a virgin girl with a Gu Master’s aptitude, the chapter notes, holding at least C grade talent, with A or B grade improving the odds further. Fang Yuan feeds the bear a Single Aperture Charcoal Gu, then three Kerosene Gu, and an eerie blood-colored fire soon fills the cave. He throws in a rank two poison Gu last, then feeds the resulting ball of light primeval stones. It takes up to a thousand of them, swells to the size of a room door, and then suddenly shrinks away. ^{ch. 152}

What crawls out is Man-beast Life Burial Gu itself, rank three. It looks like a black spider with a bear’s head, Yao Le’s face tattooed in blood across its back, an expression that seems to hate him. Fang Yuan swallows it without hesitation. The Gu dissolves into black-red water that floods his aperture. At thirty-eight percent of the primeval essence spent, the old crystal walls shatter and reform, carrying him to rank three. He forces out the tainted essence and rebuilds it as white silver, the color of a rank three Gu Master. A trace of black-red impurity keeps returning no matter how many times he purges it. Only a Cleansing Water Gu could scour it clean, and the one that came up for sale already went to the Chi faction, so for now the stain stays. ^{ch. 152}

Three days into the search for her missing granddaughter, medicine hall elder Gu Yue Yao Ji is exhausted and raging. None of the Gu Masters searching for Yao Le have found her. A subordinate interrupts with news that someone has broken through to rank three and become a new clan elder, drawing an emergency meeting at the clan leader’s pavilion. When she learns the name is Fang Yuan, a C grade talent who vanished for the same three days and three nights her granddaughter did, suspicion seizes her, and she heads for the pavilion herself. ^{ch. 152}