Borrow
Back among the elders, the academy elder watches Fang Yuan work the room and reflects that he had once rated Fang Zheng, Chi Cheng, and Mo Bei above him, yet Fang Yuan is the one who advanced first. Fang Yuan thanks him warmly for the clan’s teachings, and the old man, startled, warms to him in turn; Gu Yue Chi Lian watches the same performance and grows more unsettled the longer it runs, wondering whether a teenager can really be this practiced a politician. ch. 155
Alone with Fang Yuan in the study afterward, Chi Lian drops the smile and accuses him of dragging the Chi faction into the fight against Yao Ji. Fang Yuan answers that Yao Ji’s fall only benefits the Chi faction, and Chi Lian counters that elder Chi Zhong, though Chi faction, married into the Yao faction, so the clan head appointed him precisely to balance the two sides. He presses Fang Yuan on how he learned of his grandson Chi Cheng’s matter, but Fang Yuan brushes the question aside and asks instead for three thousand primeval stones. ch. 155
Chi Lian slams the table and refuses to be threatened again, though he says he can accept ongoing cooperation. Fang Yuan insists this is a loan, not extortion, and offers to sign a receipt for it. Chi Lian lists the elder’s privileges Fang Yuan should already know: a hundred primeval stones a week in ordinary times, three hundred during the wolf tide, a free rank three Gu worm, access to the clan’s rank one through three recipes, and the right to a wife and two concubines where an ordinary Gu Master keeps only one wife. Fang Yuan says refining his rank three Gu worm will still cost him more than that. Chi Lian reasons that an elder is unlikely to skip out on a debt, and decides that lending the money will lower Fang Yuan’s guard long enough to let him probe how Fang Yuan learned the secret. His butler brings several money bags of primeval stones, which Fang Yuan weighs and finds correct. He judges privately that three thousand primeval stones may not be enough to finish the refinement, though the shortfall does not worry him, since he already means to keep borrowing from the Chi faction. ch. 155
Fang Yuan then asks to borrow the Cleansing Water Gu Chi Lian bought from the caravan, which Chi Lian had set aside to purify his grandson’s aperture of the mixed primeval essence from boosting his cultivation. Chi Lian refuses outright and calls the request blackmail, and only relents after an hour, handing it over along with the primeval stones against two signed loan receipts. He is left alone afterward, staring at both receipts with rising indignation. ch. 155
Three days later, Fang Yuan completes a second fusion attempt and produces a rank three Sky Canopy Gu, a big ladybug-shaped worm fused from a rank two White Jade Gu and an aqua defense Gu bought with merit points, after his first attempt with a Water Shield Gu killed that Gu instead. Separately, the clan’s bestowed rank three Gu worm for a new elder, which he chooses as Thunderwings Gu taken as spoils from a slain frenzy lightning wolf, gives him short bursts of flight and fixes what he judges his last weakness in combat mobility. ch. 155
