Astounding applause
The frenzy lightning wolf finally goes down, torn open and bleeding into the mud, and the elders around it credit Fang Yuan’s Blood Moon Gu for wearing it down. They had doubted the Gu when he first refined it. Now they see it work. Fang Yuan deflects their praise politely, and his modesty, next to his ruthless fighting in the battle just past, leaves the elders seeing him as neither the aloof nor the unruly figure the clan’s rumors describe. ch. 160
Privately, he weighs the Blood Moon Gu’s flaw: the days each month it bleeds and its attack power drops, leaving his main weapon unreliable. He hopes the Chainsaw Golden Centipede, still unclaimed in the Flower Wine inheritance ground, will cover that weakness once he obtains it, but the wolf tide’s high alert keeps him from visiting that cave for now. When healers sweep the field, the medicine faction’s Gu Yue Li Chen, only rank two, bows and offers Fang Yuan a checkup. Fang Yuan declines and walks off with a smile. Once he is gone, the elders’ smiles fall away, and they privately admit they are unsettled by how far he has climbed and by the political skill in even a friendly pat on Li Chen’s shoulder. ch. 160
On the road, his classmate Gu Yue Ding Zong greets him and invites him to an evening gathering of old classmates. Fang Yuan agrees, but first heads for the underground tunnel, a place closed to anyone below elder rank. The chamber holds only a few dozen Gu, rank two through rank four, among them the Love Separation Gu, the deadliest rank two poison Gu the clan owns, once Wang Er’s, whose wounds not even a rank three healing Gu can close. Most of what remains is rank three, with few rank four pieces, and Fang Yuan expects little from a clan of this size. He finds the Tusita flower anyway, a rank three grass Gu shaped like a red lantern with three thick round leaves, able to store both food and primeval stones, and takes it at once. He reasons the clan must hold rank five Gu somewhere too, relics of its two historical rank five experts, but kept apart from this cave and fed like offerings rather than tools. ch. 160
Changed into dry clothes, Fang Yuan follows Ding Zong to a feast already laid out for him. The guests are mostly old classmates he once extorted, and they greet him with heavy flattery. He drinks lightly through the toasts, then stands and apologizes for the foolishness of his younger self, asking them to forgive the past. The room answers with loud, eager reassurance. ch. 160
