Chapter 162

Fang Yuan has been unable to investigate the Flower Wine inheritance ground for over ten days, kept from it by his elder duties and the fighting of the wolf tide. He finally slips back to the rock crack’s secret cave on a rainless night at the end of summer, checks the cave entrance for footprints, and confirms through several layers of precaution that the place remains undiscovered. ^{ch. 162}

He pushes into the rock forest beyond the second secret room, where jade eye stone monkeys have returned to block the excavated path. Rank three now, he clears almost ten groups of them in six hours and reaches the rock door of the third secret room, the one carved with a warning about the Golden Centipede’s cave that stopped him before. This time he walks straight through. ^{ch. 162}

Inside, centipedes gather from every corner of the cave until the Chainsaw Golden Centipede, the tunnel’s insect king, comes to challenge him. Fang Yuan releases a thread of his rank three aura on purpose, provoking the metre-long centipede into coiling around his waist and grinding its twin blade edges against the white light of his Sky Canopy Gu. His primeval essence holds only forty two percent in storage, not enough to sustain the drain, so he calls out the Spring Autumn Cicada instead. Recovered to around a fifth of its old strength, the cicada’s aura alone is enough to make the centipede surrender, and Fang Yuan refines it in a few breaths. ^{ch. 162}

He keeps the centipede on his shoulder as he presses deeper, using the Earth Communication Ear Grass to rule out one branching path and a dead end down another before finding, in a passage the centipedes clear ahead of him, signs that Flower Wine Monk once dug his own way through with a Thousand Li Earthwolf Spider. Fang Yuan spends over twelve hours following it, covering more than three Li, before the slope drops toward a crystal wall with water running behind it. Past the wall he finds a natural essence spring, and floating inside it, a flower bud shifting between blue and white: the Heavenly Essence Treasure Lotus. ^{ch. 162}