Thunder Crown Wolf
Looking past the crystal wall, Fang Yuan pieces together the lotus’s history without needing to be told. A thousand years ago a lone rank five Gu Master stumbled on this spirit spring, settled beside it, and folded the mortal villagers below into what became Gu Yue village, taking in over a hundred wives and concubines and founding the clan that carries his blood. Four generations on, the demonic path’s Flower Wine Monk arrived, killed the fourth generation clan leader and downed a large majority of his elders in open battle, and was infected in turn by the defensive Moonshadow Gu. Unable to keep slaughtering without drawing attention, he dug a hidden tunnel with a Thousand Li Earthwolf Spider and used it to refine the Heavenly Essence Treasure Lotus in the spring itself. ch. 163
The lotus is a rank three flower Gu bred from a recipe of the righteous Immortal Venerable Genesis Lotus, and it advances into the rank six Heavenly Essence Treasure Imperial Lotus, sixth on the ranking of the Top Ten Great Immortal Gu and worth roughly what the Spring Autumn Cicada is. Gu Masters call it a portable spirit spring because it keeps producing primeval stones on its own. But the fusion price is steep: a spirit spring is spent completely to produce it, and advancing the lotus further would need seven springs at rank four, nine at rank five, eleven at rank six. ch. 163
Fang Yuan finds the flower with only eight and a half of the nine leaves it needs before it can be picked, the missing half worn away over centuries as the lotus drained the spring and then, as the spring thinned, began feeding stones back into it instead. He tests it by throwing in primeval stones one at a time; the damaged leaf does not stir until he passes five hundred, and by his count filling it back in one sitting will take at least fifty thousand, likely more. He is carrying just over ten thousand and lacks forty thousand more. ch. 163
Raising that sum as an elder would not be hard. What stops him is that pulling the lotus out ruins the spring outright, and the clan’s higher-ups, already suspicious of him, would hunt down whoever caused it. He decides to wait for a better opening rather than move now. He also concludes why Flower Wine Monk built the inheritance here at all: without the spring, Gu Yue clan has no foundation left to hold the mountain, so its ruin was the monk’s revenge. ch. 163
Leaving the rock crack at dawn, Fang Yuan hears wolf howls, smells blood on the wind, and climbs a hill to look. Wolf packs are flooding toward Gu Yue village, and at their rear sits a myriad beast king as large as a small hill, its body sheathed in blue scales, gold fur tufting its claws and tail, and the fur on its head standing stiff into a towering crown: the Thunder Crown Wolf. Around ten figures fly out of the village to meet it, clan leader Gu Yue Bo at their head. ch. 163
