Chapter 165

In the ancestral hall, everyone kneels in uneasy silence, since Gu worms a dead Gu Master leaves behind keep the will of their maker rather than turning wild, and the first generation clan head died at least a thousand years before this night. No one alive remembers whether his old promise still holds. The clan’s last crisis was two hundred years past. ^{ch. 165}

From the slope outside, Fang Yuan wonders why the elders pulled back, then sees why: a swarm of red, locust-shaped flying Gu descends on the village square in a cloud, burrowing into the wounded Gu Masters and mortals waiting there and draining their blood and essence. The Gu Masters had already agreed to this, offering their bodies willingly for the clan, and none of them flee as the insects multiply in the square. Within a few breaths the swarm multiplies by tens of times over, leaving only bones behind before rushing out toward the wolf tide. ^{ch. 165}

Fang Yuan names it at once: the Blood Guillotine, a rank five Gu whose use and feeding are one and the same. It gorges on a Gu Master’s origin blood and doubles its numbers each time, and when food runs short it eats its own kind back down to a size it can sustain. At its largest it can blanket the sky and flatten whole villages, worse than many rank six Gu; reduced to one or two, it is weaker than a rank three. It advances into the rank six Blood Deity, seventh among the Top Ten Great Demonic Gu, and in his previous life Fang Yuan meant to refine that Gu himself before circumstance forced him to settle for the Spring Autumn Cicada instead. ^{ch. 165}

Up to tens of thousands of Blood Guillotines sweep the battlefield like a tornado, and while ordinary beast blood does not feed their growth, it kills the lightning wolves outright, drying them to husks in a few breaths. When the freed Thunder Crown Wolf’s steel net finally breaks apart, the swarm engulfs it whole. Its own lightning fries thousands of the insects at once, and the several rank four Gu on its body hold the rest back for a time, but its huge size works against it: Blood Guillotines burrow past the cracked armor and drink from it directly, forcing it to electrocute its own body just to burn them off. ^{ch. 165}

The wolf tide’s push on the village stops as the lightning wolves turn to fight the swarm on the wolf’s own command, and the dense cloud thins to fog and then to a small tornado as it takes losses of its own. The Thunder Crown Wolf breaks free and flees with nearly half its blood gone, its speed fallen to less than a tenth of normal and its lightning scattered and weak, and the rest of the wolf pack scatters with it. The surviving Gu Masters collapse where they stand, some grieving, some simply relieved to be alive. ^{ch. 165}

Fang Yuan judges that the wolf, cornered and at its weakest, would be worth killing now for the Gu it carries, and Gu Yue Bo reaches the same call: he leaves Yao Zhong and Ge Yan behind and leads the seven elders still fit to fight after the fleeing wolf. Suspicious of where the Blood Guillotine came from, Fang Yuan follows in stealth, unable to also use his Thunderwings Gu since the two cannot run together, and keeping his distance so the elders will not notice him. Half an hour later he finds Gu Yue Bo and the Bai clan leader at a standstill over the same cornered, dying wolf, each side accusing the other of trying to steal a kill it does not deserve. ^{ch. 165}

The wolf’s den holds three Thunder Crown Wolves in total, each a myriad beast king commanding a pack tens of thousands of lightning wolves strong and hunting one of the mountain’s three clans as its own prey. The Bai clan, having already killed its own thunder crown wolf and grown stronger than Gu Yue clan in recent years, came looking for an opening and cornered this wounded one in the valley instead. The wolf’s blood, bones, eyes, and fur are valuable refinement materials, and its body carries several Gu of its own, some as high as rank four, which neither clan will give up without a fight. A cold laugh sounds from the mountain wall above him, and a young man in white drops out of the sky, slashing an ice blade toward his face while saying he has waited a long time for this. ^{ch. 165}