No one more suited than Fang Yuan!
At the clan banquet, silence follows Fang Yuan’s admission that he stayed out of the wolf tide’s fighting, and the elders read it as the end of his political standing. Clan leader Gu Yue Bo tells him the clan ancestor’s rules call for stripping a runaway of elder status, but leaves the actual penalty to a later discussion among the elders. Fang Yuan accepts without protest. He privately reasons that his elder title was only ever a means to cultivate better, and that having already staked his life on the demonic path, giving up a title costs him nothing. ch. 172
Gu Yue Mo Chen then breaks his own silence and claims the blame himself: his granddaughter Gu Yue Mo Yan begged him, kneeling and in tears, not to let Fang Yuan die on the battlefield, so he kept Fang Yuan confined and unconscious in his own estate until the pursuit of the lightning crown wolf. The other elders find the story hard to credit, since telling it costs Mo Chen his own reputation, and Gu Yue Bo watches Fang Yuan’s face for a reaction he does not get. The clan leader defers Mo Chen’s punishment as well, and turns the banquet toward toasting the visiting Tie Xue Leng. ch. 172
After the wolf tide’s losses, fewer than ten clan elders remain in total, Fang Yuan among them, and the undivided interests of the whole village fall to just that handful to compete over. That night, Mo Chen receives Fang Yuan for tea in the Mo faction’s courtyard, and Fang Yuan works out why: the faction’s only heir, Gu Yue Mo Yan’s brother Gu Yue Mo Bei, died in the wolf tide, and clan rule bars a daughter from carrying the faction’s assets into an ordinary marriage, so Mo Chen’s one hope is a son-in-law who marries into the Mo faction and inherits it in her place. Mo Chen, fallen to rank two by his own injury and expecting to lose his elder status besides, needs someone who can hold the faction together, and has already settled on Fang Yuan as the only suitable candidate. ch. 172
