Chapter 174

Reflecting on the village tour, Tie Ruo Nan realises only now that Fang Yuan’s account of it was suspiciously composed: every word objectively true, drained of personal feeling, giving her nothing to press on for further clues. Tie Xue Leng reads Fang Yuan’s control differently, pointing instead to the banquet: a normal person guards their own reputation above all else, so a man calm enough to publicly admit his own cowardice, as Fang Yuan did there, is not indifferent but so fully in command of his feelings that Tie Xue Leng calls it a demonic nature. When Tie Ruo Nan reasons this points to some larger aim behind the admission, her father waves the idea off as overthinking, though he admits the young man interests him despite his aptitude capping at grade C. ^{ch. 174}

Walking home under the moon, Fang Yuan judges Tie Xue Leng too sharp to fool for long: given enough time, the divine investigator will work out the truth on his own. Racing that clock, he turns to the Mo faction’s marriage offer, recalling the deliberately steep price he set for marrying Gu Yue Mo Yan, a hundred thousand primeval stones and ten rare Gu worms each at least rank three, terms so steep that Gu Yue Mo Chen chased him out in anger. Fang Yuan expects Mo Chen to come back and compromise anyway, though taking the marriage would undo the political rehabilitation Mo Chen bought him at the banquet by shouldering the blame himself. ^{ch. 174}

He reads the clan’s balance of power as it now stands: the Chi faction weakened by elder Gu Yue Chi Lian’s death but not broken, since its heir Chi Cheng and elder Chi Zhong survive; the Mo faction crippled by the loss of its own heir and Mo Chen’s fall to rank two; and the medicine faction, whose healing Gu Masters lost little in the wolf tide, positioned to absorb both. ^{ch. 174}

The next morning, Tie Ruo Nan learns that a clan elder has already named and executed the demonic Gu Master blamed for Jia Jin Sheng’s death, on the strength of his past attempt on Fang Zheng and nothing more. Unconvinced, she has the body exhumed and reads a hunter’s life from it: a bowman’s uneven calluses, old scars from beast claws and bites, three toes missing from the left foot, and grass shoes cut to fit that foot exactly, grown from a hemp grass unique to Qing Mao Mountain. She concludes he was a hunter native to the mountain who became a demonic Gu Master by chance, but the hamlets the wolf tide left empty give her no one left to confirm it. ^{ch. 174}

Half a day of searching turns up nothing, and Tie Ruo Nan refuses to call the lead dead. Why the man attacked Fang Zheng, and why no one in the village recognised a local face, still have no answer. Tie Xue Leng tells her she has truly grown up. ^{ch. 174}