Chapter 177

Fang Yuan feeds his Chainsaw Golden Centipede’s wounds to a Living Steel Gu, a rank two healer shaped like a fist-sized charcoal briquette. For an hour its steel smoke closes the centipede’s cuts and regrows its shredded razors, and the Gu itself shrinks to nothing as it works. It is an expenditure Gu, spent whole in the act. Five or six light scars remain even so, ones natural recovery would close within a few weeks, but without the Living Steel Gu the razors alone would have needed at least half a year to regrow. ^{ch. 177}

Inside his aperture, the Spring Autumn Cicada keeps recovering, and its pace keeps accelerating the longer it heals. It is rank six, Fang Yuan is only rank three, and his aperture is losing the strength to hold it. Reaching rank six himself would end the strain, but in his previous life that climb alone cost him more than four hundred years, time he no longer has. Taking the cicada out of his aperture is the other way, and it carries its own danger: the cicada cannot defend itself outside his body, and a rank six Gu loose in the open bends the air into a mirage that would give him away to the Tie father and daughter already watching him. He resolves to hold on until he collects forty thousand primeval stones from Gu Yue Mo Chen, take the Heavenly Essence Treasure Lotus, and leave the village. ^{ch. 177}

Tie Ruo Nan and Tie Xue Leng review a report on six fist-sized purple gold stones from Fang Yuan’s gambling win: he opened five of them on the spot, and Tie Ruo Nan questions how his cultivation could supply that much primeval essence. Her Intuition Gu points her toward an old Liquor worm rather than a lucky find at the gambling rocks. She takes the suspicion to Fang Zheng. He tells her that after Fang Yuan tested only C grade at the awakening ceremony, he drank heavily for a long stretch, favoring the clan’s costly bamboo wine and taking primeval stones from classmates to pay for it. Tie Ruo Nan traces the wine to the village’s one inn, confirms the purchases with the innkeeper, and concludes Fang Yuan staged the drunkenness to disguise that he was already feeding a Liquor worm. Fang Zheng, who had once looked down on his brother as a failure who had given up on himself, now believes the whole spectacle was aimed at fooling everyone around him, himself included. ^{ch. 177}