Chapter 181

Tie Ruo Nan points the crowd’s attention back to Fang Yuan’s stillness on the recording: no disappointment, no envy, nothing but calm through a result that swaps his fortune with his brother’s outright. She reasons that only someone holding a far greater card than his brother’s A grade would feel no jealousy watching it, the way a person who finds ten stones does not envy one who finds a single stone. Her conclusion is that Fang Yuan hid his true aptitude, and that he stayed hidden out of fear of what revealing it would bring. ^{ch. 181}

Asked why he would conceal a higher grade rather than claim it, Tie Ruo Nan answers with a question of her own: does Gu Yue Bo know of Ren Zu’s ten children? The clan leader is visibly shaken. Tie Ruo Nan recounts the story herself: the ten children were born with aptitudes so extreme that heaven cut their lives short, and Ren Zu, dying of old age, fed their bodies and his own into the Derivation Gu, whose burst stomach scattered the first mortals across the land, mortals carrying a diluted trace of that bloodline ever since. In rare people that bloodline concentrates rather than dilutes as they grow or cultivate, and when one line comes to dominate entirely, that is a ten extreme physique. She names one of these as the likeliest explanation for Fang Yuan’s calm, his lack of envy, and his silence: a physique so far beyond an A grade that revealing it would mark him for death. ^{ch. 181}

Gu Yue Bo’s mind goes to the clan’s secret history rather than the official one: the first generation ancestor’s dying words named Ancient Moon Desolate Yin, foretelling that the clan would one day produce a bearer of that extreme physique and rise into a new golden age, and instructing that when it appeared, the bearer be brought to his coffin in the blood pond graveyard, where he kept a means to curb the physique’s fatal weakness. Believing Fang Yuan to be that prophesied heir, Gu Yue Bo reverses his stance on the spot and resolves to protect him, whatever it costs with the Jia family. The chapter’s own narration states plainly that the theory is wrong: nobody in the room, Tie Xue Leng included, thinks of reincarnation, and Tie Ruo Nan has reasoned her way to a conclusion that is the exact opposite of the truth. ^{ch. 181}

Tie Ruo Nan speculates aloud that this secret could be Fang Yuan’s motive for killing Jia Jin Sheng, and Gu Yue Bo rebukes her for making an unconfirmed accusation, though his own attitude toward Fang Yuan has already reversed entirely. Tie Xue Leng, unnoticed by either of them, has already slipped away. Gu Yue Bo assumes he has gone after Fang Yuan, orders Fang Zheng to gather the clan elders, and flies off himself; Tie Ruo Nan runs for Fang Yuan’s residence in turn, leaving Fang Zheng alone in the hall. ^{ch. 181}

Alone, Fang Zheng’s one remaining pride, having beaten his brother in aptitude, collapses entirely, and grief tips into what feels like a physical attack: his throat locks, his face reddens, and he claws at the floor tile until his nails tear and bleed. The pain itself pulls him back from it. Anger reignites where despair had choked him, and as the grip on his own throat loosens he ends up half laughing on the ground, an eerie sound in the firelit hall. ^{ch. 181}