Chapter 182

Gu Yue Bo searches the house and finds no one, and the vanishing of both Fang Yuan and Tie Xue Leng together strikes him as no coincidence. He turns on Tie Xue Leng’s daughter, Tie Ruo Nan, and demands to know where her father went. She tells him a white crane delivered a letter that made Tie Xue Leng drop whatever case he had been working and rush to Qing Mao Mountain a year earlier than planned. The only case she knows him to be pursuing here, Jia Jin Sheng’s death, is a dispute over the Jia family’s assets whose ordinary severity never explained her father’s urgency. Gu Yue Bo threatens to hold her hostage against Fang Yuan’s return, and she reminds him her uncle leads the Tie clan. He backs off. Tie Ruo Nan vows she will not flee and will hunt down Jia Jin Sheng’s killer herself, though she grants that Fang Yuan’s disappearance leaves him the likelier suspect. ^{ch. 182}

Elsewhere at the spirit spring, Fang Yuan has already thrown in around ten thousand primeval stones gathered from a classmate reunion and Gu Yue Mo Chen’s forty thousand, around fifty thousand together, chasing the Heavenly Essence Treasure Lotus glimpsed inside its whirlpool. He passes through the Moat Gu’s water wall and grabs the lotus from memory rather than sight. A leak of the Spring Autumn Cicada’s aura is enough to refine the resisting rank three flower Gu at once. With the lotus taken, the spring’s whirlpools vanish and the water goes still. ^{ch. 182}

Before Fang Yuan can leave, a blood colored light erupts from the spring’s depths and a sudden suction drags him under. The Sky Canopy Gu and Thunderwings Gu keep him alive as the current pulls him down a tunnel, and he falls about fifteen metres into a red-lit chamber below. He whips the Chainsaw Golden Centipede into the wall to catch himself above a pond of blood water whose circumference exceeds the village’s own. Streams pour from holes in the ceiling overhead, carrying river life the pond drains dry within moments, and dead fish, turtles, and even human bone drift on its surface while the soil around it turns red. ^{ch. 182}