The Liquor worm’s will, inherited from the Flower Wine Monk, drives into Fang Yuan’s aperture and crashes toward his rising primeval essence. Between the two colliding forces a small Gu appears: brownish yellow, its surface ringed like growing wood, two wide translucent wings veined like overlapping leaves. It is the Spring Autumn Cicada, startled awake and furious that its territory has been violated. Its aura rolls out like the Milky Way pouring down, weak yet vast enough to sweep mountains for ten thousand miles. Beside it the Liquor worm’s will is an ant before an elephant, swallowed whole in an instant. Fang Yuan’s own primeval essence shatters against the aura like a wave on a mountain, and the sea in his aperture churns before the cicada’s pressure flattens it into an unbroken mirror. He feels a weight like a mountain on his heart and cannot stir a drop of essence, yet he is not afraid; he is overjoyed, realizing the cicada was reborn together with him and can be used again, not just once. ch. 19
The Spring Autumn Cicada is rank six, the first rank six Gu Fang Yuan ever held in his previous life and, in the end, his last, the product of thirty years of effort. Righteous faction warriors, sensing the threat it posed, gathered soon after to kill him. After rebirth Fang Yuan believed it lost, but it had only fallen into deep sleep inside him, its vitality nearly destroyed by the leap back through five hundred years, too weak for even its master to feel until the Liquor worm’s will woke it. Once full of vitality, its body glossy like fine polished wood and its wings a fresh soft green, it now feels rough and dim like dead wood, its wings withered yellow with the tips curled and broken. Fang Yuan feels both distress, since it stands a step from death, and relief, since at full strength his rank one aperture could not have held it and would simply have burst. ch. 19
A Gu Master and his Gu work best at matching ranks; a weaker Gu wastes its wielder’s strength, and a stronger one is too much for its wielder to use properly. Because the cicada is at its weakest, Fang Yuan’s rank one aperture can bear it for now. Fang Yuan realizes he already owned a vital Gu before he ever sought the Liquor worm: the Spring Autumn Cicada he refined in his previous life, whose bond with him has only grown since the rebirth. In the truest sense it is his first Gu, the fruit of thirty years of effort rather than anything done in this life. Fang Yuan calls the Liquor worm scum beside it, and declares the Spring Autumn Cicada his true vital Gu. ch. 19
