Chapter 199

The ice glacier holding Lord Sky Crane shakes as he nears breaking free, and Fang Yuan shouts a warning. Unable to speak, Bai Ning Bing detonates one arm into a wave of frost that thickens the glacier by a hundred feet, then detonates the other, piling on ice that repeatedly forces Lord Sky Crane back whenever he tries to break out. Rank five or not, and thoroughly spent from killing First gen Gu Yue, he cannot escape the ice, so he activates the Life-retaining Jade Burial Gu instead, sealing himself inside an abnormally hard jade coffin that Bai Ning Bing cannot scratch even after repeated tries. Bai Ning Bing can only bury the coffin under an ice peak hundreds of feet high. ^{ch. 199}

Fang Yuan watches, impressed even on his second time seeing the Northern Dark Ice Soul physique in action, while both of Bai Ning Bing’s exploded arms slowly turn to ice, his appearance and mind dissolving with them toward true death. The ice creeps toward Fang Yuan as well, and he realizes he cannot escape it alone. He draws out the Yin Yang Rotation Gu, a black and white pair orbiting in a Taiji sphere, and wills the black half into Bai Ning Bing’s frozen body, spending nearly all the rank three primeval essence still left in his own aperture. Black light and gathering yin energy tear the ice sculpture apart, and Bai Ning Bing steps out whole again, white gown, silver hair, both arms intact, the blizzard stopping only inches short of Fang Yuan himself. ^{ch. 199}

Bai Ning Bing marvels at being alive, and Fang Yuan explains: the Yin Gu he used reverses yang into yin, a rank four healing effect that can bring the dead back, at the cost of lowering the user’s aptitude by ten percent. Bai Ning Bing’s hundred percent ten extreme physique drops to ninety, matching Fang Yuan’s own aptitude, and he welcomes the loss, since it frees him from the Northern Dark Ice Soul physique for now. Fang Yuan warns the physique will return as his aptitude recovers with cultivation, at which point only the matching Yang Gu, still in Fang Yuan’s own hands and primed to self-destroy at a thought, can reverse it again. He needs the leverage: at rank one against Bai Ning Bing’s rank three, he has no other way to keep him in check. ^{ch. 199}

Bai Ning Bing sees the plan for what it is and asks his price. Fang Yuan lays out the danger: Qing Mao Mountain is now a frozen wasteland where the three great clans and countless others will die within three to five days, drawing outside attention, and Lord Sky Crane is not dead, only sealed and waiting to break free. Since Fang Yuan’s own rank one body cannot travel or fight alone, he asks Bai Ning Bing to let him tag along while they roam the world together. Bai Ning Bing agrees, on condition that he leads and Fang Yuan follows. Asked what comes next, Fang Yuan names Bai Gu Mountain and laughs at some private joke Bai Ning Bing cannot place. ^{ch. 199}

A wave of expressions crosses Bai Ning Bing’s face before she looks down at her own chest and cries out that she has become a woman. Fang Yuan explains plainly: the Yin Gu turns a man into a woman, the Yang Gu would turn a woman into a man, which is what Yin Yang Rotation means. Furious, she vows to reclaim the one remaining Yang Gu, cursing at Fang Yuan’s attempt to console her. ^{ch. 199}

Two days later, the ice cracks open and the jade coffin bursts, freeing Lord Sky Crane, who is furious at having killed his old enemy without recovering the true blood sea inheritance he came for. Searching the melting ice with a recon Gu, he pulls out a frozen young man wrapped in the light of a Moon Raiment Gu, close to death, and reasons that the resemblance to Fang Yuan is close enough that the two are likely twins, which would make the youth kin enough to refine a Kinship Blood worm from. The rescued youth, Fang Zheng, wakes disoriented, remembering only the three clans’ competition, an Ironbeak flying crane breaking his barrier and pecking his forehead before he fell from a cliff. He recognizes Lord Sky Crane, tries to rise, and fails; Lord Sky Crane names himself and says they are bound for the Middle Continent, leaving Fang Zheng shouting in shock. ^{ch. 199}