Each with their own objectives
A young Gu Master offers Tie Ruo Nan his condolences over her father’s death, then tells her the search of the battlefield turned up traces suggesting a few survivors escaped it. He worries that the demonic Gu Master who inherited the blood sea inheritance may be among them. Tie Ruo Nan stops crying, rises, and swears to find her father’s killer whoever it is. The young Gu Master answers that the investigation will go ahead. But the clan leader has already ordered him to send her home safely instead of letting her join it. ch. 203
She refuses to be sent away, and mid-argument her eyes suddenly close and she drops asleep on the snow. He hands her off to a subordinate named Gui Yi with orders to escort her home, then sets out alone along the Yellow Dragon River after the survivors. ch. 203
On that same river’s beach, several hundred six legged crocodiles are already charging Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing. Bai Ning Bing, without her old Northern Dark Ice Soul physique and reduced to two borrowed Gu, sees cliffs closing off three sides of their ground and demands to know why Fang Yuan chose such a spot. He tells her not to panic: it is a hundred-strong beast group, not a thousand, so they can be killed off rather than simply survived. ch. 203
She wades in with the Chainsaw Golden Centipede, and about twenty crocodiles die to it in quick succession before Fang Yuan calls out to strike their stomachs instead of their armored backs. Bai Ning Bing laughs him off and keeps hacking her own way, until her blade dulls against the crocodiles’ carapaces and her attacks start losing their edge. Only then does she recall his advice and switch to their bellies, where the crocodiles are soft and killing turns easy again. Tens of them die this way, and the survivors, enraged, fix their hatred on Bai Ning Bing as the greater threat and leave Fang Yuan at the rear alone. ch. 203
Mid-fight, she weighs killing Fang Yuan for the Yang Gu that keeps her leashed to him, then drops the thought. She knows he would destroy the Gu rather than let her take it, and she still has no Gu worms of her own to fall back on. Fang Yuan, watching her hesitate, reads her plainly and feels no surprise, since he would have thought the same in her place. After an hour of fighting on top of almost five days without real sleep on the raft before this, her stamina finally gives out and she calls back to him for help. He refuses, reasoning that joining the fight would only draw more crocodiles onto himself and cost her the Yang Gu if he dies. He throws her his Blood Moon Gu instead, and it steadies her for a while, even as her primeval essence starts running low again. ch. 203
