Chapter 204

Bai Ning Bing turns on Fang Yuan for standing back while she fights at the front. He needles her in return: the former Northern Dark Ice Soul physique, unable to handle a hundred-strong beast group on her own? When she snaps back that he should fight himself if he has the nerve, he tells her plainly that with rank three cultivation he would not need her at all. ^{ch. 204}

He then corrects her fighting, calling her style crude and telling her to use her primeval essence with more care instead of burning it recklessly. She bristles at first, citing the clan’s praise for her skill, but as he keeps talking his five hundred years of accumulated experience land harder than any clan teaching, and her expression turns from disdain to grave attention. Once she starts fighting by his instructions, her situation improves sharply even as the crocodiles keep dying around her. ^{ch. 204}

Fifteen minutes on, at least half the pack lies injured and over two hundred corpses cover the ground, and the rest finally break off and retreat. What surfaces from the water next is worse. The six legged crocodile king is a hundred beast king that walks upright like a man, on two thick hind legs, its other four limbs clawed and rock-hard. Its yellow eyes fix on her with open killing intent. Bai Ning Bing knows she could beat it fresh, but not with her primeval essence and stamina already this drained from the fight behind her. ^{ch. 204}

Fang Yuan throws her the Heavenly Essence Treasure Lotus to refill her primeval sea, names it for her, and tells her its one weakness is the white patch of skin near its chest before turning invisible with the Stealth scale Gu and vanishing from the fight entirely. Left alone against it, she rolls clear of its charges, watches her centipede blade rebound off its armored back, and gets flung into the cliff wall by a sweep of its tail. She dodges its final rush at the last possible step and lets it crash into the cliff instead, burying itself in falling rock. When it claws free again, half its teeth are broken and blood runs from its nose. It comes at her a second time, angrier than before. An hour later it finally collapses on the wrecked beach, bled out by the Blood Moon Gu’s cutting wounds, and the remaining crocodiles lose their nerve and flee into the river. ^{ch. 204}

Fang Yuan comes out of hiding unhurt and searches the corpse himself, taking two rank two Gu from it: a dying Carapace Gu shaped like a palm-sized turtle shell scaled like a crocodile, and an inert, finger-sized, legless Crocodile Strength Gu. He refines both on the spot using the Spring Autumn Cicada’s leaked aura, and the Carapace Gu spreads into a scale tattoo across his back while the Crocodile Strength Gu sinks into his aperture to raise his physical strength permanently. Bai Ning Bing, who fought and bled for the kill while he collected the reward untouched, watches him do this a second time since their first fight and starts to doubt her old explanation for how he manages it. ^{ch. 204}