Chapter 205

Fang Yuan takes stock of the two Gu pulled from the crocodile king. Neither suits him well. The Carapace Gu only guards his back, and the Crocodile Strength Gu would push his mortal body past what it can safely bear, since he has already remodeled it once with the Black and White Boar Gu and cannot keep strengthening it without a Gu like the Jade Bone Gu from the Bai Gu mountain inheritance, still at least ten to fifteen days away, to support it. ^{ch. 205}

So he hands the Crocodile Strength Gu to Bai Ning Bing instead, telling her a month of repeated use will give her a crocodile’s strength. She is quietly delighted. She had searched for a Gu like this back in the Bai clan and never found one. Before they leave the blood-soaked, unstable beach, Fang Yuan gathers crocodile blood and flesh into the tusita flower, since the flesh will feed the new Gu and the blood will feed his Blood Skull Gu and Blood Moon Gu. ^{ch. 205}

Night falls as they climb the collapsed cliff into a dense jungle, and the two press on despite strange cries echoing out of the dark ahead. They stop at a stand of at least thirty to forty beast-trap trees, carnivorous plants whose vine-tipped leaves snap shut on prey like a mouth and spend months dissolving it in acid. Bai Ning Bing wants to cut a path through with her Gu; Fang Yuan instead calls the grove their safest campsite for the night, reasoning they may find nothing better by pushing on through the darker jungle beyond it. ^{ch. 205}

He guts two crocodile corpses from the beach, empties and cleans them, and shows her his plan: they climb inside the bodies and roll toward the trees, letting the vines swallow the corpses whole and hoist them up into leaf-cages in the crown. Bai Ning Bing follows his lead once she understands, and by the time she settles inside her own leaf-cage the acid smell around her no longer troubles her, since Fang Yuan has already told her it needs at least three months to dissolve a crocodile’s body. Worn out from days without proper sleep and the fight before it, she drops off almost at once. ^{ch. 205}

Fang Yuan stays awake longer. He pulls cotton clothes and a cloak from the tusita flower to cushion and cover himself, then spends the hours before midnight nurturing his aperture, helped by the lotus and his new aptitude to a point where a full night of it still would not drain his primeval essence. He sleeps anyway, choosing rest over the extra cultivation, and dozes lightly enough to hear beasts drawn by the blood scent get caught by the beast-trap trees around them through the night. ^{ch. 205}