Becoming the leader
Bai Ning Bing cuts her way out of her leaf-cage with a Blood Moon Gu blade and drops to the forest floor. She had a rough night. The crocodile body was hard and tough, and between that and the cold night it kept waking her, so only cultivating in a patch of morning sun brings her stamina back to more than half. Looking up at the tree crowns, she counts many more leaf-cages hanging around her and reasons that the blood smell from the beach drew a great many beasts into the grove overnight. ch. 206
Fang Yuan calls to be freed, and she leaves him waiting a spiteful fifteen minutes before cutting his cage open too. He steps out fully rested and clearly pleased with himself, having spent the night warm on cushions and cover she never saw him take from the tusita flower. He cooks a stew and adds mushrooms he finds growing near the trees; Bai Ning Bing warns that wild plants can be poisonous, so he drinks five or six mouthfuls himself first before she trusts it. The mushrooms make it taste better than the day before, and despite herself she feels a flicker of admiration for how well he has held up next to her own exhaustion. ch. 206
He feels her gaze land on him and keeps his head down, pretending not to notice, then turns over what he has understood of Bai Ning Bing’s demonic nature since she saved him back on Qing Mao mountain: she will never submit to him, but that does not mean she cannot be subdued and used. He decides against forcing the matter. His own cultivation still needs time to recover, so he can afford to take hers slowly instead. ch. 206
They push on south-east afterward, through a forest that grows taller and darker the deeper they go: beast-trap trees three to four meters high near the camp give way to a stretch at five to six meters, and further in to king trees seven or eight meters tall. The Earth Hearing Communication grass lets them steer around most of the danger moving through it, deer and foxes and distant tiger calls among it, though some stretches still need Bai Ning Bing’s strength to force a way through. Neither of them has a mobile Gu left to speed the trip, since Fang Yuan’s Thousand Li Earthwolf spider died earlier and Bai Ning Bing’s White Form Immortal Snake Gu escaped, so Fang Yuan uses every rest to keep cultivating instead. ch. 206
One night they camp on a stone hill, and Bai Ning Bing falls asleep at once on the bare rock. She wakes the next day aching all over, with a stiff neck and frequent sneezing that Fang Yuan takes as an obvious cold, though they keep travelling regardless. A few days later she falls sick again, with a headache, a fever, and her fighting strength badly reduced; the chapter does not say whether this is the same cold worsening or a second illness on top of it. Fang Yuan stops and treats her with medicine and paste from the tusita flower. She needs six days to recover, too weak through most of it to even tend herself. Afterward she admits to herself, if not to him, that she would have been in real danger without his help, and she grows noticeably quieter in the days that follow, letting Fang Yuan’s authority over their travel settle into something closer to leadership. ch. 206
