Escape
An hour later, the lava crocodile king lets out one last cry before falling silent, and Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing hear the Xuan Yuan Divine Pheasant pecking at its meal. Its appetite is too large for one crocodile king to satisfy, and neither of them sleeps that night. Between the crocodile king’s cries they hear the white apes screaming, the poison swallowing toad screeching, the bee groups fluttering, and above all, the pheasant’s own loud cry. Only at evening does it finally fly off, trailing a rainbow behind it, and the two dare to leave the cave. ch. 208
The valley is completely wrecked, half destroyed. The lava crocodile king lies dead on its back, its stomach pried open by the pheasant, flesh and organs eaten, leaving only a skeleton in dark red skin. They find a red glass fragment, the remains of the Flame Stomach Gu, destroyed defending the crocodile king against the pheasant. The Lava Explosion Gu and Accumulating Ash Gu are nowhere to be found, since a Gu worm leaves its dead host to wander loose. Fang Yuan expected to miss the Accumulating Ash Gu, but they still spend the afternoon cutting scraps of leftover flesh into the tusita flower, enough to feed the Crocodile Strength Gu for three months. ch. 208
At the white apes’ territory, the forest is now broken trees and scattered limbs, with the old, the crippled, and the young crying over their dead. The pheasant’s night of feeding reduced what was a thousand strong beast group to only two or three hundred, and the survivors, including its beast king ranked members, are all injured. Bai Ning Bing wants to strike while they are weak. Fang Yuan stops her: an army burning with righteous indignation is bound to win, he tells her, and the apes, hurt as they are, would fight to the death if provoked, more than she alone could handle against a few hundred injured beast kings. She gives up the plan. ch. 208
The rotting swamp has turned chaotic, its poisonous residents killing each other now that the pheasant has passed through and unsettled the balance. The two watch three fights from its edge. Two brightly colored snakes battle until one swallows the other, only for a crab sized scorpion to kill the winner. A poison powder moth is swallowed by an eerie blue toad and suffocates inside it, but the toad also dies, poisoned by the moth’s powder. A face sized black spider is swarmed and devoured by ants. Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing leave at once. ch. 208
The frenzy needle bees’ house sized hive has collapsed and stands empty, and a smell of sesame draws the two closer. Fang Yuan explains the hive is both a refinement material and food humans can eat directly, then bites into a piece; it tastes like a biscuit, sweet and crisp rather than oily. Bai Ning Bing tries a piece too and finds it delicious. With their salted meat and dry biscuits running out, she suggests collecting hive for the tusita flower, and though Fang Yuan looks uneasy and wants to move quickly, she reassures him that a windless day keeps scavengers away for now. ch. 208
His unease is justified: a thick cloud of frenzy needle bees descends on them. The pheasant, after eating its fill of the hive’s centre, never bothered exterminating the swarm, whose numbers were barely reduced, and the bees, too low in intelligence to keep chasing it once it flew high, had already returned to find their home destroyed and two strangers eating what remained. Their fury at the pheasant transfers completely to Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing. ch. 208
Without a movement Gu, Bai Ning Bing falls behind Fang Yuan as they run. Her Sky Canopy Gu forms a white armor that flickers after taking almost a thousand strikes in a moment, the bees’ steel hard needles at high speed no less dangerous than a needle rain. Her primeval essence keeps draining, and some of the bees, grown into rank three Gu with piercing ability, punch straight through the armor and open wounds on her back, the pain pushing her speed past its usual limit. Fang Yuan, meanwhile, hardens the skin on his back into a crocodile scaled armor with his Carapace Gu, which ordinary bees cannot get through, drawing the dangerous Gu bees toward Bai Ning Bing instead. ch. 208
After fifteen more minutes of pursuit, both are panting and slowing when Fang Yuan spots a lake ahead. They dive in, and the bees follow, stinging Bai Ning Bing’s armor hard even underwater, but the two swim to the far shore and climb out with the hive’s scent washed away, leaving the swarm to vent its frustration on the water’s surface behind them. Shaken, Bai Ning Bing curses: the pheasant, the apes, the bees, none of them were anything she could have handled, and had the pheasant found her the night before she would have become its meal. Rank three cultivation, she says, is the bottom of this world’s hierarchy, and she asks when they will finally reach Bai Gu mountain. Fang Yuan hushes her and crouches to touch the cold remains of a doused campfire: traces left behind by other people. ch. 208
