Encountering a demonic Gu Master
Even after outrunning the bees, the mood stays solemn: ahead of them lies a fire pit and the traces of someone cooking meat. Fang Yuan grows roots from his ear with the Earth Communication Ear Grass, driving them into the ground until his hearing sharpens many times over, and after listening a while he relaxes, finding no one lying in ambush nearby. He sifts through the cold ashes and concludes the fire was lit half a month ago by someone travelling alone, likely no longer close by. ch. 209
Bai Ning Bing reasons that clan Gu Masters travel in groups of five, so a lone traveller points to a demonic Gu Master. The distinction is not that the righteous are kind and the demonic are cruel, but that solitude shows a person’s true nature. Righteous Gu Masters move in groups and answer to the people around them, while demonic Gu Masters, alone and unsupported, grow sharply vigilant and act only to secure their own safety. ch. 209
This is bad news for them. Meeting righteous clan Gu Masters offers some hope of avoiding a fight, but meeting a demonic one guarantees one, unless they can frighten the demonic Gu Master into backing off. Solitary wanderers this deep in the wild tend to run around rank four with unusual methods of their own, and between the two of them, Bai Ning Bing is only a new rank three while Fang Yuan is rank one initial stage, without enough Gu worms to cover every danger. If they meet a demonic Gu Master under these conditions, they will most likely be finished. ch. 209
Fang Yuan decides they should stop rushing and recover fully first, now that they know someone else is nearby. They tend their wounds. Bai Ning Bing’s back is full of fingertip sized holes, and although the Carapace Gu’s coverage is usually too small to matter, this time it spared Fang Yuan most of the damage while she drew the swarm’s attacks. He treats himself first, then helps her, and it is the doubled protection of her Ice Muscles Gu and Sky Canopy Gu together that saved her life against the piercing bee Gu. With medicine and bandages running low even after reusing what they could, Fang Yuan says they urgently need a healing Gu, since medicine is hard to make and expendable while a healing Gu recovers itself on primeval essence. ch. 209
Bai Ning Bing raises a separate problem: her chest gets in the way when she runs or fights, and she wants to cut it away but fears the wound would be too severe without a healing Gu. She has spent her life as the Bai clan’s cultivation focused genius, indifferent to anything outside training, and having lived as a man before this body, she has never really thought of herself as a girl, especially knowing Fang Yuan’s Yang Gu can restore her male body eventually. Fang Yuan tells her not to cut anything off, and to bind it instead with bandage as though it were an injury, fixing it in place. She accepts, unhappily, calling it the best she can do for now. ch. 209
Days later, sheltering in a cliffside cave cleared of birds, Bai Ning Bing’s injuries have mostly healed, and the two continue toward Bai Gu mountain. Fang Yuan travels with extra caution now, stopping often to listen through the Earth Communication Ear Grass. It pays off. On the second day he finds burnt wood left by the demonic Gu Master, and on the third they find the site of an intense battle by a stream: the picked clean skeleton of a hundred beast king green python, its scales scattered and the stream’s course changed by the fighting. Fang Yuan judges that only a rank three cultivator could have survived such a fight, though he would still rather avoid this demonic Gu Master, since an intelligent enemy threatens them far more than the frenzy needle bees did. ch. 209
That same afternoon brings fresher traces still: flesh cut away on the ground, evidence the demonic Gu Master has been poisoned. Bai Ning Bing is glad, since a weaker enemy only helps them. Over the following days the traces multiply, and Fang Yuan, drawing on five hundred years of experience, judges they are closing in on an enemy whose injury is worsening, the green python’s poison now spreading badly through her body. He warns Bai Ning Bing that a demonic Gu Master pushed toward death by poison could turn extreme out of desperation, and that any fight will fall to her alone, since his rank one cultivation is useless in battle. Their one advantage is that the enemy is out in the open while they stay hidden, so they move even slower and more carefully than before. ch. 209
One afternoon, still listening through the ear grass, Fang Yuan finds her: in a cave, at her last breath. Bai Ning Bing wants to strike at once, but Fang Yuan holds her back, arguing they do not need to, since the poison alone will kill her within days. Then a weak voice calls out from the cave: she has already found them, and her voice reveals she is a woman. Fang Yuan’s expression changes and he begins retreating at once. She taunts them with an offer of her primeval stones and Gu worms, and the two move faster still, sensing a trap in her firm tone despite her weakness. She warns there is no easy way out and steps from the cave to attack; Fang Yuan slips into stealth while Bai Ning Bing engages her, calling up the Sky Canopy Gu and the Chainsaw Golden Centipede. ch. 209
Three rounds in, the demonic Gu Master is suppressed: a middle aged, barefoot woman with thick black fur on the soles of her feet, her face and limbs stained green by the python’s poison. Unable to keep fighting, she suddenly stamps the ground and leaps back into the cave. Bai Ning Bing gives chase; Fang Yuan shouts for her to stop, but the warning comes too late, and an explosion detonates under her feet, throwing her body through the air. ch. 209
