Before dawn Gu Yue Fang Zheng hurries toward the academy, flushed with pride at having refined the Moonlight Gu after days of hard cultivation, two primeval stones spent, and no sleep the night before. He has already told his aunt and uncle the good news, and they were glad, so he means to make every clansman who ever looked down on him and his brother look up to him instead. At the academy gate the guards greet him as Gu Yue Fang Yuan and ask why he has come back. Puzzled, Fang Zheng corrects them: he is Fang Zheng, here to claim the top prize. The guards tell him he is too late: his older brother already met the elder the night before and took first place. ch. 21
Fang Zheng cannot believe it: a C grade talent beating him, an A grade talent, feels impossible. In his mind he runs through everything that made Fang Yuan seem beneath him: the brother who slept through class, who was always drunk and never came home at night, who had bullied Shen Cui, slapped him twice, and taken all his primeval stones. None of it fits the person who has just taken first place from him. The academy’s bulletin wall soon posts the new list, Fang Yuan first and Fang Zheng second, and the news spreads through every student who had stayed home refining a Gu. ch. 21
In the Mo branch home, Gu Yue Mo Chen hears that young master Mo Bei has lost heart and abandoned his own Moonlight Gu refinement over the news, and snaps at the housekeeper not to make excuses for him. He argues that Fang Yuan only won through a Moonlight Gu with a weak will and pure luck, and orders Mo Bei left alone to think it through himself. In the Chi branch home, the elder Gu Yue Chi Lian calls in his grandson Gu Yue Chi Chen and tells him the same thing: Fang Yuan’s win owes nothing to skill, only to a weak willed Gu and good fortune. Chi Lian tells him his true rivals are Fang Zheng and Mo Bei, not Fang Yuan, and promises to press a rank three Gu’s aura onto his Moonlight Gu to help refine it. ch. 21
