Monkey Brain Delicacy
Fang Yuan’s aperture walls turn from light to water, and he reaches rank one middle stage. More than twenty days have passed since he and Bai Ning Bing killed the demonic Gu master, and he credits the advance to cultivating without a break in that stretch. ch. 212
He wishes he still had a liquor worm on hand. It refines a Gu master’s primeval essence one small realm higher. He destroyed his third one earlier, to keep the Tie father and daughter from investigating Gu Yue Yao Le’s death. The four flavor liquor worm he fused from his first two is now useless to him, since it only works on rank two Gu masters. Reversing it back into a rank one liquor worm needs a prodigal son Gu or a revert Gu, and Fang Yuan has neither. ch. 212
Bai Ning Bing arrives at the cave wearing a shirt of green vines and black thorns. It grew from the rank three iron thorn thistle Gu, which she claimed as her lifebound Gu after they killed its owner, the demonic female Gu master. She grumbles about dodging Fang Yuan’s buried charred thunder potatoes on the way in. ch. 212
On her waist hangs a string of captured grass skirt monkeys, tied up and screaming, the pair’s food source these past days. Fang Yuan borrows her blood moon Gu and cuts open a live monkey’s skull with it. He offers Bai Ning Bing a spoonful of the raw brain, to mark his advance to middle stage. She hesitates, then tries it, and finds it delicious. ch. 212
They finish the brain together, and at Bai Ning Bing’s demand, a second monkey’s brain too. Afterward they grill the monkeys’ meat, and Fang Yuan grows rice bag grass to round out the meal. The two eat until full. ch. 212
Asked about the monkeys, Bai Ning Bing says the pair is safe as long as they stay out of the forest’s depths. Three monkey kings guard its center, where the wine Fang Yuan wants is kept, and reaching it will not be easy. ch. 212
