BOOM!
Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing reach the slope below Bai Gu mountain, ragged and worn, five days after stealing the monkey wine. They have just escaped a family of five Steel Rage Boars, a beast group that moves in small numbers but ranks high. The weakest adult among them qualifies as at least a hundred beast king, and the family’s grandfather boar is a thousand beast king. ch. 214
Bai Gu mountain rises alone from flat, deathly white ground, its rocks made of bone rather than stone or snow. It is Bai Ning Bing’s first sight of it. No one lives there yet, though large numbers of bone beasts and many bone type wild Gu worms do, alongside plants found nowhere else. ch. 214
Fang Yuan recalls that in ten years, a clan named Bai will settle at Bai Gu mountain and in time become the dominant power over a thousand miles of surrounding land. What he is really after is a pair of twins, Bai Sheng and Bai Hua, who at eighteen will find a cave in the mountain’s back area holding a complete inheritance from an unnamed rank four righteous Gu master known only as the Flesh Bone Lord. A hundred years after finding it, the twins both reach rank five and take over the Bai clan. ch. 214
A complete inheritance covers all six categories: attack, defense, healing, movement, storage, and investigation. Fang Yuan wants three Gu from it in particular. The jade bones Gu would toughen his bones, adding the strength of a crocodile on top of the two boars’ strength he has now. The rank three healing Gu called flesh white bones went, in Fang Yuan’s previous life, to Bai Hua. He ranks a third Gu above both: the bone flesh unity Gu. It is a paired cultivation Gu, used on two Gu masters together, that lets them advance together for a greater result with less effort. ch. 214
Right now his combat strength counts for little: his primeval essence is still the weakest, green copper grade, and he gets by on his A grade talent and the heavenly essence treasure lotus’s recovery speed. He reflects that he might have died to the six legged crocodiles at the beach without Bai Ning Bing, and that depending on someone else is no substitute for strength of his own. ch. 214
Before they can act, four righteous Gu masters descend on them from a hundred steps out: an old, rank three leader and three rank two companions, moving as a trained, uniformed group. Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing are both startled to meet righteous Gu masters in such a desolate range. The chapter leaves them closing in, with Bai Ning Bing privately worried that her own strength, blunted and carrying Fang Yuan as a burden, might not match four righteous Gu masters. ch. 214
At dusk, elsewhere, Tie Ao Tian leads what remains of his hunting party: three Gu masters out of the eight who set out from Qing Mao mountain. Two were lost when two thousand beast crocodile groups and three hundred beast crocodile groups struck together, on a beach that turned out to be the six legged crocodiles’ breeding ground. Three more were killed by the Xuan Yuan Divine Pheasant, among them the party’s most experienced investigator and a rank three defensive Gu master. Tie Ao Tian, the Tie clan’s fourth young master, presses on anyway: catching Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing to avenge Tie Xue Leng would still make his mission a success and strengthen his claim to the clan leadership. ch. 214
His party finds monkey carcasses less than a week old, buried in two dug-open holes, and takes it as a sign they are closing the gap. Tie Ao Tian’s mood lifts, and as dusk settles he climbs the slope to enjoy the moment while his men look on with pride. Then an explosion tears through the scene, with no cause the chapter names. ch. 214
