Bone Flesh Unity
The skull’s carved fangs bear an inscription: two people, one mind, three spirits united, and a warning against forcing what fate refuses. Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing press their palms to a red gem in its eyes without effect; Fang Yuan reasons the two of them, forced together only by circumstance, must not be of one mind. Fang Yuan kicks the unconscious twins awake again and sets their small hands on the gem instead, and it flares to light at their touch. ch. 226
The skull’s jaws creak open on a pit of coal and dry wood holding a pottery container and a scroll. The scroll traces the life of the tomb’s owner, Grey Bone Scholar, who spent his years failing to devise a Gu that could pass primeval essence between Gu Masters without leaving behind a fouling trace of aura, and who died still refining his answer, the Bone Flesh Unity Gu, which needs two Gu Masters bound by blood, parent and child or twins. Fang Yuan recalls that in his previous life, Bai Sheng and Bai Hua completed this same Gu themselves and rose to rank five together as the twin stars of the righteous path. Here, the twins meet the blood condition but are still only mortal children, not yet Gu Masters, so the requirement is not truly satisfied. ch. 226
Fang Yuan lights the wood regardless. He and Bai Ning Bing pour primeval essence into the gem in turns, and when the ritual calls for fresh flesh burned into the fire, he strips the twins, throws them in, and kicks them back each time the pain drives them out, until they burn to death. The fire climbs from orange to eerie blue to scarlet but stalls short of the reddish-purple the scroll calls for, and the attempt fails. Reasoning the twins failed only because they were not Gu Masters, Fang Yuan cuts his own forearm with a Tusita Flower blade and throws in his flesh. Bai Ning Bing’s ice muscles turn the blade aside, so she saws a piece free with the Chainsaw Golden Centipede instead, and the moment her flesh lands, the fire turns reddish-purple. ch. 226
The two pour their essence together as the skull’s jaws seal over the blaze, and something inside shatters before the fire goes out, leaving no trace of the pottery container or the twins’ bodies. Two linked Gu remain, one green and one red, and Fang Yuan takes them for the Bone Flesh Unity Gu, refining and storing them at once without pausing to confirm it. He also takes Bai Ning Bing’s Flesh-bone Gu and instantly refines it, since she cannot, but his own low cultivation cannot afford to activate it, so he passes it back to her. She heals her own cut first, at a cost of twenty percent of her rank three peak stage primeval essence, then uses it again to heal his. The wounds close, but the pain of the cutting still shakes them both light headed as they flee into a new tunnel at the hall’s far end. The pursuing Bai clan reaches the hall shortly after, finds the air still charged from a refinement and the twins’ torn clothing left on the platform, and Bai Clan Leader, unable to voice what she fears, orders the chase to continue. ch. 226
