Chapter 227

Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing sprint down the secret tunnel, which Fang Yuan expects, from his previous life, to open onto a cliff on Bai Gu mountain. Bai clan Gu Masters close in behind them, led by the Bai clan leader with her elders strung out behind her in the narrow passage. An elder’s Blitz Gu closes the gap until Bai Ning Bing’s Blood Moon Gu slows him with a thrown blood blade. Fang Yuan lends her the Canopy Gu again, and she pairs it with the Iron Spike Thorns Gu and her ice muscles to hold off a wave of attacks. Shouting that the Bai clan does not know where its two young masters are, Fang Yuan buys a pause. The Bai clan leader answers in rage, firing a Frost Fish Gu that chills and slows him. His Stealth Scales Gu is destroyed by an elder’s grasping hand before it can hide him. He escapes instead on the Jumping Grass, leaving Bai Ning Bing to face the clan leader alone. ^{ch. 227}

Left behind, Bai Ning Bing meets the Bai clan leader’s fury; a single punch shatters the Canopy Gu’s armor and she throws up blood. She flings out the chainsaw golden centipede to buy a moment, sprints past as the clan leader tears it apart with bare strength, and reaches the tunnel’s end: a cliff. Understanding at last what Fang Yuan meant, she jumps. The Bai clan leader, unable to follow, screams that she will have Fang and Bai back alive or as corpses. ^{ch. 227}

Falling, Bai Ning Bing hears her name and turns to find Fang Yuan descending on the footless bird, a legless flying Gu built of bone with an eagle’s head, a crane’s body, a swallow’s tail and two pairs of wings. He pulls her onto its back, but a rock waits less than three hundred metres below them. Fang Yuan drains his own primeval essence rapidly to force one last burst of speed from the bird, kept steady only by the Heavenly Essence Treasure Lotus refilling his aperture as fast as it empties. Cracks spread through the bird’s bone wings as it skims past a startled bone beast’s raised rear end and climbs away into the sky. ^{ch. 227}

From the cliff, the Bai clan cannot follow. Tie Dao Ku says the footless bird can fly ten thousand miles in a day, and the narration adds that almost no other Gu worm can match its speed, making it the fastest flying mount below rank five. The elder Bai Zhan Wen, grandfather to Bai Zhan Lie, chooses to burn his own body with the Human Torch Gu and gives chase alone. It is a rank four Gu that turns its user into living fire until their life force runs out. Fang Yuan has flown an uncountable number of Gu mounts in his previous life, and that instinct lets him dodge and double back until the watching Bai clan can see their elder’s sacrifice being made a mockery. Unable to close the distance, Bai Zhan Wen self-detonates. The blast cracks the footless bird’s body from the impact, though the flames themselves do little damage to bone, and sets over six square kilometres of land on fire, killing every bone beast in range and large numbers of its bone trees. ^{ch. 227}

Fang Yuan had no defensive Gu active in the blast, unlike Bai Ning Bing, and it burns through his flesh and destroys his earth hearing ear grass. Once the bird steadies, he douses the fire with the Tusita Flower’s milk spring water, left with skin mostly burned and his face disfigured. He tells Bai Ning Bing he likes the footless bird because it has no legs, only wings, so it must fly or be destroyed the moment it lands. She answers by asking it to carry them into the sky, and it climbs until it is a vanishing dot. On the cliff, the Bai clan watches in silence until their clan leader coughs up blood and collapses. ^{ch. 227}