Chapter 250

Fang Yuan tells Shang Xin Ci plainly that he and Bai Yun are demonic path Gu Masters who have taken lives. She is not shaken. Zhang Zhu had already warned her to be wary of them, and her own hard upbringing as a talentless illegitimate child left her without better options. Fang Yuan says that once he judges his debt to her repaid he will quietly disappear. Until then, he and Bai Yun will act openly as Zhang clan’s Gu Masters, and he asks her to vouch for them. She agrees, telling him to call her Xin Ci and saying she trusts a frank demonic cultivator over the hypocrisy she has seen from the righteous ones. ^{ch. 250}

Ou Fei, a young Gu Master, forces his way into the tent after slapping Xiao Die down at the entrance. With Zhang Zhu dead, he declares, he has come to claim Shang Xin Ci, whom he has desired and been refused by for some time. He reaches for her. Xiao Die throws herself in the way and is slapped to the ground again, dazed and ringing-eared. As Ou Fei raises his hand a second time, an unseen grip locks onto his arm. It belongs to Fang Yuan, still disguised as a servant, whose grip Ou Fei cannot break. Fang Yuan releases him, then kicks him once in the stomach with enough force to hurl him twenty to thirty feet clear of the tent, tearing the flap, in front of a gathering crowd. ^{ch. 250}

Enraged at being struck by what he takes for a servant, Ou Fei leaps twenty feet into the air and dives at Fang Yuan with a Gu that swells his palms to over three times their size. Fang Yuan is in fact a rank two upper stage Gu Master. Since advancing, he has been able to hold a portion of borrowed rank three peak stage snow silver primeval essence in his aperture, stockpiled through the caravan’s repeated beast attacks, against Ou Fei’s mere rank two initial stage. He flicks out a spiral bone spear that pierces Ou Fei’s shoulder through his defense and stops his dive cold. He closes in and drives a fist, carrying the strength of two boars and a crocodile, through Ou Fei’s raised palms and into his face. Ou Fei’s nose shatters, his face caves in, and he is thrown dead to the ground. The watching crowd cries out in horror. A layer of white light, the effect of Fang Yuan’s canopy Gu, covers his body; without it, he could not have used his strength so freely. Xiao Die and Shang Xin Ci both realize he truly is a Gu Master. Shang Xin Ci recalls his own warning that demonic path cultivators like him and Bai Yun are vicious and merciless. ^{ch. 250}