Each with their own schemes
Over a lavish meal at the restaurant, Fang Yuan eats with open enjoyment while Bai Ning Bing needles him about his sudden generosity. Both are silently working out how to handle the other. Fang Yuan is nearing rank three, the point at which his promise to return the Yang Gu falls due, and he has no intention of keeping it, seeing integrity as only a useful mask. ch. 260
Bai Ning Bing senses this and grows anxious, since only the Yang Gu’s return can restore her male body, and she has no leverage while Fang Yuan holds it. Fang Yuan privately weighs killing her outright. He judges her the greater danger of the two threats he carries, since she knows more of his secrets than Ding Hao ever did, has seen Bai Gu mountain’s inheritance firsthand, and watched him draw beast hordes onto the caravan; he had his chance to kill her during the journey and let it pass, and her ice muscles jade bones and hard-won combat experience make her no easy target now. ch. 260
Bai Ning Bing, for her part, doubts she can seize the Yang Gu outright unless she can kill Fang Yuan in a single stroke. She has not yet found his true trump card. She considers binding him with a poison vow Gu, or stealing the Gu with plunder Gu, seize Gu, or petty thief Gu. Both recognize the other as dangerously like themselves, proud, amoral, and trusting no one, and both understand that if either strikes and fails to finish it, they fall together. ch. 260
The two finish the meal in silence, its flavor lost on them, and Fang Yuan pays fifteen primeval stones even with the discount. Outside, they overhear street talk of Shang clan’s leader appearing at the southern gate. Bai Ning Bing dismisses it as rumor. Fang Yuan takes it as confirmation that events are unfolding as his memory foretold. ch. 260
A giant flying blue whale descends onto Shang Liang mountain, carrying the Yi clan’s caravan; the crowd gathers to watch. Flying blue whales are huge, docile, air-borne beasts controlled by a whale enslavement Gu and eating up to five hundred kilograms a day, so only a large clan can keep one, and across the southern border only the Yi clan owns any, an overlord ranked almost equal to Shang clan with close ties to forces in the eastern seas. Bai Ning Bing remarks that such a creature landing on the old Bai clan village would have flattened it. ch. 260
Climbing toward the inner city, Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing pass through a Shang clan city larger than even the southern border’s foremost Wu clan holds. At a cave entrance, a guard names the price of the inner city: a hundred primeval stones a head, to keep the crowds down and order intact. Bai Ning Bing is startled by the sum. ch. 260
