Chapter 271

Shang Yan Fei offers instead to have the Bai clan arrest warrant on Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing explained away and lifted, and Xin Ci backs the idea eagerly. Fang Yuan shakes his head. Clearing the warrant would mark him as Shang clan’s man, a hindrance to his plan of getting close to the demonic Gu Masters and joining Yi Tian mountain later. He judges the warrant itself no real burden. He carried over a hundred such warrants in his previous life, and reasons that no demonic lord goes without tens of them. Once he built the blood wing demonic sect and ruled a region in that previous life, he recalls, many clans came to him offering to lift their warrants unasked, since only strength ends up mattering. His plan is to stay in Shang clan city two to three years and grow strong enough that Bai clan’s warrant means nothing, and besides, Bai clan is already too weakened to act on it. ^{ch. 271}

Fang Yuan tells Shang Yan Fei plainly that the conflict with Bai clan began over a stolen inheritance. He and Bai Ning Bing killed the Bai clan young masters, he says, and killed them without regret. His own injuries at Bai clan’s hands will be repaid: kindness returned in full, and a spark of grudge answered with a burning forest. He does not hide his overwhelming killing intent as he says it. Reactions split around the courtyard: some are disgusted, calling him deeply demonic natured; others look on with disdain, dismissing revenge on an entire clan as naive; and others are simply amused, unsure whether he is a fool or unusually brave. Xin Ci is shocked but not surprised, since this matches the man she already knows. Shang Yan Fei is unmoved and finds Fang Yuan’s bluntness easier to read than Bai Ning Bing’s silence, matching what Wei Yang had reported of the two. ^{ch. 271}

Fang Yuan again turns down the warrant’s removal, saying he needs it to keep driving himself stronger. Shang Yan Fei insists some reward is still owed by Shang clan’s own rule, and the courtyard’s mood turns slightly more solemn. Fang Yuan pushes further, laughing and asking what if he truly does not want it, and Shang Yan Fei answers flatly, his gaze set, that this is not an option. Onlookers split again, some quietly scolding Fang Yuan a fool and others praising his overwhelming bravery, while Xin Ci’s hands sweat with worry for him. Wei Yang defuses the standoff, suggesting Doctor Su Shou heal Fang Yuan’s burns and disfigurement instead, and Shang Yan Fei agrees. She is a rank five healing Gu Master counted among the southern border’s four great doctors, alongside Roaming Doctor Jiu Zhi, Doctor Sheng Shou, and Doctor Sha Ren, and bound to Shang Yan Fei by a mix of favor, grudge, love, and hatred. Her rule requires every patient to bathe first, and Bai Ning Bing, who has hidden her face under cinnabar and black oil for the whole journey, chases off the attendants sent to wash her and insists on doing it herself. While Fang Yuan bathes, he needles her over the disguise and mentions she can ask Doctor Su Shou about the Yin Yang rotation Gu, the very method he uses to control her and her greatest source of pain. The remark spins Bai Ning Bing into fresh suspicion: even Xin Ci did not know her own parentage, yet Fang Yuan somehow does, and he is far beyond her ability to read. She cannot reach the truth, that his knowledge comes from the rank six Spring Autumn Cicada, and guesses instead that he holds some Gu of precognition, reminding herself that such Gu carry severe weaknesses and can show a future that is wrong or confused. Even so, she cannot shake the fear that any move she makes against him might already be foreseen. Fang Yuan, in fact, is only resting with his eyes closed, and later reads her hesitation over the bath itself as a small concession to him, one more way the encounter has tested her alongside Shang Yan Fei. ^{ch. 271}

After an hour, the servants finish washing Fang Yuan and he steps out, while Bai Ning Bing lingers, still lost in thought. Doctor Su Shou heals him with a burst of white light: burnt skin recovers, new flesh grows over the missing right ear and takes its shape, and in fifteen minutes his looks and his ear are fully restored. Bai Ning Bing emerges afterward with her disguise washed away, her natural face striking enough that Doctor Su Shou herself is momentarily charmed, and the doctor’s manner toward her turns warm where it had been cold toward Fang Yuan. Bai Ning Bing declines healing and asks only about the Yin Yang rotation Gu, and Doctor Su Shou agrees to answer while turning Fang Yuan out of the room. ^{ch. 271}

Outside, Wei Yang praises Fang Yuan’s restored face, then presses him hard to accept Shang Yan Fei’s reward, warning that a refusal risks Shang clan’s reputation and could leave Xin Ci caught in the middle. Fang Yuan agrees to take the reward and privately hand it to Xin Ci afterward, and asks Wei Yang what he should request. Wei Yang answers that a token matters more in Shang clan city than money ever could. Back before Shang Yan Fei, Fang Yuan asks for two tokens, one for each of them. Shang clan ranks its tokens from black stone up through white, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, and blue to purple thorn, the highest, carrying almost half a clan elder’s authority, and only two hundred exist. Shang Yan Fei, who had meant to withhold a token while he weighed recruiting them, grants a purple thorn token to each anyway, startling even Wei Yang. A token Gu bites Fang Yuan’s arm for blood, then bursts and merges into the wooden token, binding it to him alone and leaving it to weaken over time, until only a return to Shang clan city can renew it. The young masters’ regard for him shifts sharply toward equal standing. Shang Yan Fei then holds out the second token as Bai Ning Bing returns to the courtyard in her true, unconcealed appearance, cold and solemn, having just learned from Doctor Su Shou that returning to her male body needs a matching Yang Gu. There is no guarantee of success, though a rank six Gu Immortal’s help would give her a high chance of it. The assembled young masters fall into a daze at the sight of her. ^{ch. 271}