What naivety!
Alone in his secret room, Fang Yuan sets out to refine the Eating One’s Words Gu. He buys more materials than the recipe needs, hiding the true recipe inside the clutter. A Smelly Fart Gu fuses with a seed-grown Rice Bag Grass Gu, whose vines climb out of a jar of rotting swamp mud until their bucket-shaped leaves swell to the size of a bowl. The fusion yields a Defecate Gu, prized by doctors for the diarrhoea it causes. Fang Yuan strengthens it again with a Big Strength Gu, producing the rank three Big Strength Defecate Gu at three times the potency. Few Gu Masters bother with it: it eats more food than a rank two Gu for an effect that repeated dosing can match, and misjudged doses of it have caused fatal diarrhoea before. ch. 278
Next, Fang Yuan calls up a Lion Roar Gu and feeds it the Big Strength Defecate Gu in three portions. Each portion is refreshed with one of three Paper Crane Gu, light blue, dark green and pink, and Fang Yuan manages all three Gu with nothing but his own mind. Fang Yuan built the feat from five hundred years of practice, not raw talent. By the third feeding, the lion image has shrunk by more than half, and it chants foully at what it is being fed. ch. 278
The completed Eating One’s Words Gu will destroy itself within ten breaths. Fang Yuan turns it on himself at once. Its light draws two images of the Poison Vow Gu out of him as purple smoke, and the lion mouth swallows both, leaving no trace of the vow on his body. The whole Gu then explodes into a shower of three-coloured light. Fang Yuan laughs at how easily it broke: in his previous life this Gu was not invented for another two centuries, so nothing in this era could prepare a defense against it. The Gu strips only his own side of the vow. Shang Ya Zi and Bai Ning Bing stay bound by theirs, and Fang Yuan means to keep it that way, letting Shang Ya Zi’s coming revenge play out and keeping Bai Ning Bing useful rather than forcing an early break with either. ch. 278
Tallying his funds afterward, Fang Yuan is down to four hundred and twenty thousand primeval stones. Tens of thousands went on the banquet, Nan Qiu Garden’s rent, gambling den play, Gu worm feed, and the many purchases for this refinement. Ordinary Gu worms run from about five hundred primeval stones at rank one up to as high as a million by rank five. Rank six Gu are never sold at all. A single yellow gold relic Gu costs close to three hundred thousand on its own, and his remaining stones will not stretch to even two of them. He plans to stay in Shang clan city two or three more years, on a sum that will barely last one. Earning more primeval stones, he decides, means the battle stage. ch. 278
