Chapter 280

Fang Yuan opens the match before Tang Qing finishes his bow, closing the distance in a blur and driving a fist into his chest. The blow caves two inches of Tang Qing’s chest in, tearing skin and exposing broken rib, and he is thrown rolling across the grass. Rage overtakes his shock, and he vows to kill Fang Yuan and tear him apart, but before he can rise Fang Yuan is already on him. A stamping kick between his legs is dulled by a hastily raised wind Gu, though the pain still doubles him over screaming. Fang Yuan’s white light armour flares as his Canopy Gu activates, revealing a rank three cultivation he had hidden under a Breath Concealment Gu until this moment, and Tang Qing’s shock at facing so young a rank three Gu Master lasts only until the final punch lands. It smashes his face in, caving his nose, forcing an eye more than half out of its socket, and shattering his skull; he falls motionless and stops breathing. ^{ch. 280}

Screams break out around the stage: a man has been beaten to death, and even Wei Yang looks startled. Killings are rare on the battle stage, since fighters can surrender, a hosting Gu Master can usually cut off a killing blow in time, and rivals who share the same city tend to hold back. None of that applied here. Fang Yuan had only just left seclusion, his instincts still blunt, and his concealed cultivation had lulled Tang Qing into carelessness; his first blow crippled Tang Qing, and the next two landed before the overseeing Gu Master could react. That Gu Master tells Fang Yuan plainly that he has no respect for life, and calls it a dangerous way of thinking. Fang Yuan only shrugs it off: it was just a life, and by the battle stage’s own rule the dead man’s possessions are now his. The host takes back the rented Vine Information Gu but lets him keep the rest, three rank two Gu and one rank one Gu worth about two thousand primeval stones combined, plus the twenty to thirty primeval stones Tang Qing carried, too little time left for him to self-detonate his own Gu worms before dying. ^{ch. 280}

Afterward Wei Yang urges him to spare opponents where he can: the battle zone may be huge, but everyone in it still lives in Shang clan city and crosses paths with everyone else more than Fang Yuan realizes. Fang Yuan disagrees: sparing an enemy only invites them to strike first, and killing when he can is what has kept him alive against demonic Gu Masters who attacked him without warning in the past. Wei Yang recognises his own younger self in the answer, ruthless and savage, trusting no one. Demonic Gu Masters, cut off from any clan’s support, often cannot feed themselves reliably and have no one to trust, so those who survive tend to prey on each other and grow only more ruthless for the lack of any safety net; in Wei Yang’s understanding, this is exactly why the righteous factions flourish while the demonic path has to be suppressed. He decides not to press the point, trusting that change will come to Fang Yuan slowly, on its own, rather than by anything he can force. ^{ch. 280}

Wei Yang presses the point further, walking Fang Yuan through what a boar’s charge or a crocodile’s bite would do to an ordinary body, then noting that Fang Yuan’s own punches only cracked ribs and a skull despite carrying the strength of two boars and a crocodile. A body can only unleash a fraction of the strength stored in it, sometimes not even a tenth, which Wei Yang calls the strength path’s deepest flaw: money spent on the Black and White Boar Gu, Crocodile Strength Gu, and Brown Bear Innate Strength Gu buys far less than it costs. Fang Yuan grants the logic but counters that some strength path Gu Masters do learn to summon a full beast phantom, unleashing everything their beast Gu holds; Wei Yang answers that it happens too rarely, and only through one rigid attack an opponent can easily read. Fang Yuan tells him plainly that he means to see the strength path through to the end, and Wei Yang lets the matter drop, banking on what the battle stage itself will teach him over time. ^{ch. 280}

A half month on, back in the gambling den, Wei Yang warns Fang Yuan that Tang Qing’s brother Tang Xiong has deliberately dropped himself down from the Fourth Inner City to the Fifth to challenge him for revenge today, known for wielding the strength of three bears. Fang Yuan waves off the warning and turns to picking rocks for what will be his third match. In under a month of this habit he has already lost more than a hundred thousand primeval stones, though he judges even five hundred thousand would be worth it for the legendary Gu he expects. ^{ch. 280}

Fang Yuan notices a rock propping up the counter’s damaged leg and calls it out as a Stellar Stone; the shopkeeper admits he wedged a squarish, unprized stone there a few years ago after a gambler kicked the leg, since only arrow or shooting-star shaped Stellar Stones are prized and this one drew no buyers. Fang Yuan insists on choosing it as his last piece of the day. Wei Yang privately thinks the choice pointless, and has quietly disapproved of Fang Yuan’s rock gambling all month, since it has cost him heavily for little but a stray rank one or two Gu, sometimes only a corpse; still, he says nothing, content that the losses will only make Fang Yuan lean harder on the clan. ^{ch. 280}

Wei Yang, mindful of the time before Fang Yuan’s match, presses the shopkeeper to hurry, and the shop pulls its dissection masters off another gambler’s rocks mid-work to serve Fang Yuan first, ruining a few of them. That gambler, Li Ran, protests loudly and is placated with a refund and the shopkeeper’s jab that years of gambling have never once won him anything. The name catches at Fang Yuan’s memory: a Li Ran was the one who obtained the legendary Gu in his previous life, though he cannot be certain it is the same man. Whichever he is, this Li Ran’s chance at it has just been taken from him. ^{ch. 280}

Working through more than ten rocks of scrap, low, and middle grade, the five old masters turn up a live rank three Sword Shadow Gu from among Fang Yuan’s other picks, worth thirty two thousand primeval stones against the eight thousand he spent. Wei Yang, who wields a Broadsword Light Gu of the same rank, urges him to keep and use it rather than sell. But the Stellar Stone that had propped up the counter’s leg, the rock Fang Yuan actually wanted, opens onto nothing at all. ^{ch. 280}

Outwardly Fang Yuan laughs off his luck and offers to buy Wei Yang a drink; inwardly he is reeling, certain the legendary Gu should have been in that stone and unable to explain why it was not. He wonders whether the rumor named the wrong rock, the wrong shop, or was simply false, and worries that without the legendary Gu his cultivation on the strength path, and the Three Kings Inheritance riding on it, may be lost. The source of the rumor stays a mystery to him as he and Wei Yang head off to his match against Tang Xiong. ^{ch. 280}