A flash of inspiration Gu
Fang Yuan does not dare investigate the purple thorn token openly. Instead he spends his once per month enforced challenge searching the secret reception area for a man named Li Ran, the one who wins the legendary Gu in the life he remembers living once already. Three registered candidates share that name. He rules out the one woman, since rumor holds Li Ran is male, and rules out an ailing sixty year old, rank three, once risen to third inner city’s battle stage but now fallen back to fourth. The Li Ran left is a middle aged man past fifty, rank two, ten years settled in Shang clan city. He is a gambler and a debtor who married in the city and then separated from his wife, and he wins more battles at the battle stage than he loses. ch. 282
Fang Yuan tails him for days and confirms he is the man he once saw at the gambling den. The man spends without restraint: a night of gambling or a feast at the finest restaurant can leave him borrowing to eat cheaply for half a month, and he has left several restaurants unpaid. Fang Yuan reasons this must be the legendary Gu’s undisciplined former owner, and wonders whether fate will let him take the Gu this time. Something in the pattern will not sit right, though he cannot name what. After more than twenty days of watching, the feeling only sharpens. Trusting no one, not even Bai Ning Bing despite their poison vow, he decides he needs an outside spark. He buys a flash of inspiration Gu, a rank three consumable priced at twenty nine thousand primeval stones, the kind recipe masters use once to break through a creative bottleneck. ch. 282
The Gu tears through his thoughts and the pattern snaps into focus. Li Ran visits a restaurant every three days, the gambling den twice every seven days, a brothel once every five days, and a restaurant called Fu Tai Xiang He every ten days. Three days later Fang Yuan follows him there and takes his usual window seat once he leaves. A shop assistant explains that the seat looks straight into the room of Qin Yan brothel’s top courtesan, Lady An Yu, who by rumor costs almost ten thousand primeval stones for a night, and assumes Fang Yuan wants the view Li Ran always took. ch. 282
Fang Yuan doubts it. At that distance An Yu would only blur, and Li Ran never behaved like a man come to peep. Across the street he recognizes a tofu stall run by a mother and son as Li Ran’s abandoned wife and child, and realizes the seat was chosen to watch them, not her. He reasons that a man who cannot govern his own desires should not keep so exact a rhythm, and the contradiction will not leave him. Mid meal the pieces lock together like a lightning strike, and Fang Yuan silently declares that he has found the legendary Gu he lost. ch. 282
