Got it
Waking from a recurring memory, “Li Ran” recalls a bond ceremony where, as a young man, he swore to sacrifice his future, his reputation, and his life for the clan. His true name is Wu Ran. The surname marks him as a member of Wu clan, the number one overlord in the southern border. Wu clan leader Empress Wu Ji gave him his secret mission eleven years earlier: work his way into Shang clan’s upper ranks. Changing his name, he wandered the wilderness for three years, then settled in Shang clan city and lay low there for eight more, marrying and fathering a son without ever telling his wife who he really was. Contact with Wu clan has stayed one sided and rare, once every half a year, until an agent told him a year ago that the clan was finally ready to use him. ch. 283
The stellar stone in his storage is a plant. Empress Wu Ji personally chose an all-out effort Gu, an almost extinct Gu from an ancient strength path inheritance, for Wu Ran to appear to win by luck. The demonic Gu Master Wei Shen Jing, a subordinate of hers, forged a convincing scrap grade fossil to hold it, and Wu Ran chose the gambling den’s own leg support rock as the decoy he would swap it with, so the whole den could later testify the discovery was chance. Success would let him become an external clan elder like Wei Yang, complete his mission, and finally bring his wife and son back to Wu clan; thinking of them now fills him with guilt. He notes, amused, that someone has already claimed the leg support rock he meant to use as his decoy, calling that man an idiot for picking a mere scrap grade stellar stone, though he admits he will have to play the idiot himself the next day. ch. 283
He sleeps without dreams and wakes certain everything is about to change. At the battle stage his opponent is a familiar rank two peak stage fighter, evenly matched enough that the bout could go either way, and Li Ran holds back rather than reveal his true strength. The two fight to a stalemate until Li Ran spots an opening. In that instant his heart lurches in pain and his opponent’s counterattack sends him flying; a trace of blood falls from his mouth. ch. 283
At the same moment, in Li Ran’s ransacked home, Fang Yuan stands over a flipped bed and an exposed hiding place, holding a flowerbud Gu, a rank two storage Gu shaped like a pale blue crystal flower. Though the Gu belongs to Li Ran, the Spring Autumn Cicada’s aura lets Fang Yuan refine it instantly. Inside he finds only a sack of rice, daily necessities, poor tea, thirty to forty primeval stones, and a few fossils. A black light rises from the Gu and becomes the stellar stone itself, squarish and rough like the gambling den’s leg support rock. Fang Yuan’s heart pounds as he realizes what he holds. He concludes Li Ran must be a rival clan’s spy hiding the Gu exactly as Fang Yuan once hid his own liquor worm at Qing Mao mountain, and that Li Ran’s caution would keep the stone out of a storage Gu he might lose in a fight he could not risk avoiding. ch. 283
