Reputation Gu
Fang Yuan has driven Li Ran back and turns to press a second attack, but Li Ran throws up a hand and calls out that he concedes. The crowd erupts, many spectators furious that they paid primeval stones to watch and got no finish, though some in the audience judge Li Ran wise to stop before he died. The bell rings and the match ends. ch. 287
As Fang Yuan leaves, Li Ran calls him back and accuses him of repaying kindness with injury, demanding compensation for the harm done in a fight Li Ran himself forced. Fang Yuan asks what he wants. Li Ran calls the all-out effort Gu invaluable and names a price: a hundred thousand primeval stones. The crowd calls the demand shameless. Fang Yuan doubles it instead, promising two hundred thousand, then pours out his primeval elder Gu on the stage floor and hands over eighty thousand stones on the spot, the whole of what he currently holds, with the rest owed once he has the money. The gesture stuns the crowd into silence. ch. 287
Word of the match spreads through Shang clan city, along with word that Fang Yuan holds a purple thorn token, and people with ill intent toward him start to disappear. What the crowd takes from the exchange is not the Gu they came to see but Fang Yuan’s reputation for repaying kindness and grudges alike. ch. 287
Back at Nan Qiu garden, Bai Ning Bing presses him on whether he truly means to hand Li Ran two hundred thousand primeval stones, calling it unlike him. Unseen by her, the promise is a secret arrangement: Li Ran will cooperate with Fang Yuan and pass him a refinement recipe, and Fang Yuan pays him for it. Fang Yuan tells her a reputation is worth more than a travel token, since it lets a person move through the world unhindered, and that two hundred thousand stones is cheap for one. She stays doubtful but chooses to trust him for now, reasoning that he holds a precognitive Gu. ch. 287
The narration recounts a legend of the reputation Gu, drawn from the legends of Ren Zu. Verdant Great Sun wakes stranded on a hill inside the ordinary abyss, a gulf no living thing has ever crossed, and overhears the trees of the surrounding forest planning to let him starve and grow into their soil. He learns from their whispers of a reputation Gu buried under a rock at the forest’s center, digs it out, and is told that reputation itself makes no sound but can still spread and shake the world. Shouting through the Gu opens a golden bridge across the abyss, but hunger has left him too weak to voice a bridge that reaches the far side. The Gu has him move it and try again from further down his body, and the bridge that follows spans over a thousand miles and carries him across. The legend closes on the point that a foul reputation is always easier to earn and to keep than a good one. ch. 287
