Chapter 289

Spectators outside the stage remark that even Wang Han has now lost and died to Fang Yuan, calling him ruthless and unwilling to show mercy. The blue-shirted man’s chest is caved in, his ribs showing through, and blood soon dyes the field. The hosting Gu Master declares Fang Yuan the victor and leaves the corpse where it fell. Fang Yuan reclaims the vine information Gu and finds it now records seventeen wins against no losses. Most opponents in the fifth inner city are only rank two, and between his own cultivation edge and the all-out effort Gu, his recent matches have ended in a few moves; each win nets him an opponent’s Gu worms plus a stage reward in primeval stones that grows with the size of the crowd watching. ^{ch. 289}

In front of everyone, Fang Yuan hands Li Ran fifty thousand more primeval stones, explaining he pays in public so Li Ran cannot later accuse him of cheating him out of it. Li Ran accepts with a cupped-fist salute, noting the running total now stands at a hundred and thirty thousand. The crowd argues over where all this wealth is coming from: some credit his string of stage wins and the two or three Gu worms he sells off nearly every dead opponent, others call him too much for advancing by stepping on so many corpses and ask why demonic Gu Masters need to kill each other at all, and one voice grants that keeping his word to Li Ran shows real merit even as another cuts in that he still has not paid the whole two hundred thousand. Someone in the crowd predicts Fang Yuan’s fortunes are about to turn, since in five days Li Hao will forcefully challenge him. ^{ch. 289}

Fang Yuan resumes cultivating steel tendon Gu in his aperture, an earthworm-shaped black Gu with an oily exoskeleton whose eerie light darkens and hardens his muscles and tendons where it touches him. After half a day he stops, sweating and dizzy, the sensation numb, painful, and itchy at once. Where an ordinary Gu Master needs half a year to finish with the Gu, Fang Yuan means to finish in a month, using it six times as long each day as an ordinary cultivator would. He tells himself he must treasure every moment to grow stronger, that losing even one match would cost him the all-out effort Gu and stall his rise, and that reputation, wealth, and the rest are worth using and discarding alike beside his one true goal of reaching immortality, a height he says no one has ever actually attained. Resolved, he takes up the Gu again without resting further. ^{ch. 289}

Elsewhere in the fifth inner city, a thin, made-up Gu Master in a flowery robe named Li Hao, rank three and especially skilled against strength path fighters, taunts an opponent into an enraged charge rather than fight him directly. Li Hao uses position swap Gu to trade places with his rank three mountain back toad, a beast larger than a mammoth carrying a small mountain of rock on its back, and the toad lands on the charging man and ends the match at once. The win brings Li Hao to twenty-nine net victories, one win short of rising to the fourth inner city, and the crowd names his last opponent as the lucky man who won the legendary Gu. ^{ch. 289}