Chapter 290

Five days pass, and Fang Yuan has a fresh match scheduled. Wei Yang warns him beforehand that today’s opponent carries real weight. Fang Yuan already goes in prepared: through his alliance with Li Ran, an undercover spy of eight years whose grasp of the battle stage surpasses even Wei Yang’s own, he has gathered plenty on the stage’s participants. Wei Yang’s own briefing adds that Li Hao once rose to the fourth inner city as a strength cultivator before hitting the wall every strength path fighter meets in its middle stage, gave up the path in despair, and turned to a support style built on a lucky pull from the gambling den: a rare position swap Gu, paired with a mountain back toad bought at auction once he sold off his old Gu. Riding that combination, he has won every match he has entered since, rebuilding his fortune, and now forces this challenge because he wants Fang Yuan’s all-out effort Gu. Fang Yuan reads Wei Yang’s habit of attending his important matches as more than Shang clan courting him: he takes it that Wei Yang sees his own younger self in him and, for that reason, treats him as a true brother. ^{ch. 290}

The match is fought on a swamp of black, foul-smelling mud, and the crowd gathered to watch is the largest Fang Yuan has drawn yet. Where he is seen as arrogant and cruel for his string of kills and his lucky purple thorn token, the crowd favors Li Hao instead, reading his fall from the fourth inner city and his climb back as a story of never giving up. Li Hao stops sixty steps off, just outside the fifty-step reach of vertical crash Gu, and lectures Fang Yuan on the strength path’s lack of a future before Fang Yuan cuts him off and tells him to be quiet. ^{ch. 290}

At the bell, Fang Yuan charges with vertical crash Gu, but the mud slows him and he stops at forty-five steps rather than the usual fifty. He turns and closes the rest of the gap with horizontal charge Gu behind a boar phantom, a hit the narration says would certainly have broken bones and drawn blood, and only a last-instant use of position swap Gu, his vital Gu, lets Li Hao trade places with him and escape it. Shaken, Li Hao falls back on his movement Gu and signals the sky with a burst of green light; the mountain back toad descends, its shadow spreading wide over Fang Yuan below, and Fang Yuan waits out the movement Gu’s cooldown before charging clear just before it lands, the impact shaking the whole battle stage and throwing mud as far as the audience’s own shielding. ^{ch. 290}

Rather than charge Li Hao as the crowd expects, Fang Yuan turns on the toad itself, weathering the splash behind canopy Gu and slamming into it behind a bear phantom. The toad only sways: its rock-covered back is dense enough to make it one of the heaviest rank three Gu, and once planted its four legs hold like a mountain. Fang Yuan keeps attacking anyway, boar, bear, and crocodile phantoms flashing in turn, blow after thunderous blow, frightening the crowd into cold sweat and drawing complaints that he is senseless for punching the mountain instead of Li Hao. The toad begins crying out under the punishment, and an alarmed Li Hao mounts it himself and drives it into a charge that would send Fang Yuan flying if it connected. Fang Yuan dodges clear with horizontal charge Gu, circles the toad, and strikes again. ^{ch. 290}