Chapter 292

Fang Yuan sits sealed in a secret room, healing from the fight with Li Hao. The self-reliance Gu does the work, drawing on his own physical strength: the stronger he grows, the better it heals him, and it can heal no one else. It cost him forty-five thousand primeval stones. Ten hours in, the healing is still slow. The steel tendon Gu is the reason: it has hardened his tendons with its own law, and the self-reliance Gu must overwrite that law before it can mend them. The two laws happen not to clash, which spares him worse harm. Fang Yuan reflects that every Gu, large or small, carries a fragment of the Great Dao, and that refining and using Gu is itself a way of learning the laws of heaven and earth. ^{ch. 292}

In Shang clan city, Shang Yan Fei turns over the poem Fang Zheng recited after killing Li Hao, and teases that its last line treats Shang clan as grass. Wei Yang offers a gentler reading: that the line meant Li Hao, not the clan. Shang Yan Fei waves off his own tease and admires the ambition instead. He asks how much of the two hundred thousand primeval stones Fang Zheng still owes Li Ran, and Wei Yang tells him a hundred and thirty thousand is already repaid, with seventy thousand left. Privately, Shang Yan Fei weighs Fang Zheng’s fierce, unruly nature against a plan to win him over for Shang Xin Ci once hardship has worn him down. ^{ch. 292}

Fang Yuan’s winning streak continues undisturbed. Li Hao, the fifth inner city’s strongest fighter and about to rise to the fourth, is dead by his hand, and few now dare to actually fight him. Challengers forced onto the stage surrender rather than risk it. He wins nineteen, then twenty, then twenty-one bouts in a row, with the tally still climbing, collecting primeval stones rather than fighting for them. As this quiet stretch continues, a group of Bai clan Gu Masters chasing him arrives at the foot of Shang clan city. ^{ch. 292}