Chapter 299

Leaving the stage, Bai Ning Bing reviews the match against Tie Dao Ku in her head. She judges she spent seventy percent of her primeval essence and has only twenty percent left, and regrets not killing him, though she counts the fight a real gain. Her high A grade aptitude gives her fast recovery, yet her current Gu set drains too much essence under pressure, and a Gu that is both powerful and efficient is rare and expensive. She envies Fang Yuan his heavenly essence treasure lotus, since his strength path spends little essence to begin with and his ninety percent aptitude already keeps him flush, so the lotus would be wasted on him. Buying it from him crosses her mind and is dismissed at once; she has never seen him suffer a loss, and taking the lotus from his hands would surely cost her a heavy price. ^{ch. 299}

Instead she trims her own kit, giving up snowball Gu, which drains too much across five or six casts in a real fight, and keeping icicle Gu to pair with ice explosion Gu, whose power scales with how large, old, and cold the ice is. That Gu carried her fight against Tie Dao Ku, and if the explosion catches her too, turning to ice crystal form keeps the injury down to a low level rather than sparing her entirely. Where an ice path Gu Master normally plays defence, she has leaned into explosive tricks instead, with results beyond what she expected, and she credits the shift to Fang Yuan’s influence pulling her from a blunt style toward something more treacherous. Measuring her current set of ice crystal, ice edge, icicle, and ice explosion Gu against Fang Yuan as her imagined rival, she doubts it is enough unless she can revive her old signature move, the ice blade storm built from revolving Gu, whirlwind Gu, and ice blade Gu, which she now judges outdated past rank two. Remembering that this is Fang Yuan’s first match in the fourth inner city, she hurries to watch. ^{ch. 299}

At the stage, a crowd has gathered to see Zhu Ba, expected to end the newcomer’s run. Bai Ning Bing sizes him up from the crowd’s talk: he stands nearly three metres tall, his whole body swollen with fat that hides his head and limbs, a build clearly built by Gu rather than birth. His fat disperses any blow that lands and returns it through a counter-shock Gu, a style that troubles strength path fighters most of all. He sits and lets Fang Yuan hit him again and again, boar, brown bear, and crocodile phantoms flashing overhead, unmoved through fifteen minutes of it. Fang Yuan finally staggers back, blood at his lips from internal injuries his defences cannot stop, heals with self-reliance Gu within a few breaths, and resumes his attack in silence. Zhu Ba warns him that he is taking eighty percent of the damage back through the counter-shock while dealing only twenty percent, and urges him to give up; Fang Yuan does not answer. ^{ch. 299}

The crowd grows bored and starts to jeer, guessing Zhu Ba is only toying with a newbie. Zhu Ba, still chuckling despite having absorbed the boar’s collision, the crocodile’s bite, and the bear’s crushing weight all at once, offers to let him retreat without taking his Gu. The audience marvels at what Zhu Ba, rank eight in the fourth inner city, has just shrugged off. Fang Yuan cuts through it, shouting for the fat pig to shut up. The stage falls silent. ^{ch. 299}