Chapter 302

Tie Ruo Nan arrives in Shang clan city and finds Tie Dao Ku wearing a black eyepatch, his left eye and his hand blade Gu both lost to Bai Ning Bing in a battle months before. Since then he has scraped by on battle stage winnings and escort and investigation work, watching Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing from hiding and reporting what he sees; his letters are what bring Tie Ruo Nan here herself. Two years earlier, Tie Xue Leng’s death reached the clan, and his daughter answered it by defeating rivals through the Tie clan’s thirteen halls, rising to become one of its eight young masters at rank three upper stage. Tie Mu checks the eye and calls it beyond his own skill. Only a rank five master can heal it, so Tie Ruo Nan hands Tie Dao Ku a primeval elder Gu and sends him to Doctor Su Shou, whose fee runs to about a hundred thousand primeval stones, more than he had been able to save while replacing his hand blade Gu in a city of high prices. She then asks to be taken to Nan Qiu garden, where Fang and Bai are staying, and the garden’s doorboy turns her away three times in a row, telling her both masters are in closed cultivation. Each time she leaves an invitation rather than force the door. ^{ch. 302}

The name startles Fang Yuan. He remembers Tie Xue Leng bursting from the mountain giant puppet Gu’s bronze mask to save his daughter with the steel hand Gu, but his own view was blocked first by the white form immortal snake and then by the attacking cranes, so he never learned whether either of them lived and had assumed both dead. That Tie Ruo Nan survived and now stands among Tie clan’s young masters is alarm enough on its own; she knew both him and Fang Zheng before the disaster, and if she ever learns he is not truly Fang Zheng, the life he has built in Shang clan city collapses. The name alone brings a strong killing intent oozing out of his heart. He cannot act on it: Shang clan city forbids harm to a Tie clan young master, and he can only wish, uselessly, that he still carried his old rank six strength. Reasoning that she came with a small party rather than an arresting force, he concludes she suspects nothing about Qing Mao mountain and wants only to hear from him what happened to her father. ^{ch. 302}

He weighs a last resort: if exposure ever threatens him, he could sell the blood skull Gu to Shang Yan Fei, who is gathering pieces of the blood sea true inheritance to raise Shang Xin Ci’s aptitude, and let the gift explain away an aptitude far above the ordinary one Shang Yan Fei once measured in him. He does not intend to use it unless matters grow that dire. Fang Yuan does not yet know one thing: his brother Fang Zheng is alive, and his strength is growing fast. ^{ch. 302}