Hard Qi Gu
News of the fight ripples through Shang clan city, and every street debates it: experience won out over youth in the end, though many call Bai Ning Bing’s loss glorious rather than shameful. Attention quickly turns to the coming match between Fang Zheng and Ju Kai Bei, seven days off, already anticipated as a clash between the city’s two brightest fighters. Bai Ning Bing herself vanishes. She does not return to Nan Qiu garden after the fight. Shang Xin Ci worries something has happened to her, but Fang Yuan reassures her that this is only pride: narration states that despite her female body, her heart is that of a man, one that seeks solitude rather than comfort after a defeat. ch. 315
Shang Xin Ci asks whether the coming fight can be avoided at all, since Ju Kai Bei is a strength path Gu Master like the one who cost Bai Ning Bing her vital Gu, and Big Brother Hei Tu, unlike her, has no way to replace all-out effort Gu if he loses it. Fang Yuan answers that this is exactly why he cannot lose, and sends her home while he seals himself away to refine a Gu. From what he has learned of Ju Kai Bei, matched evenly with Yan Tu, and from what he saw in that fight, he puts his own odds at only thirty percent, a figure he judges outstanding given the two full realms between them. Success in the refinement, he tells himself, would raise it to sixty percent. ch. 315
Elsewhere, in his first inner city study, Shang Yan Fei replays the whole match through a ball of colorful smoke. He confirms Bai Ning Bing lost her vital Gu and suffered its backlash, and that intelligence from Feng Yu Manor places her recovering at Doctor Su Shou’s residence, a fitting punishment, he judges, for scheming against his second son. Even so, he reads her public performance as proof of real talent, expects her to surpass Yan Tu given time, and judges her a true genius he would like to recruit for Shang Xin Ci’s sake. His mind turns next to Fang Zheng, and a rumor that he might hold a heavenly essence treasure lotus, one of two the Shang clan’s living treasure door guards alongside a single heavenly essence treasure monarch lotus, none released without a heavy price even at Shang Yan Fei’s own word. Reasoning the lotus would serve his daughter Xin Ci better than a strength path fighter like Fang Zheng, he writes and sends a secret letter by paper crane. ch. 315
The letter reaches Ju Kai Bei and Yan Tu in their own secret room: if Ju Kai Bei wins, he is to request the lotus from Fang Zheng, and regardless of the outcome, he is forbidden from claiming all-out effort Gu as his prize. Ju Kai Bei, who had hoped to claim that Gu himself, prizing it as legendary, is disappointed; Yan Tu reads the order as their master’s fondness for talent and reminds him that as hidden elders now, they follow commands rather than roam free as they once did. The two reminisce about their years as solitary demonic Gu Masters along the southern border, ten years of freedom bought at a constant cost in food, stones, and safety, until a chance clash in the wild left them both too spent to finish the fight. At dawn, unable to trust each other yet unable to strike, each admitted aloud, unprompted, that surviving would mean joining Shang clan city, and the coincidence forged the friendship that has bound them since. ch. 315
Ju Kai Bei, teasing Yan Tu over his narrow win, reveals a black, fist sized beetle Gu, hard qi Gu, meant to shore up the defense his own killer move sacrifices. He regrets it is not the far rarer strength qi Gu, which would multiply his battle strength two or three times over; Yan Tu laughs off the greed, since strength qi Gu vanished along with the ancient qi path, a path that once claimed eight of every ten Gu Masters before strength path eclipsed it. Bai Ning Bing’s vitality Gu, Ju Kai Bei’s hard qi Gu, and Fang Yuan’s atmosphere Gu, narration notes, all trace back to that same faded path. ch. 315
