Eating will be eating
Chao Feng accepts Fang Yuan’s refusal curtly and cannot force the matter, though inwardly he scoffs and plans to step in once Shang Xin Ci’s effort fails. He shows Fang and Bai open goodwill regardless: Fang Yuan defeated Ju Kai Bei, holds the purple thorn token, and is an esteemed guest of the clan, with cultivation at rank three peak stage but fighting strength rated at rank four. Chao Feng personally sees the group to the exit, a gesture read outside as a political signal. ch. 328
Outside, the Auspicious Festival fills the streets with rows of temporary stalls, most regular shops closed for the day. Shang Xin Ci reflects that she has now spent nearly three years in Shang clan city and thanks Brother Hei Tu for how far she has come. He tells her he will soon leave the city with Bai Ning Bing for San Cha mountain, but promises to secure her the young master’s position first, and leads the group off to recruit subordinates. ch. 328
At a stall wedged between a lantern shop and a silk shop, a young man in tattered clothes lies half drunk beside goods he inherited from his grandfather. He recognizes Fang Yuan and, moments later, Bai Ning Bing, and stammers in fear. Fang Yuan throws him ten primeval stones and orders him to leave everything behind; when the young man hesitates over the sale, Fang Yuan slaps him to the ground and drives him off with a cold stare. Shang Xin Ci’s conscience recoils at the sight; Bai Ning Bing stays unmoved. Fang Yuan brushes off the reproach as a demonic Gu Master’s straightforwardness, and privately reasons that the strong consuming the weak is the same act whether a demonic cultivator commits it plainly or a righteous one dresses it in reluctant excuses. ch. 328
Among the abandoned stock, Fang Yuan picks out a half token of black steel, worn and partly broken, bearing the character Fan. Three hundred years earlier, a wounded demonic Gu Master was pulled from a river and nursed back to health by a kind young girl. Grateful, he split a token he had carved and told her that either half could summon his aid at Dan Huo mountain’s Gui Ku cave, a promise he said would hold even for a future owner after her death. Less than fifty years on, a battle and an eruption on Dan Huo mountain destroyed Gui Ku cave, and Tie clan captured the Gu Master and threw him into the demon suppression tower. The girl kept his secret to her grave, and her half token passed down through descendants who were driven from their clan and settled, declining, in Shang clan city until only this one young man remained, spoiled and given to gambling, drink and brothels, left selling off his family’s possessions. His fortune turned when three demonic Gu Masters, shopping at his stall during an Auspicious Festival, found the matching half. ch. 328
