Chapter 33

Mo Yan reaches for Fang Yuan the moment he calls her bluff. She freezes with her hand in midair, held back by the family rule that forbids dragging a student from the dormitories. Threatening to burn him to ash with her stare alone, she withdraws her arm rather than risk trouble that could reach her grandfather’s honor. Fang Yuan tells her plainly that he never lied, since she has indeed found Fang Yuan, and he faces her rank two pressure without flinching. ^{ch. 33}

Fang Yuan swings the door wide open rather than shutting it, and reasons that an open door makes Mo Yan more wary rather than less, since she had at least a fifty percent chance of forcing her way in if he had left it half shut. Drawing on five hundred years of experience reading human nature, he turns his back on her and sits down to cultivate, and she stands frozen at the threshold, unable to cross a distance of only a few steps. She hurls insults at him, calling him a coward and demanding he come out like a man, but he shuts his ears and gives no answer, until she finally storms off and orders Gao Wan to keep watch through the night. ^{ch. 33}

Alone in the primeval sea, Fang Yuan drives his green copper primeval essence in tides against his aperture walls, and the sea’s level falls from its original forty four percent to twelve percent as he works to turn the light barrier into the water barrier of a middle stage Gu Master. Night deepens around him, and with only the body of a fifteen year old he shivers in the cold mountain air pouring through the open door. Gao Wan, still standing guard, needles him to come out and accept punishment for beating Mo Bei, but Fang Yuan takes out a primeval stone and closes his eyes again. ^{ch. 33}