Fang Yuan tires from the exchange while Gao Wan’s breathing stays steady, his decades of trained stamina outlasting a fifteen year old’s still developing body. Gao Wan taunts that clan rules forbid using the Moonlight Gu inside the school hostel, certain this leaves Fang Yuan defenseless, but Fang Yuan calls the Moonlight Gu anyway and leaps back to create distance. He fires a moonblade that carves through Gao Wan’s raised arm to the bone, a wound Gao Wan believes only a rank one middle stage moonblade should cause, though he has no way of knowing Fang Yuan’s essence has already been refined to middle stage. ch. 35
Gao Wan’s fighting spirit collapses and he flees screaming for help, his cries reaching the nearby hostel guards, who gather but refuse to intervene since Gao Wan is only an outsider’s servant. Fang Yuan catches up and fires two more moonblades into his neck, beheading him. The body is thrown back ten meters as blood sprays across the grass, and the guards watching cry out that Fang Yuan has committed murder. ch. 35
Fang Yuan walks to the corpse and kicks the severed head aside. The wound reveals that his essence is middle stage, a secret that would expose his Liquor worm, and with less than ten percent of his primeval essence left he cannot silence the more than ten guards now watching, so he drags the body away himself. He demands a sabre from the nearest guard, who hands it over without resistance, and walks off carrying the headless corpse in one hand and the blade in the other, leaving a dozen stunned guards staring at the trail of blood behind him as the sun rises. ch. 35
