Chapter 373

Wu Gui cannot beat Tie Mu Bai alone, but he gains a second rank five peak stage ally when Ku Mo joins the fight, turning it into two demonic Gu Masters pincering one righteous elder. Righteous onlookers curse the demonic path’s shamelessness while demonic Gu Masters cheer and rush toward the mountain. Tie Mu Bai can suppress Wu Gui alone but not both at once, and Wu Gui and Ku Mo, though allied, stay wary of each other even as they fight together. The three settle into a stalemate. ^{ch. 373}

An explosion tears the black clouds apart as Tie Mu Bai’s four clawed golden dragon Gu roars into the open. Ku Mo sneers at the rank four Gu and tears it down with one attack, but Tie Mu Bai’s golden breeze Gu, a healing wind the spectator Li Xian judges comparable to a rank five Gu, mends it instantly and it rises again. Wu Gui answers with an ear piercing, raven like cry that leaves onlookers on both sides dizzy and nauseous. The black halo it releases collides with the golden dragon and destroys it in a blinding, deafening burst, and the shockwave that follows flattens trees and stones, burying Gu Masters alive, and scatters the dark clouds outright. ^{ch. 373}

The three fighters reappear in the sky: Tie Mu Bai armored in his golden coat Gu with a golden aurora Gu lighting his flight, Wu Gui riding a dark cloud with beak like lips, and Ku Mo flapping bone wings under bone armor bristling with colored spikes, like a monstrous multicolored hedgehog. They clash again within moments, too fast for ordinary eyes to follow. One golden strike alone carves a gorge twenty feet wide and over a hundred feet tall through the mountainside, mincing the spectators caught nearby, while a raven’s caw bursts the heads of hundreds more and falling bone spikes nail others to the ground. ^{ch. 373}

Every onlooker still on the mountain flees as the battle climaxes, including established figures like Li Xian and Hu Mei Er. Only five rank four peak stage Gu Masters, Yi Huo, Kong Ri Tian, Long Qing Tian, Yi Chong and Wu Shen Tong, stay long enough to watch tensely, ready to run at the first sign of danger. Even they cannot bear it once true rank five Gu come out: Tie Mu Bai’s turn gold Gu turns anything it touches, rock, plant, or beast, into lifeless gold; Ku Mo’s soft bones Gu liquefies bone within fifty miles into paste; and Wu Gui’s pitch black Gu spreads a darkness that restricts any Gu worm under rank six that it touches. ^{ch. 373}

The narration states how rare such power is: rank four Gu are already hard to buy, rank five Gu barely circulate at all, and even Fang Yuan, who reached rank six Gu Immortal in his previous life, managed to refine only the one rank six Spring Autumn Cicada himself. Watching from a distance, Bai Ning Bing is shaken; she has seen rank five combat only once before, from the decrepit, life prolonging Lord Sky Crane and first generation Gu Yue at Qing Mao mountain, and these three fight at their true peak. She realizes she could not survive one blow from them, or even escape. ^{ch. 373}

She turns to Fang Yuan, who watches as calmly as an uninvolved spectator, and asks whether this is the opportunity he has been waiting months for, since the fight seems set to let the demonic path overturn the righteous hold on San Cha mountain. Fang Yuan explains that rank five Gu are so scarce that many rank five Gu Masters own none at all and fight with only four Gu, so strength here comes down to how many rank five Gu each side holds. Wu Gui and Ku Mo, demonic and resource poor, likely have one or two apiece, while Tie Mu Bai, backed by the whole Tie clan, should have at least three. ^{ch. 373}

When Bai Ning Bing asks if that means Tie Mu Bai will win, he shakes his head again. A Gu Master’s worms are trump cards that become vulnerabilities once revealed, so none of the three will show everything, and the battle has no winner or loser from the start, only a probe toward the richer contest still to come for the three kings inheritance. Bai Ning Bing reasons the rest out herself: peak rank five Gu Masters do not fight recklessly over a treasure this rich unless the two sides are badly mismatched, and nothing here shows that, so the battle can only end in a draw. ^{ch. 373}

She knows better than anyone how badly Fang Yuan wants the three kings inheritance, yet he holds himself back even now. His composure unsettles her more than the battle itself: watching him, she wonders how she will ever take from him the yang Gu that could turn her back into a man. ^{ch. 373}