Spring rain mists over Qing Mao Mountain as Fang Yuan eats at the inn, and at the next table a grandfather tells his grandson the legend of Ren Zu, who gave his heart to the Hope Gu to escape an ancient predicament. Grown old and unable to hunt, Ren Zu learns from the Hope Gu of a pair of Gu on a distant mountain that can catch any Gu in the world, including the Longevity Gu, if only he can learn their names. ch. 38
Ren Zu climbs the mountain and gropes through a cave in total darkness, and two voices there tell him they will serve him only if he speaks their true names. He wastes his remaining years on guesses that go nowhere, and on what should be his last day he stumbles onto the word Regulation, then in his final hour onto the word Rule. The two Gu appear, a cube named Regulations and a sphere named Rules, and together they catch him an eighty-year Longevity Gu that restores his hundred-year-old body to the vigor of a twenty-year-old. ch. 38
Once the grandfather finishes and leaves with his grandson, Fang Yuan turns the story over and reads in it a meaning the pair at the next table never grasped: darkness is ignorance of a person’s own rules and regulations, and understanding them is the only light that dispels it. He applies the idea to Gu Yue village itself, naming Shen Cui’s effort to escape her servant status, Gao Wan’s attempts to please his master, his aunt and uncle’s greed for his parents’ inheritance, and the Academy Elder’s wish to keep his position as people each following their own rule. ch. 38
Turning to his own case, Fang Yuan reasons that Gu Yue Mo Chen will not pursue Gao Wan’s death because doing so would break the elders’ rule against interfering in a junior’s dispute, a rule Mo Chen guards because he fears the precedent could one day fall on his own grandson and sole male heir, Gu Yue Mo Bei. He judges that only his own modest talent keeps the matter from escalating further: with at least a B grade, he believes the Mo family would risk its reputation to suppress him as a future threat. ch. 38
Fang Yuan credits his advantage not to the Spring and Autumn Cicada or to any foreknowledge of the future but to five hundred years of lived experience from his first life, the same kind of hard won mastery that let Ren Zu command the Rules and Regulations Gu. ch. 38
