Chapter 403

Ten minutes into the assault, the mound is already thick with blood and corpses, and Mo Wu Tian presses Chou Jiu to move faster. Chou Jiu answers that a slower pace suits him: the dog groups are too large to break quickly, and letting the righteous path absorb more of the pressure benefits the demonic side. Chou Jiu is already Fang Yuan’s slave, and his deepest wish is simply to keep stalling. ^{ch. 403}

Earlier the two factions had stood at a stalemate until Mo Wu Tian broke it by arranging to cooperate with Xiao Mang, and Chou Jiu, unable to stop him, could only go along and try to slow the advance from within. Splitting the attack in two directions plays to his manipulation: the righteous side ends up advancing further and taking heavier hits, while the demonic side loses less but moves so slowly it risks being surrounded. ^{ch. 403}

Mo Wu Tian accuses Chou Jiu of muddled thinking that will get them surrounded; Chou Jiu snaps back that Mo Wu Tian’s recklessness already cost lives, and that the two factions will soon be rivals for the treasure and ought to be weakened now. Most of the demonic Gu Masters side with Chou Jiu, and a furious Mo Wu Tian charges alone toward the bronze hall, daring the rest to wait and die. Hu Mei Er, Li Xian and the others want to follow but lack the strength to go it alone, so they stay with the crowd while Chou Jiu, pleased with himself, plans to advance safely along the path Mo Wu Tian is paving. ^{ch. 403}

In the fighting that follows, Yi Chong takes on blue fish scales and black fins to become a shark; Yi Huo tears through the dogs wreathed in fire; Yan Jun turns into a hollow phantom shadow, dodging every blow; Li Xian conceals himself with a rank five Gu; and Kong Ri Tian floats above the battle as a rain of petals. Xiao Mang and Mo Wu Tian push furthest, but the two dog emperors Ba Huang and Ying Ming block their advance again. ^{ch. 403}

At the front, a blood soaked Tie Ruo Nan stops to catch her breath, guarded by the Tie clan’s four old-timers and by Tie Bai Qi, and tells Tie Bai Qi the rest is up to him. He bares the third eye on his forehead, tears open a black hole with his Gu worm, and sends out an army of white apes to charge the bronze hall, cover their advance, and be spent doing it. Under their cover, Tie Ruo Nan and the four old-timers fight their way into the hall. ^{ch. 403}

Fang Yuan is still refining and can do nothing else; when the land spirit wants to strike Tie Ruo Nan itself, he stops it, since it is needed to hold the dogs and the immortal essence, and sends Bai Ning Bing to block her instead. Bai Ning Bing, snorting coldly, meets Tie Ruo Nan in fierce combat. ^{ch. 403}

Without Feng Tian Yu’s help, Fang Yuan’s refinement crawls compared to his previous life, when he had already reached the third watch Gu by this point; now he has only just thrown in the five hundred year lifespan Gu. The cloud of smoke reacts violently and nearly ruins the refinement more than once, and each time he barely saves it. Behind him, the Tie clan’s four old-timers join the fight against Bai Ning Bing, who cannot hold against all of them and calls out, addressing him as Fang Zheng, that she cannot last much longer. ^{ch. 403}

The smoke finally absorbs the lifespan Gu and settles into a field of golden wheat, the “five hundred years as autumn” stage, and Fang Yuan tells her, his voice tight, to hold on a little longer. She curses that if she dies he will not survive either, and after several more exchanges she gasps that she cannot continue and means to self-destruct. Startled, Fang Yuan asks whether her aptitude has already returned to a hundred percent, and she only throws the question back at him without answering. ^{ch. 403}

The smoke shrinks from a water tank’s size to a basin’s as it matures, and despite Fang Yuan’s plea to hold on unless she truly cannot, Bai Ning Bing says it is already too late. Frost floods the hall, and she rises into the air with her whole body turning to ice, the same transformation she underwent when she self-destructed at Qing Mao Mountain. The glacier crushes toward Tie Ruo Nan, who cries out at what she calls the legendary Northern Dark Ice Soul physique before the ice seals her inside it, and the cold keeps spreading toward Fang Yuan, whose calls to Bai Ning Bing go unanswered as her face turns indistinct and her eyes dim. ^{ch. 403}

Cursing, Fang Yuan sends the Yang Gu toward her, but it turns back into his hand of its own accord at the same moment the cloud smoke completes, landing on his other palm as a golden, peanut-shaped Gu with red markings that will survive forty years, far longer than the week-long false Gu it replaces. Laughing, he blocks the frost with the liquid metal Gu and asks Bai Ning Bing whether she has acted enough. The frost stops. ^{ch. 403}

He needles her about enjoying her time cooperating with the Tie clan, and she turns back to flesh and stares at him in shocked suspicion, demanding how he knew. Fang Yuan lists it out: her staged loss to Yan Tu in Shang clan city to win Doctor Su Shou’s help removing her poison vow, her secret contact with Tie Ruo Nan, and her plotting with the four old-timers on San Cha mountain. Dazed, she can only wonder to herself how he found out, since she had planted the fixed star Gu on him and believed herself careful. ^{ch. 403}

Tie Ruo Nan breaks free of the ice with the four old-timers, calls him a demon, and declares he cannot escape now that the scheme is exposed; Fang Yuan raises his left arm and asks, chuckling, what happens if he simply cuts it off. The four old-timers frown: even their killer move would only win them the severed arm, and by their understanding of Fang Yuan, sacrificing his own left forearm would cost this cruel and wicked man nothing. ^{ch. 403}

Tie Ruo Nan laughs off his defiance: the dogs cannot hold the bronze hall against both factions forever, and once Xiao Mang, Chou Jiu, Mo Wu Tian and the others break through, he will have no Immortal Gu finished and no way to defend it. She brands him a frenzied lunatic whose murders of so many Gu Masters and plundering of their apertures make his crimes unforgivable, names Bai Ning Bing as the witness who will make it known to the world, and offers him one way to keep his life: surrender to the Tie clan, hand over the half-finished Immortal Gu and the old clan leader’s Gu worms, and enter the Demon Suppression Tower for reform. ^{ch. 403}