I like your fear
In Hu Immortal blessed land’s southern district, an eight-hundred-year-old rockman wakes his grandson Yan Yong from years of sleep. Yan Yong is a hundred and eighty years old, freshly grown by rockman standards, and grumbles at being roused; rockmen curl into mossy stone lumps to sleep, usually for seven to eight years at a stretch, and a full rockman life runs to about a thousand years against an ordinary human’s bare hundred. His grandfather, leader of the Hui Shi tribe, explains that a new immortal has replaced the old one and has summoned the tribes early, a year ahead of the usual ten-year tribute. ch. 412
On a green-stone altar, Fang Yuan receives the rockmen’s tribute in his black robe, hair loose. Tens of rockmen kneel before him, eight of them tribe leaders: two grey rockmen, three granite, one iron, one green, one white. Their offerings pile up: ore threaded with gold, silver, bronze and iron, gems, jewels, and Gu worms the rockmen turn up while eating dirt underground. Most of the Gu are rank one rock skin Gu or rank two monolith Gu; only one, a rank three stone aperture Gu, catches Fang Yuan’s eye, since he once used one himself to relieve the pressure Spring Autumn Cicada placed on his own aperture. ch. 412
The oldest tribe leader begs to reduce the tribute, citing thirty years of steady contribution against earthquakes, floods in the north and fires in the east that have made the offerings harder to find. Fang Yuan agrees at once, smiling, and offers to exempt them from tribute entirely, on one condition: the rockmen dig a river from the north and carry its water east to stop the fire from spreading. ch. 412
The rockmen explode in refusal. They call it a death sentence, say their kind needs sleep above all else, and declare they would sooner relocate than dig through fire and flood. Little Hu Immortal warns Fang Yuan privately that the tribute alone is already at the rockmen’s limit. Fang Yuan ignores her, telling the rockmen that the ground they live on, the dirt they eat and the spring beside their tribe are all his, that they are his slaves by that fact alone, and that the river is an order rather than a request. ch. 412
When one rockman keeps shouting his defiance loudest, Fang Yuan sends a golden dragon to kill him; the dead man turns out to be the granite rockmen’s old tribe leader. His death detonates the rest. Dozens of rockmen charge Fang Yuan at once, their Gu worms flaring, but Little Hu Immortal seals every one before they can be used, and Fang Yuan snickers as he begins his slaughter. The rockmen shatter into fragments too weak to match him, yet the fragments gather themselves back into smaller rockmen who charge again shouting for revenge; this is how the race breeds, splitting a dying rockman’s soul and stone into new bodies that carry some of the dead one’s memory. Three such waves rise and fall before the ground goes quiet. ch. 412
Only one rockman is left, shivering on the ground: Yan Yong. Fang Yuan asks his name, then tells him, smiling warmly, that he is sparing him for one reason alone: Fang Yuan likes the fear and horror Yan Yong shows toward him. ch. 412
