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Three days after the slaughter, an injured Yan Yong staggers back to his tribe and wakes every hibernating rockman to spread an alarm. He tells them the male immortal means to enslave them all and seize the tribe’s handsome young men as playthings, that the rockmen fought him without fear of death and wounded him badly enough to force a retreat, and that everyone else who resisted died so he alone could return with the warning. He claims the immortal swore, before fleeing, to return with his fox army and wipe out every rockmen tribe. ch. 413
The eight tribes, leaderless since both heirs and elders died at Fang Yuan’s hand, fall into grief, fury and chaos. Before they can finish arguing over what to do, fox groups genuinely attack in waves; the rockmen retreat underground to hold out, and though the foxes pay heavily for every assault, they keep coming, and despair spreads through the tribes. ch. 413
Yan Yong recovers through sleep and leads a real counterattack, telling his tribesmen the immortal is already wounded and only a paper tiger who can spend foxes but not fight himself. He mourns the fallen elders publicly, above all the old white rock tribe leader, whom he says died in his arms and entrusted him with the tribe. Grateful rockmen hand him the white rock tribe’s leadership, and within a month he absorbs the leadership of all eight tribes; another half month later, he drives the fox groups off entirely. ch. 413
Yan Yong argues this is not enough while the immortal still lives, since the foxes will only return, and proposes marching on his mountain to finish him. Some rockmen hesitate, worn out and short of numbers, but Yan Yong invokes the white rock leader’s dying secret: Dang Hun Mountain holds gutstones that could strengthen the whole race. The tribes rally into an expedition. ch. 413
Fang Yuan has already thinned his own defenses around the mountain on purpose. At Dang Hun Mountain the two sides stage a battle: Fang Yuan kills a number of rockmen to terrify the rest, then lets Yan Yong appear to defeat him in a staged retreat, shouting a threat about returning once his immortal essence recovers. Slow and unfamiliar with the terrain, the rockmen let him go and celebrate their victory. Yan Yong then redirects them: the mountain is a demonic ground safe to enter only a few days each year, so they must gather what gutstones they can within three days and leave. ch. 413
A rockman’s solid stone body strains the soul that carries it, so the race spends eighty percent of its life asleep nurturing that soul; once the soul thickens enough it overflows onto a rock and forms a new little rockman, and gutstones processed through guts Gu speed that overflow along. Digging for gutstones during those three days swells the tribes by six thousand little rockmen, tripling their total population from before the battle. ch. 413
Back inside Dang Hun palace, Yan Yong kneels and reports this to Fang Yuan with open dread, confirming he still remembers his instructions. Fang Yuan tells him the tribes now have the manpower to dig, and gives him three months to cut a great river across the east and north. Yan Yong protests that constant labor without sleep could wipe the rockmen out. Privately, he reels at the scale of it: their numbers stand at ten thousand now, and Fang Yuan calmly confirms only over two hundred will be left when the river is done. He warns that if it is not finished in three months, he will expose everything to Yan Yong’s own tribesmen and kill him. Yan Yong curls up and rolls away in terror. ch. 413
Little Hu Immortal reminds Fang Yuan how much it cost to bring the rockmen into the blessed land in the first place; he tells her their numbers are easy to replace. He then explains why: the soul burial toad, a rank four Gu left behind by the previous Hu Immortal, lets him collect the souls of rockmen killed fighting the fox groups; seeded onto Dang Hun Mountain, those souls become new gutstones, part of which he keeps to make his own soul six times stronger than an ordinary person’s, giving the rest to the tribes. The rockmen have no idea their strengthened souls are paid for with their own dead. ch. 413
