Conscience of those in power
Yan Yong leaves Dang Hun palace through the tunnels and reaches the mountain surface, his fear and dread easing with every step away from Fang Yuan. His tribesmen mob him as a hero: some kneel to kiss his feet, others shout his courage to the sky. Yan Yong laughs along, but the cheering leaves him hollow. He alone knows the truth behind the victory: every rockman celebrating around him will be worked to death digging the river within three months, and there is nothing he can do about it. Privately he judges Fang Yuan a demon, his heart colder and harder than any rockman’s, his strength greater than the weight of mountains, and admits to himself that he is simply too afraid of dying to resist; he is only a hundred and eighty years old and has not slept nearly enough. Every cheer from his tribesmen lands on him like a lash, because he knows he is leading them to their deaths. ch. 414
He climbs to address the crowd and asks whether they will keep following him toward a brighter future; the rockmen answer with what the narration measures as a hundred and twenty percent show of support. Nearly every rockman who might question him is already gone: the elders who might have known better are already dead, hailed as heroes for falling in the earlier fighting, the newborns are simple minded, and the surviving old rockmen are all devoted followers. ch. 414
Yan Yong tells them the escaped immortal must be recovering his strength at the north lake or the east fire pit, and proposes burying both under soil so he can never draw on them again. One old rockman calls the idea impossible outright, given how wide the lake is and how hot the fire pit burns; Yan Yong marks him down to be worked to death on the heaviest labor to come. A second old rockman offers a better plan instead: dig a river and let the lake’s water flow into the fire pit, using water to put out fire. Yan Yong reads this rockman as the more dangerous one for being clever rather than merely doubtful, and privately resolves to have him killed off on a defense post later. ch. 414
In public, Yan Yong claims the river plan as his own, then credits it to the dead white stone tribe leader’s dying words: that the north flood and the east fire were both the immortal’s doing, the very source of his power. The rockmen mourn and praise the old leader’s wisdom, unaware Fang Yuan killed him outright and broke his soul down into a gutstone on Dang Hun Mountain; whether that particular gutstone was later smashed by a rockman or by Fang Yuan himself, the narration leaves as a mystery no one will ever solve. The tribes settle on Yan Yong leading the river dig. ch. 414
Watching in secret, Fang Yuan has Little Hu Immortal release a pulse of Dang Hun Mountain’s power once the plan is fixed; the rockmen’s souls tremble, several young ones faint outright, and Yan Yong uses the moment to warn everyone the mountain itself is about to strike, hurrying them off toward the north and east instead of home. ch. 414
Little Hu Immortal asks Fang Yuan whether he knows the story of the rockmen, gently pushing him toward the gentler approach the previous Hu Immortal once used. Fang Yuan tells her fear and hatred outweigh gratitude as tools. The narration explains why the rockmen matter this much: skilled diggers who can raise underground cities and, fed on Dang Hun Mountain’s gutstones, breed without limit, they are valuable enough that other Gu Immortals buy and trade them as slaves, and the previous Hu Immortal won them over slowly with kindness because most of them, stubborn and unafraid of death, answer to nothing else. Where she leaned on kindness, Fang Yuan privately judges that path too gentle and laughs coldly in his heart that rules, laws, friendship and morals are all just tools for squeezing out benefit, that leniency and cruelty come to the same thing, and that he cares nothing for being hated, since hatred alone has never been strong enough to stop him. Only seven months remain before the sixth earthly calamity, and the lake and fire pit, both scars of earlier calamities, are the blessed land’s weakest points; what matters to him is getting the river finished fast, however many rockmen it costs, since Dang Hun Mountain can breed as many replacements as he needs from their captured souls. ch. 414
