For tomorrow!
At the dig site, an elderly rockman kneels weeping before Yan Yong: three tribesmen died of exhaustion the day before, and because exhaustion kills the soul outright, none of them left behind a single descendant. Yan Yong beats his chest and insists the work cannot slow, since the fox attacks keep growing in size, a sign, he says, that the immortal is recovering his power; he points to a field of gravestones he has ordered built for the fallen, promising their descendants will remember them with gratitude. The old rockman presses the real problem: rockmen who die of exhaustion leave no souls at all to become descendants, so gravestones change nothing. Yan Yong says nothing. A young rockman nearby accuses the old man of being afraid to die, and other young rockmen close ranks around him, framing his objection as cowardice against a shared sacrifice. Yan Yong sends him off gently and moves on to inspect the next segment with his young followers, who mock the old rockman as they leave. ch. 415
Stung and near breaking, the old rockman almost speaks again, but the construction ground is thick with carved gravestone slogans about unity, courage and a bright future for the tribe, and even the rockmen who die of exhaustion show a smile before the end. He kneels in a daze, slams his fist into the ground once, and returns silently to the digging. ch. 415
Further down the line, the river channel is already taking shape. Six young rockmen from the patrol groups Yan Yong calls his rock guards report their segment’s last few days: another twenty-five kilometres dug, a hundred and twenty tribesmen lost, and three rockmen caught sleeping on the job, a disgrace Yan Yong orders punished publicly. The guards tremble with devotion as he praises them, calling them the tribe’s future and himself their pride, though Yan Yong avoids their eyes, unsettled by their fervor. ch. 415
Looking over the whole project, tens of metres wide and stretching in long segments, Yan Yong feels genuine awe at what the united rockmen can achieve, and then, thinking of Fang Yuan, a chill that freezes it over completely. He recognizes the fox attacks, the gravestone slogans and even the rock guards he built with his own hands as pieces of Fang Yuan’s design, each one meant to grind down rockmen resistance. He feels himself a puppet on Fang Yuan’s strings, sinking further each day he watches his tribesmen die for a cause they still believe in, and privately wonders whether he would be happier never knowing the truth at all. ch. 415
Elsewhere, Fang Yuan spends his last estrus Gu on the fox groups, triggering a mass mating. Fox gestation varies sharply by kind: a golden fox bears three to four young every two months, while a desolate beast like the three-tail fox needs even more than a hundred years to bring one fetus to term; the ordinary foxes of this blessed land carry short gestations by comparison. Since the digging began, Fang Yuan has used estrus Gu daily to grow the fox army, drawing down the last of the assistance and enslavement Gu the previous Hu Immortal left behind in Dang Hun Mountain, since she held no Immortal Gu of her own and died to blue charm lightning shadow in the fifth calamity along with her set of enslavement Gu. The fox population has grown several times over, more than the blessed land can feed; left unchecked, many would starve within two years, but Fang Yuan’s whole attention is on surviving the sixth calamity. ch. 415
Months pass, and the finished river carries the north’s floodwater into the east’s fire pit. The clash douses almost half the black flames, leaving only three burning patches at the edges, and the water that remains fills tens of pits into small lakes across the land. The north is still mud and the east still a burnt waste, but the narration likens the change to a scab closing over a wound, expecting both to recover in time. On Fang Yuan’s order, Yan Yong leads the hundred or so injured, exhausted survivors home to the south. Little Hu Immortal worries over the thick clouds the whole project has raised, but Fang Yuan waves the concern off as a detail to settle later, if the blessed land survives the calamity at all. ch. 415
