Chapter 42

At the rock gambling den, Fang Yuan keeps grinding a fossil into an oddly uneven mudball while the watching Gu Masters puzzle over it, until a young man bursts into the tent calling himself Jia Jin Sheng and offering forty primeval stones for the unfinished mudball. The Gu Masters in the tent bow to him as second young master, and he confirms he owns the gambling den himself, while the crowd murmurs that he is the half-brother of the merchant caravan leader Jia Fu. Fang Yuan accuses him of trying to force a purchase against a Gu Yue clansman on the clan’s own Qing Mao Mountain, and the surrounding Gu Masters grow hostile enough toward Jia Jin Sheng that he backs off and lets the grinding continue. ^{ch. 42}

The grinding uncovers a live Gu: a palm sized, warty yellow toad that the crowd recognizes as the rare Mudskin Toad. Before Jia Jin Sheng can name a price, Fang Yuan states the Gu’s own worth: a rank two Gu that eats five hundred grams of yellow soil a meal, the necessary main Gu for refining a Treasure Brass Toad, worth five hundred primeval stones on the market. Jia Jin Sheng, who had hoped to talk him down before the mudball was even opened, pays the full price, and Fang Yuan hands over the toad for five money bags holding a hundred primeval stones each. ^{ch. 42}

Fang Yuan had begun with ninety-eight primeval stones, spent sixty of them on the gambling rocks and was left with thirty-eight, so the sale leaves him with five hundred and thirty-eight primeval stones in total. He never meant to keep the Mudskin Toad, since it is a rank two Gu that needs yellow soil while Qing Mao Mountain’s soil is green, and feeding it alongside his other Gu worms would strain his funds. He pockets the money bags, picks up his last unopened purple gold fossil, and walks out of the tent without answering the clerk’s question about why he is leaving that one unground. ^{ch. 42}