Just take me
Travelling under the name Chang Shan Yin, Fang Yuan asks Ge Yao why he needs her at all, and she answers with the dangers ahead: the poison grassland’s purple fog will poison anyone who breathes it too long, ghosts and spirits wait deeper in, and only her return heart Gu can find the way back out. Her stomach growls mid-answer, and she admits, blushing, that poison beard wolves killed the big stomach horse carrying her food and her primeval stones. Fang Yuan presses her: why would the tribe leader’s own daughter travel on so common a mount. ch. 427
The answer slips out before she can stop it. Ge Yao fled her father’s camp rather than marry Man Duo, Man tribe leader’s third son, a sickly rank two cultivator she calls a monkey-thin weakling with no heroic spirit who leans on his father’s power. Ge tribe, newly migrated in with its strength greatly reduced, needed Man tribe’s rich betrothal gift, a stretch of fertile grassland, and her father pushed the match; she ran instead. By the grassland’s bride-kidnapping custom, she asks Fang Yuan to simply take her. He refuses. She argues that marrying into Ge tribe would spare him the suspicion an outsider draws in northern plains. Fang Yuan calls himself a northern plains native; Ge Yao laughs at this, since his accent and his food both mark him a stranger. He tells her to let him think it over and hands her primeval stones without answering. ch. 427
Northern plains treats women as lower in status than men, sometimes sold as goods in markets, unlike southern border’s female clan leaders, and Fang Yuan already carries the memory of where this leads. In an earlier life, Hei tribe leader Hei Lou Lan became lord of the imperial court, then, extremely lecherous, filled his harem with beauties from many tribes; he also pushed a policy raising women’s status that enraged every rival power, so his own tribesmen betrayed him within two years, luring him outside the court to be killed, and the tribes then warred for five years over who ruled next. Northern plains women often flee rather than marry, which is why Fang Yuan guesses correctly that Ge Yao has done the same. ch. 427
As they move deeper, the faint poison thickens into a visible light-purple haze, and Ge Yao halts at a wolf pack’s tracks; her rank three investigative Gu finds them before Fang Yuan’s own rank four one does, since northern plains suppresses everything he brought from Hu Immortal blessed land. Hundreds of poison beard wolves come into view, close to a thousand of them, more than in their earlier fight, and this hundred beast king, commanding so many, is clearly stronger than the one before. Ge Yao’s face turns pale and she trembles at the sight. ch. 427
Fang Yuan tells her to just protect herself and charges alone into the pack. Golden light armor covers him, a golden dragon sweeps out now and then, and every wolf that meets his fists or feet has its bones shattered; the pack cannot bring him down. He also duels the wolf king directly, a beast wreathed in flickering lightning that spits green venom and moves fast enough to leave an afterimage; Ge Yao judges it carries at least three wild Gu. Fang Yuan keeps moving instead of engaging it head-on, using the ordinary wolves to block the king’s own movement Gu. Ge Yao raises a water armor, kills three wolves and wounds several more with a spiral water arrow, then panics as a dozen close in and calls out a water dragon that scatters them. Watching him fight, her fear turns to admiration, and she then draws a large part of the pack onto herself with the water dragon; Fang Yuan shouts at her to get clear. After some effort he turns the pack’s attention back onto himself, breaks the wolf king’s guard with a beast phantom, pins its skull to the ground, and beats it to death with his bare hands, a beast on the verge of becoming a thousand beast king. ch. 427
