Chang Shan Yin's death
Back in his aperture, Fang Yuan finds the white bone wheel drifting half sunk in his primeval sea, lifeless; it is close to destruction, and only bone bamboo Gu combined with ghost fire Gu could repair it. He recalls its fame: rank eight Demonic Gu Immortal Shen Jie Ao, the Proud Bone Demon Lord, once lacked a rank six Gu and instead combined several rank five Gu, the white bone wheel among them, into a killer move called White Bone Chariot with power to rival one; on the strength of that ingenuity he reached rank eight, and his later move White Bone Battlefield, combining three Immortal Gu, grew even more powerful and let him dominate, killing countless Gu Immortals and leaving the righteous path helpless against him. ch. 431
Fang Yuan measures himself against such men. In his previous life he lived roughly five hundred years and reached rank six Gu Immortal, one step from rank seven, before the righteous path attacked him as he refined Spring Autumn Cicada and he self-detonated. He counts Blood Sea Ancestor, the Proud Bone Demon Lord and Soul Specter Demon Venerable among the truly impressive, and privately holds that a man of this age should live unrestrained by the mortal realm, killing whoever he dislikes, slaughtering when his heart turns evil and blessing the world when it does not, bending everything to his own will and trampling any enemy who resists; to him, this is true freedom. ch. 431
He deepens fixed immortal travel Gu’s concealment again, using dark toss Gu, a black cocoon-like Gu whose tendrils wrap around bright pearl Gu and dim it further; the method, called tossing pearls in the dark, was developed during the battle of the five regions in his previous life. Ge Yao asks whether he means to seal away the beautiful jade butterfly inside; Fang Yuan only smiles and says nothing, returning to his search of the battlefield. ch. 431
This battlefield dates back twenty years, to a fight between Chang Shan Yin, a rank four peak stage Gu Master, and Ha Tu Gu, a rank five initial stage Gu Master leading a band of bandits. Once childhood friends, the two men loved the same woman; she chose Chang Shan Yin, and Ha Tu Gu’s jealousy grew into a hatred only blood could settle. Ha Tu Gu poisoned Chang Shan Yin’s mother to draw him toward a cure inside the poison grassland; instead Chang Shan Yin led wolf packs deep into the plains and set an ambush there, and when Ha Tu Gu arrived with his own band of bandits, the wolves attacked from every side in a fight that ran until sundown, until every wolf lay dead and every bandit was killed or fled. Spent of primeval essence, the two men grappled bare-handed, wrestling and biting, until they collapsed only steps apart, gasping and as powerless as children. Ha Tu Gu’s essence recovered first, and he cast a poisonous bone spear; Chang Shan Yin twisted his body at the last instant so it struck his chest instead of his head, then broke off the spear with wolf strength Gu and dragged himself over to stab it into Ha Tu Gu’s eyes, killing him. ch. 431
The poison had already spread through Chang Shan Yin’s body, so with his last recovered essence he activated wolf fetus burial Gu, built from a hundred and eight different species of pregnant female wolves and able to save anyone with a single breath left, and buried himself in the ground to sleep. About thirty years later, a rank three Gu Master named Ma Hong Yun, fleeing a wolf pack, stumbled onto him by chance and freed him; Chang Shan Yin helped drive the wolves off in return, and later became one of four great generals under Ma Hong Yun, a former slave who rose to lord of the imperial court. With Ma Hong Yun’s later help, Chang Shan Yin himself reached rank seven Gu Immortal as the Sky Wolf General, and he eventually died resisting a Central Continent invasion; his descendants’ retelling of the story is how Fang Yuan already knows it. ch. 431
Fang Yuan finds the wolf tail that, in his memory of an earlier life, Ma Hong Yun once tripped over here, a pull that freed both himself and the buried Chang Shan Yin, and yanks it free from the grass. The ground writhes, and a huge female wolf’s body rises out of it, purple-furred, white-bellied, eyes closed, taller than a grown man even lying down; Ge Yao thinks it looks pregnant. Fang Yuan says it is not a wolf but a Gu, and cuts its belly open, spilling amniotic fluid and blood; Ge Yao leaps clear of it. A man emerges from inside, the true Chang Shan Yin, eyes shut, skin gone green, a broken bone spear still lodged in him and his face locked in pain. Fang Yuan crouches as if to examine the wounds and instead pinches his neck; unconscious, Chang Shan Yin cannot resist or self-detonate his Gu, and he dies on a single faint breath, roughly ten years short of the rescue and the future as the Sky Wolf General that would otherwise have found him. ch. 431
In his aperture, Fang Yuan finds several tortoise breath Gu, fist-sized storage Gu marked like tortoise shells, in which Chang Shan Yin had sealed his own Gu one by one before entering the wolf’s womb so they would not starve. Leaking Spring Autumn Cicada’s aura, Fang Yuan instantly refines them, then crushes each one under Ge Yao’s watch to reveal eight enslavement path Gu inside, all rank four and some worth more than an ordinary rank five Gu, the very set that built Chang Shan Yin’s reputation in northern plains and had killed rank five Gu Masters before; with Spring Autumn Cicada’s help, all eight pass to Fang Yuan. He is satisfied, at last, to hold a genuinely excellent set of rank four Gu from northern plains. ch. 431
