Chapter 432

Fang Yuan turns from the retrieved Gu worms to Chang Shan Yin’s corpse and starts drawing out its poison with Gu worms, working in turns with Ge Yao’s cleansing Gu. She asks why he would detoxify a dead man, then wonders aloud whether the corpse is Chang Shan Yin and Fang Yuan his son, before ruling that out herself: Chang Shan Yin’s son is a northern plains native, and Fang Yuan looks foreign. Fang Yuan answers flatly that he is Chang Shan Yin. As the toxins clear, the corpse’s skin loses its wretched green tinge and returns to its natural color. ^{ch. 432}

Fang Yuan strips the body, rinses its clothes, and sends Ge Yao back a few steps. A swarm of black ants from his aperture consumes all of the corpse’s skin, leaving behind a mess of exposed tendons, and Ge Yao fights down the urge to vomit. He plants a seed that grows at speed into a flower wrapped in a membrane like the inner flesh of a mouth, lined with rows of tiny jagged teeth. The ants climb inside and the flower closes over them, grinding and humming until the whole bloom trembles. ^{ch. 432}

A second Gu, one Ge Yao does not recognize, turns into a multicolored blaze and fastens onto the flower. It burns and shrieks so sharply that Ge Yao claps her hands over her ears and backs away, her face paling as she senses the demonic path in what she is watching. Fang Yuan shouts for it to open; the corolla parts, the flame rushes in, and the flower bursts, releasing a Gu that shifts constantly between yellow green and blood violet like rising smoke. Fang Yuan calls the Human Skin Gu’s refinement complete. ^{ch. 432}

He calls out an old removal Gu that becomes a cooling breeze and washes away the three Gu he had used to modify his body: ancient bronze skin, essence iron bones and golden steel tendons. Warning Ge Yao to shut her eyes, he takes a dagger and slices himself open from neck to abdomen without bleeding a drop, thanks to a staunch bleeding Gu prepared in advance. Ge Yao stares in horror, hands over her mouth, as he rips the skin from his chest and lets the colorful smoke of the new Gu settle a fresh, oddly aged layer of skin over the wound. He repeats the process on his arms and legs, struggles briefly with his back, then cuts a careful circle around his face, eyelids, sockets, ears and chin, and removes it entirely. ^{ch. 432}

When he turns back to Ge Yao he wears Chang Shan Yin’s face, and he answers her in a flawless northern accent he had simply chosen not to use before. Privately, Fang Yuan dismisses the whole procedure: the body is only a sack of flesh, and in this world only immortality is worth pursuing. Examining himself, he finds his fingerprints, his chest hair, his nose and cheeks, even the grey at his temples, now exactly Chang Shan Yin’s. ^{ch. 432}

Ge Yao, certain she has just watched a dead man come back to life, demands to know who he really is and accuses him of faking the northern accent as an outsider. Fang Yuan answers with a story: dying with no one to save him, he claims, he fled as a wandering soul through poison grassland’s sunless gloom for twenty years before seizing a foreign Gu Master’s body, and their meeting was chance. He presses on: if he meant to guard against her, he says, he would not have let her witness any of it, and he waited twenty years before taking a body only because he refused to slaughter a northern plains native for his own ends, so he asks whether she would really turn on him over an outsider. ^{ch. 432}