Chapter 433

Persuaded that Fang Yuan could have killed or abandoned her at any point already, and moved that he offers to help clear her arranged marriage, Ge Yao agrees to travel with him toward the snow spirea. He tells her a story of his own grief: his mother died of poison from Ha Tu Gu over twenty years ago because he failed to find a snow wash Gu in time, and the search has haunted him ever since. Tears run down his face as he tells it, and Ge Yao, thoroughly convinced, apologizes for having doubted him. ^{ch. 433}

The two push two to three hundred li into poison grassland, then another five to six hundred li, until the purple fog grows so dense neither can see their own hands. Ge Yao’s fog sparrow Gu is useless in it, but Fang Yuan can still scout a thousand steps ahead. She wants to turn back; he refuses, because he alone understands that snow spirea only grows this deep in the poison. ^{ch. 433}

At the grassland’s heart sits Zi Du blessed land, home to the rank seven Gu Immortal Zi Yan Ran, titled Lady Poison Scorpion. Every few years her blessed land vents its accumulated toxins outward, and the venting has slowly turned the surrounding land into the purple fog and poison beard wolves of poison grassland. Fang Yuan and Ge Yao are now near its center, and there they find a twenty foot snow spirea with a black trunk and drooping white branches. They gather three snow wash Gu from the spirea. Fang Yuan keeps one and gives Ge Yao the other two. ^{ch. 433}

Fang Yuan seals the Immortal Gu Fixed Immortal Travel, kept inside a dark pearl, inside an Iron Cabinet Gu taken from Tie clan at San Cha mountain, cutting off its telltale aura. He buries the cabinet using a rank five Earth Treasury Flower King Gu, a gift of Flower Wine Monk’s inheritance that closes to smaller than an infant’s fist and leaks no aura at all, spending four hours feeding it primeval essence to finish the planting. His own aperture cannot hold the Immortal Gu, so this hiding place is the only way to keep it safe until he can retrieve it, and he judges that only a Gu Immortal with an Immortal Gu able to scout hundreds of li underground could ever find it. ^{ch. 433}

The return trip runs a different route, guided by Ge Yao’s return heart Gu, and wolves attack them again and again, including thousand wolf groups three or four times that force them into the air to escape. When about a hundred poison beard wolves close in near the border, Fang Yuan meets them gladly rather than fleeing, sending out a rank two Wolf Enslavement Gu that breaks the hundred beast wolf king through his hundred man soul and folds the whole pack under his command, the second wolf group he has subdued this way. By the time his following grows to a thousand wolves with four hundred beast wolf kings, poison grassland no longer threatens them, and Fang Yuan decides every Gu worm on him that is not native to northern plains has to go. ^{ch. 433}