Chapter 436

In daylight, poison grassland still lies dark beneath thick cloud, and a hump wolf as large as a warhorse lies motionless on a mound, watching a grey rabbit forage from its burrow. The rabbit ranges far from its hole so as not to expose it, and once it has eaten its fill and turns for home, the hump wolf breaks from cover and gives chase. The rabbit is faster, but its stamina cannot match the wolf’s, and after three or four failed lunges it is finally caught. ^{ch. 436}

The hump wolf carries its catch back to its den to feed a mate and cubs, and finds only blood and corpses waiting. Fang Yuan had found the den earlier, killed the weak female wolf and her cubs there, and taken a rank two Wolf Enslavement Gu, then stationed poison beard wolves as an ambush to wait for the male’s return. Now the returning wolf howls with fury as the poison beard wolves close in around it from every side. ^{ch. 436}

Watching from a mound, Fang Yuan is pleased that a male wolf has come, since he wants a hump wolf for a mount rather than spend primeval essence on Chang Shan Yin’s Wolf Sprint Gu. The hump wolf fights hard and the poison beard wolves work him down through teamwork rather than a head on clash, and after an hour he is breathing raggedly, ringed by around sixty poison beard wolf corpses. With his skill in the enslavement path, Fang Yuan could kill it using only thirty poison beard wolves, but he wants it alive and holds himself back. ^{ch. 436}

At two hundred steps, Fang Yuan releases a rank two Wolf Enslavement Gu that becomes a light smoke and settles over the hump wolf; the wolf tries to flee, then charges Fang Yuan, but the poison beard wolves block it until the smoke fully takes hold within a few breaths. It collapses, wounded and submissive, and Fang Yuan privately credits his hundred man soul and the guts Gu, without which the capture would have cost him far more effort. He calls out wolf smoke Gu, which fully heals the hump wolf, grows it fresh fur, and revives most, though not all, of the injured poison beard wolves; their fighting strength still needs rest and food to return. ^{ch. 436}

Whether a wolf fights at its best also depends on hunger, since too little strength leaves it weak and too much food leaves it sluggish, so Fang Yuan lets the animals eat before he eats his own rations. The poison beard wolves feed on their own dead, the hump wolf eats the rabbit it caught, and then, by Fang Yuan’s command, it devours the corpses of the mate and cubs he had killed there. ^{ch. 436}

Three days have passed since Fang Yuan killed Ge Yao. Her usefulness had been fading through the trials that brought them here: the ghost face sunflower sea, the earth spike rats, the shadow crows, finding Chang Shan Yin and taking his skin, finding the snow wash Gu, and burying the earth treasury flower king Gu. Meanwhile the danger she posed kept rising, since she had watched him arrive naked in northern plains, bury the Immortal Gu, and work the moving perspective cup Gu, and her love for him only sharpened that danger, because a girl in love digs into a man’s past and his future both. With a tribe and a father behind her, keeping her close would have drawn two tribes’ attention onto him, and with Dang Hun Mountain still dying, Spring Autumn Cicada recovering only slowly, and his own cultivation just rank four peak stage, Fang Yuan had no time to spend on that risk. It was a premeditated murder. ^{ch. 436}

After killing her near the grassland’s edge, Fang Yuan had the wolves devour her corpse and used the burial soul toad to swallow her soul, already sent on to the blessed land and crushed inside Dang Hun Mountain. He had also swept the fire site clean of any trace. Privately, he reduces all that beauty to nothing more than the waste the poison beard wolves leave behind, and calls anything short of eternal life worthless in the end. ^{ch. 436}

He tells himself that dying a million times worse than Ge Yao would still leave him without regret, since only full effort earns a death free of it, and that he has been resolved to die from the very start. Nobody understands this transmigrator and reincarnator, walking alone toward the nearly impossible chance of immortality, and he does not need anyone to. ^{ch. 436}