Chapter 447

Talk of Ge tribe turns the banquet cold, and old Ge tribe leader rises to explain his daughter’s death to the assembled guests. Ge Guang watches his father grieve, wishing none of it were real, dreading the moment he must prove to outsiders that his sister is truly dead. Man Tu listens patiently only for show: Chang Shan Yin’s fame as the hero who killed Ha Tu Gu and its bandits earns him that much, but nothing outweighs the chance to absorb Ge tribe now that he has an excuse. ^{ch. 447}

Man Tu’s third son Man Duo bows to Fang Yuan and produces chase smoke Gu, a butterfly-shaped worm trailing smoke that can mark a person for months. He says he used it on Ge Yao the first time he saw her, and offers to activate it to find whether she is hiding in Ge tribe’s camp. Fang Yuan recognizes the Gu at once, and his heart sinks: he had once stood close to Ge Yao and even embraced her, and the smoke could expose him. He cannot object without looking guilty, so he urges Man Duo to use it. ^{ch. 447}

The smoke turns black and gathers thickly on Fang Yuan in front of the whole banquet. Every eye turns to him. Man Tu takes it only as proof that Chang Shan Yin met Ge Yao and had close contact with her. Ge Guang, unable to stay seated, demands to know whether his uncle met his sister in poison grassland. Fang Yuan swears by the Wolf King’s name that he never met her there, and old Ge tribe leader declares in front of everyone that he believes him. ^{ch. 447}

Pressed further, Fang Yuan offers an account: after waking from his twenty-year sleep, he subdued many poison beard wolves on his way out of the grassland and rested against their fur for warmth on cold nights, so one of them, having eaten Ge Yao, could have passed the mark to him by contact. He invents the story on the spot, and it holds up partly because Ge Guang himself saw him commanding poison beard wolves when he was rescued from the wind wolves. Fang Yuan proposes that everyone ride to Ge tribe’s ranch and check his resting wolf pack to settle the matter. ^{ch. 447}

At the ranch, the chase smoke Gu picks out a few poison beard wolves carrying thicker smoke than Fang Yuan, and old Ge tribe leader takes this as proof his daughter’s killer is among the wolves, bowing to Fang Yuan in gratitude. Ge Guang stays quiet: clearing Fang Yuan of direct suspicion still would not rule him out, since ordering the wolves to eat her corpse after killing her himself would look the same. Man Tu, who never believed Ge Yao was dead, proposes instead that everyone follow the trail deeper into poison grassland to gather more evidence, framing it as clearing Chang Shan Yin’s name. Ge Guang stops him: he has a surer test. His father had marked a set of water path Gu worms with a rank five hints and clues Gu before giving them to Ge Yao, and she knew to leave them intact for her killer if she died. He asks his father to bring the Gu out and activate it, and looks hard at Fang Yuan as he says it. ^{ch. 447}