Chapter 454

The Gu Masters who had been fighting for their lives watch, stunned, as their enemies become allies in moments, and Fang Yuan moves on to another front. His wolves swallow every wolf pack in their path and grow larger for it, leaving ruin and dumbstruck Gu Masters wherever they pass, while Man Hong, Man Hao, and the rest lose color in their faces. ^{ch. 454}

Deliberately avoiding the myriad wolf king’s own battlefield, Fang Yuan circles the camp and takes three more thousand-rank wolf kings, bringing his total to eight, while his hundred-rank wolf kings nearly double to fifty-nine. The repeated subjugations leave him jittery and nauseous, but he endures it and gathers the group back toward the ranch, which can no longer hold them; he cannot say the exact count, only guess that it has passed twelve thousand. ^{ch. 454}

Rather than rush back into the fight, he dismounts and rests, checking the battlefield now and then through the white-eyes wolf’s sight to make sure Ge tribe leader and the elders survive, since their deaths might draw Man tribe into the open. Once he can command the wolves again, though not fully recovered, he rejoins the battle, sending in only his eight thousand-rank wolf kings, since ordinary wolves are too weak against a myriad wolf king, and encircles it so tightly that it cannot break through on either flank. Man Hao and Man Hong marvel at a precision of wolf manipulation his earlier headlong charges never showed them. ^{ch. 454}

Seven of the eight thousand-rank wolf kings cannot fight at full strength under the myriad wolf king’s pressure, yet it still feels trapped like a fly in a web, and it is finally worn down to death, killing one of his thousand-rank wolf kings in its last strike. Watching its huge body fall, the Gu Masters erupt into tearful chants of Wolf King, feeling the name finally earned. Man Hong concedes that annexing Ge tribe is no longer realistic with Fang Yuan present, and Man Hao, who had felt only contempt for him before, mutters the name and feels its weight for the first time. ^{ch. 454}

Ge tribe leader brings the elders to Fang Yuan’s side and bows deeply in thanks. Fang Yuan waves off the praise and steers them toward clearing the field. He leaves the myriad wolf king’s corpse untouched to avoid suspicion, privately regretting that he lacks a rank four wolf enslavement Gu that could have taken it alive, since such Gu are rarely sold in northern plains markets and he has only ever bought rank two and three versions. When a searching Gu Master finds a rank four wolf enslavement Gu on the corpse itself, Ge tribe leader happily gives it to him, and though such a find is likely in a myriad beast king’s body, Fang Yuan is still pleased, calling it his first real stroke of luck in a long while; he declines the celebratory banquet, using the excuse of needing to refine the Gu. ^{ch. 454}

That night, apart from the bonfires’ noise, Fang Yuan finds his primeval sea at ninety percent but his cultivation still stagnant, unadapted to northern plains. He turns instead to a strength of ten jun Gu, the third he has used, which engraves strength path marks on his body before shattering, and judges he has hit a bottleneck; his skeleton, skin, and tendons need strengthening next to hold more power. Fusing his last wolf soul Gu with his hundred man soul proves far harder than before, given how many more wolves he now commands, but after visible strain it succeeds, forming a wolfman soul: grey, wolf-eared, long-haired, tailed, with a longer nose and sharper eyes than his own. The new soul lightens his burden and lets him feel a faint familiarity from the wolf kings’ own souls, an acceptance the hundred man soul never earned; he judges it should let him hold three times as many wolf kings as before. Opportunities like today’s will likely be rare, but he expects to at least double his pack again on the way to the heroes assembly, and looks over his remaining stock of enslavement Gu with anticipation. ^{ch. 454}