Chapter 472

Insulted by Fang Yuan’s contempt, Water Demon Hao Ji Liu unleashes a rank four waterfall Gu, and its rushing water kills or injures more than a thousand wolves in an instant, clearing the ground around him. Yan tribe’s Gu Masters answer together with a rank five wind barrier Gu, and every wild Gu the wolf kings throw at it vanishes without a mark. Yan Cui Er, held hostage on the lakeshore, watches the fight in disbelief: the war she caused has left her only a spectator. ^{ch. 472}

Fang Yuan sneers at both of them. An enslavement path Gu Master’s true strength, he reflects, is the power to fight an army alone: the real Chang Shan Yin once killed rank five Gu Master Ha Tu Gu and wiped out his entire group of valiant generals this way. His own wolf group now numbers thirty thousand and above, with hundred wolf kings, some thousand wolf kings, a night wolf myriad beast king and a young mutated white-eyes wolf among them, not even half what Chang Shan Yin commanded at his peak but enough, he judges, to wipe out two or three Ge tribes. Against it stand only Hao Ji Liu, Yan tribe leader Yan Tian Ji, a dozen or so rank three elders, and a handful of others, some twenty Gu Masters in all. His wolfman soul lets him steer the pack as easily as a wolf king commanding its own, smoother than the hundred man soul ever allowed. ^{ch. 472}

Hao Ji Liu’s charge burns through his primeval essence, and once it drops past half he pulls back into a defensive crouch. Fang Yuan recalls, from his past life, that this same Hao Ji Liu carved out a name for himself and lived actively for eighty-nine years before the real Chang Shan Yin killed him. He judges Hao Ji Liu no longer worth chasing and turns to Yan tribe’s Gu Masters instead, deliberately slowing the wolves’ assault so both sides keep bleeding primeval essence while Yan tribe’s famous defensive line holds. ^{ch. 472}

A letter reaches Ge tribe leader Ge Guang mid-march, laying out why Fang Yuan means to destroy Yan tribe: in his previous life, Chang Shan Yin’s mother was secretly poisoned, and he was ambushed in the poison grassland by Ha Tu Gu’s men, an internal plot inside Chang tribe meant to suppress him. Ge tribe’s old marriage tie to Chang tribe moves Ge Guang to commit fully once he reads it. He brings Ge tribe’s Gu Masters to ring the battlefield rather than join the fighting, so that every Yan tribe elder they block raises the odds of taking Yan tribe’s camp. ^{ch. 472}

Realizing their danger, Yan tribesmen charge together to break out, throwing pill fire, gold silkworm, frost breath, snowball, tornado, thunderclap and fire claw Gu into the wolves. The assault costs Fang Yuan’s wolves heavily, but he watches them die without any change of expression: they are ordinary wild beasts to him, spent without regret and useful only for wearing down the enemy’s strength. As elders cry out in dread and one warns that young master Liu Wen Wu will avenge them, Yan Tian Ji, his voice already hoarse and his primeval essence under half, orders the charge to keep going. ^{ch. 472}