Chapter 495

The water wolf den holds four thousand water wolves, and when its home is invaded, the group fights back regardless of its size. The resistance stalls Fang Yuan’s wolves until he sounds his wolf howl Gu and commits three reinforcing groups, after which the wild water wolves are quickly overwhelmed. ^{ch. 495}

Chai tribe abandons its claim on the beetles and withdraws from crescent lake entirely, over one elder’s hope that Chang Shan Yin might not want them. Zhong tribe’s investigative Gu Master later reports to Zhong Fei You that Chang Shan Yin recruited three thousand of the wild den’s four thousand water wolves while losing only three hundred of his own, and that all three beetles went to Chang Shan Yin as well. The loss ratio unsettles Zhong tribe’s leadership. Zhong Fei You downplays it, crediting the wild wolves’ quick defeat to their leader being only a thousand beast king against Chang Shan Yin’s myriad beast king, but concedes that even Zhong tribe united with Chai tribe could not stand against him. Despite the marriage ties between the two tribes, he sets the defeat aside for a later reckoning through Liu Wen Wu, noting that northern plains still holds three enslavement masters stronger than Chang Shan Yin, before both tribes depart. ^{ch. 495}

Nine days on, Fang Yuan brings the enlarged wolf group back to Ge tribe camp. Ge Guang, sensing what reads as a rank four peak stage aura, is startled and pleased, believing his supreme elder’s cultivation has recovered to the level Chang Shan Yin held before the battle with Ha Tu Gu that left him near death and in hibernation. In fact Fang Yuan’s first aperture already stands at rank five peak stage, showing only as rank five initial stage under northern plains’ suppression, and the rank four peak reading Ge Guang senses comes from a breath concealment Gu laid over it. His second aperture, formed in northern plains and so untouched by that suppression, still openly shows rank three peak stage. He keeps his true strength hidden to preserve it as a reserve and let his apparent strength climb without raising suspicion. ^{ch. 495}

Ge tribe camp is expanding under heavy slave labor. Ge Guang laments the shortage of slavery Gu, noting that even without it a single Gu Master rarely holds more than five ordinary slaves, and normally only one slave Gu Master, given the greater soul burden of controlling a captured Gu Master directly. Fang Yuan, who could readily supply slavery Gu, withholds it rather than expose more of what he holds, since Ge tribe serves him only as one piece among his plans. He tells Ge Guang to have the tribe feed the wolf group while he withdraws to cultivate, hands over the resources gathered from the recent wolf hunting to ease that burden, and keeps the contents of the three black skin fat armor beetles for himself. ^{ch. 495}

In seclusion, Fang Yuan works to raise his wolfman soul to the thousand man soul level his overall soul has already reached, and continues strengthening his body with jun strength Gu. Between sessions he examines the grey-white stone slabs taken from the beetles, their surfaces covered in black ink lines that read partly as script and partly as drawn scenery. Legend traces slabs like these to the immemorial era, when Ren Zu’s ninth daughter, Carefree Wisdom Heart, went to the Qian Kun Crystal Wall to save wisdom Gu, a wall said to hold a book mountain where an ink waterfall fed a literature spring whose splashing droplets formed words, the origin of the hundred clan writing system. When the crystal wall later broke, it scattered into slabs like these, and legend holds that gathering every one of them would restore the wall and reopen the book mountain to whoever did it. Many Gu Masters, Gu Immortals and even Immortal or Demon Venerables have sought them across history, which has produced large numbers of convincing fakes; even treasure yellow heaven’s owner, Daoist Countless Treasures, history’s most accomplished appraiser, could only identify them with seventy to eighty percent accuracy, and Thieving Heaven Demon Venerable himself once made deliberately convincing counterfeits to scam other Gu Immortals. Fang Yuan has no interest in the full restoration, since even a rank nine Gu Venerable never managed it, and appraises the slabs only to relax, drawing on an eye he trained, and fakes he once made and sold, in his previous life. One slab he had already judged fake reacts when he feeds it his primeval essence: its ink lines begin to move. ^{ch. 495}