Life hanging on a grass rope
The next morning in the academy, the elder tells the students to choose their second Gu worm to pair with their vital Gu, and while the others weigh their options, Fang Yuan sleeps through the lecture after a night spent cultivating his aperture, prompting the class to note that he already has his second Gu worm, the Liquor worm pulled from gambling rocks, which stirs both admiration and envy, including from Chi Cheng, a family branch’s own heir whose grandfather had tried and failed to procure him a Liquor worm, while Fang Zheng watches his brother and privately vows to surpass him. ch. 61
That night Fang Yuan returns to the secret cave with a bell-collared wild rabbit and a grass rope of his own weaving, and after finding the rock powder he had scattered at both entrances undisturbed and only his own footprint at the rock crack, he spends an hour weaving the grass rope, sends the rabbit down the passage on it, and once the rope stops moving hauls it back unharmed and kills it on the spot so it cannot lead anyone else back to the cave. ch. 61
Judging that stretch of the passage safe, he goes in himself, the tunnel widening as he descends until he can stand fully upright after more than fifty steps and swing his arms freely after a hundred, and over roughly two hours he covers its full three hundred meters without a detection Gu to warn him, sweating heavily by the time he reaches the end. ch. 61
There the tunnel stops at a huge smooth-faced rock blocking the way entirely, and Fang Yuan reasons that Flower Wine Monk built the passage with a Thousand Li Earthwolf Spider and that age alone collapsed this stretch, though he cannot rule out a deliberate barrier; he weighs that grinding through with the Moonlight Gu alone would take at least a year or two, while pick and hammer would risk the sound giving him away and, if discovered, cost him his life. ch. 61
