Quickly get lost
Fang Yuan scouts the forest for wild boar, aware that Gu Masters usually need at least rank three to safely wander the wilds alone, since even rank three and rank four Gu Masters die there, while the ground near the village stays safer for a rank one middle stage cultivator like him thanks to the clan’s periodic clearing. Coming up empty after a long search, he leaves the forest for the mountain foot instead, recalling that Qing Mao Mountain holds three clan villages, the Xiong family on the fore mountain, Gu Yue village at the mountain waist, and the Bai family at the back mountain waterfall, with tens of small mortal villages at the foot that the three clans rule from behind the scenes and draw servants from, never Gu Masters, since the clans favor bloodline over talent and only occasionally take in outsiders who marry into the clan, as his previous servant Shen Cui hopes to do. ch. 65
After thirty minutes he sees smoke rising and a village beside a small river, then picks up a wild boar’s tracks on the mountain path and gives chase, passing a group of grazing deer he leaves alone and a small beehive he judges too small to hold a Gu. He finds the boar already fallen into a hunter’s pit, pierced by a sharpened bamboo stake at the bottom and, by the blood pooled beneath it, trapped for at least fifteen minutes though still struggling; he kills it with a single moonblade to the neck, reflecting that had he fallen into such a trap himself he would have died within half a quarter of an hour, and resolves to find an old hunter who can tell him where the traps and the wild beasts’ territories lie. ch. 65
Four young hunters emerge from the forest, praising their leader as the best hunter in the village and crediting his family’s Old Wang as the hunting king of the whole region, while one of them, Er Gou Dan, teases him about marrying the leader’s sister; the hunter answers only that he means to leave Qing Mao Mountain one day and see the world. Spotting Fang Yuan beside the dead boar, the hunter, addressed by the others as Second brother Wang and named Wang Er, scowls and shouts at him to get lost for taking advantage of him. ch. 65
