Seeing Wisdom Gu Again
Alone once Tai Bai Yun Sheng leaves, Fang Yuan weighs how to use his senior brother rather than kill him for his Gu and his rank six time path aperture, since keeping him serves better. Tai Bai Yun Sheng is worth using: a former healing Gu Master, now ranked six on the time path with a high grade blessed land and flight. He is also easy to control. Fang Yuan’s earlier soul search laid his life bare. Tai Bai Yun Sheng is kind-hearted and repays favors, and after repeated help in True Yang Building, rescue from the wind veil of assimilation and the return of his two Immortal Gu, he trusts Fang Yuan completely. ch. 652
That trust shows in his choice of seat, closest to Fang Yuan though most people keep their distance from his huge, ugly form. It traces to guilt over Gao Yang and Zhu Zai, whose deaths Tai Bai Yun Sheng caused when survival instinct overrode him, guilt that once drove him to rush his own ascension meaning to die. Giant Sun’s will helped him become a Gu Immortal before he fell unconscious. Fang Yuan then woke him inside Eighty-Eight True Yang Building and pressed the claim that they shared a master, striking his weakest point, before giving him fellow apprentices and an organisation that offered belonging. Their shared hardships there sealed his trust completely, and Fang Yuan credits that trust partly to Mo Yao’s interference with his own mind. ch. 652
Fang Yuan reasons that this guilt will make Tai Bai Yun Sheng repay him many times over, both to honor the debt and to prove to himself he is good, a pattern he likens to compensation drawn from Earth psychology. Knowing this, he had already returned Man as Before Gu and Landscape as Before Gu to him. The return came at the moment of rescue. He already owns too many Immortal Gu to feed cheaply, and with his aperture dead and producing nothing, he would rather spend Tai Bai Yun Sheng’s own green grape immortal essence than his own remaining nineteen beads. ch. 652
Fang Yuan admits to himself that becoming a zombie has truly dulled his thinking, and gives up trying to solve the feeding problem alone. He summons Little Hu Immortal and asks where wisdom Gu has gone. She senses it sleeping deep underground in a rockman cave since he brought it here, and he orders her to take him there. ch. 652
The cave is large enough for Fang Yuan to move freely. Wisdom Gu shines with five colored light on sensing him. Fang Yuan reminds it that he helped it escape and saved its life, and that their earlier agreement is now due. After a silent pause it rises and summons the light of wisdom, a many colored sphere that engulfs them both, and Fang Yuan’s thoughts at once collide at lightning speed. ch. 652
Little Hu Immortal, dazzled, begins to fade within a few breaths, since though formed from obsession fused with heavenly power she remains bound by wisdom Gu’s restriction. Fang Yuan wakes her with a touch and sends her off. She vanishes rather than disobey. ch. 652
Alone in the halo, Fang Yuan checks on Mo Yao’s will, still suppressed inside his aperture. It remains unaffected by the light of wisdom. He had confirmed this once before, in the wind veil of assimilation, but confirming it again finally settles his mind. ch. 652
Becoming a zombie has slowed his own thoughts, and though the light of wisdom speeds their collisions, it would turn an ordinary zombie briefly clever and then an idiot. Fang Yuan is spared this by wills stored in his mind, formed earlier from wisdom path Gu worms bought to deal with Mo Yao. Those Gu include special will Gu, deliberate will Gu and sharp intent Gu, and their wills had already helped him through the end of his northern plains journey. With his own brain unable to keep pace, he draws on these instead. Under the light they melt and shrink like snow in sunlight, bringing flashes of insight and old memories back into vivid focus. Before he has even finished thinking it through, Fang Yuan already has many different ideas for solving his problem. ch. 652
