Chapter 66

At Wang Er’s order to get lost, Fang Yuan answers with a cold smirk, firing a moonblade and rushing all four hunters at once; one man fails to dodge and the blade tears off his right wrist and forearm, leaving him screaming on the ground while the other two mortals drop to their knees begging for mercy. Only Wang Er stays standing, snatching up his bow and ordering Fang Yuan back at arrow-point; when a second moonblade flies at him he sidesteps it and looses an arrow that Fang Yuan ducks under, then discards the bow to meet him in a fistfight, his build at least fifty centimetres taller than Fang Yuan’s. ^{ch. 66}

Fang Yuan dodges Wang Er’s first punch and knocks his arm aside, and as Wang Er turns and the sun’s glare blinds him for a moment, Fang Yuan sends a third moonblade along the sunlight’s path. Wang Er senses the danger and turns his head at the last instant, seeming to land safely, until a piece of his skull flies free in a spray of blood and he collapses dead, the moonblade having sheared through only half his head where he flinched away from a clean strike. ^{ch. 66}

The two kneeling hunters realize their leader, Second brother Wang, is dead, and Fang Yuan gets back up largely unhurt aside from a sore shoulder, having lost his footing after firing the blade. He judges Wang Er far stronger than the Mo family’s servant Gao Wan, dangerous enough to beat even a careless rank one upper stage Gu Master, and reasons that Wang Er’s archery, which could rival or even outrange the moonblade’s ten-meter reach, forced him to close the distance and use the sun’s angle to land his moonblade, its power already refined by the Liquor worm to an upper stage Gu Master’s strength, at close range. Looking at the corpse, Fang Yuan reflects that life and death are nature’s law and that in the face of death a person is no different from a pig. ^{ch. 66}