Chapter 68

After the two hunters spend nearly fifteen minutes checking old man Wang’s bamboo-paper maps and pronounce every trap on them accurate, Fang Yuan says he does not believe the old man and kills him with a single moonblade, now powered by upper stage primeval essence strong enough to break bone and cut steel. When old man Wang’s daughter rushes toward her father’s corpse, a second moonblade catches her across the face and kills her as well, and Fang Yuan looks at her body afterward and remarks only that she still looks decent. ^{ch. 68}

Fang Yuan then orders the two surviving hunters to search the house for a hunter’s beast skin map recording the true beast territories and trap locations, promising to spare them if they find it, but their search through the ransacked house turns up nothing. He goes in himself and reasons that old man Wang’s earlier readiness to name where the paper and brush were kept was meant to steer the search away from the true map, and inspecting the firepit he finds a single heavy charcoal lump among the brittle ordinary charcoal and breaks it open to reveal a hidden bamboo tube holding the real beast skin map. The map marks five wild boar sites, two small, two medium and one large, with a red cross inside the large site that never appeared on old man Wang’s bamboo papers, confirming to Fang Yuan that the old man had tried to deceive him. ^{ch. 68}

Fang Yuan reasons that killing Wang Er had already given him cause to demand the map, that old man Wang could not be left alive to bear a grudge over his son’s death, and that his purpose in the killings was solely to obtain a beast skin map he could trust over one that could be falsified. He reflects that everyone in this world is bound up in karma and so no one is wholly innocent, comparing humans slaughtering pigs and big fish eating small fish to conclude that anyone can live and anyone can die. ^{ch. 68}