Chapter 71

By the middle of June, Fang Yuan wrestles down another badly wounded wild boar on a riverbank, and once its charges weaken he lifts it bodily over his head and hurls it onto a rock, killing it and reflecting that his strength can now match a boar’s own, though not yet let him overpower one directly, since the White Boar Gu’s strengthening effect tops out at a boar’s own strength. ^{ch. 71}

He feeds the boar’s meat to the White Boar Gu again, keeps its teeth, and leaves the rest of the carcass for scavengers to erase the wounds, since the injuries Fang Yuan leaves no longer resemble moonblade cuts; back in his secret cave he tries to push aside the giant rock blocking the passage to the Flower Wine Monk’s strength inheritance, and though it does not budge, he judges from his own effort that it weighs some five to six boars, more than his current strength can move. ^{ch. 71}

With no storage Gu to carry the beast skin map, Fang Yuan sits and memorizes it from the bamboo tube each day, reflecting that a Bookworm would let him recall it perfectly and recalling that he owned one for sixty years in his previous life, though he judges Bookworms too rare to obtain now and lets the wish go. ^{ch. 71}

Comparing himself to his previous life, Fang Yuan recalls that at this same point he was still rank one initial stage while Fang Zheng, Chi Cheng and Mo Bei had already reached upper stage, but this time, aided by the Liquor worm and his prior life’s cultivating experience, he has kept pace with his C grade talent against classmates of A and B grade. He notes that Fang Zheng, Mo Bei and Chi Cheng are nonetheless beginning to close his lead, helped along by his own extortion scheme, which pushed his classmates toward physical training under their elders at the cost of their cultivation time, and by the hours he has spent hunting with the White Boar Gu instead of advancing his own rank. ^{ch. 71}

He decides not to contest the academy’s reward of thirty primeval stones for whoever reaches upper stage first, since his real purpose in training the White Boar Gu instead is to stay unnoticed and protect his chances at the Flower Wine Monk’s strength inheritance rather than chase the academy’s rewards. Studying the map again, Fang Yuan reasons that the red cross marks a forbidden territory, likely home to a wild boar king, that old man Wang deliberately left off the false bamboo papers so that even Fang Yuan’s death there would spare him the need to take revenge himself, though the meaning of three further isolated red circles on the map remains a mystery he cannot solve from a distance. ^{ch. 71}