Chapter 73

A guard reports to the academy elder that Fang Yuan spared Fang Zheng, Chi Cheng, and Mo Bei during his extortion, taking no primeval stones from any of them. The academy elder had been ready to punish Fang Yuan for threatening to seize the thirty primeval stones Fang Zheng had just won. Working through the report, he reasons that sparing all three, each tied to a different faction within the clan, means Fang Yuan is finally bowing to the clan’s system. Privately he concludes that a fifteen year old cannot forever resist the clan, and that Fang Yuan will settle naturally into his place once he accepts it. ^{ch. 73}

Three days later the mid-year exam begins, sending students into the forest to trap and kill wild boars. Gu Yue Chi Cheng escapes a falling tree only by leaping three meters clear with his Dragonpill Cricket Gu, while Gu Yue Mo Bei needs half an hour of moonblade strikes before his boar collapses from blood loss. Covered in mud and sweat, Mo Bei reflects that fighting a living wild boar is nothing like sparring against wooden and grass practice puppets. ^{ch. 73}

At the elders’ tent on a hidden hill, a scout reports no casualties among the students after a full afternoon of hunting, a result the academy elder privately credits to Fang Yuan’s earlier extortion having pushed his classmates into hard physical training. Asked for the standings, the scout names Fang Yuan first with eight boars, ahead of Chi Cheng’s three and five each for Fang Zheng and Mo Bei. The elders marvel that a C grade talent is outpacing three students of A and B grade, though they predict his lead will not last since his primeval essence cannot recover as fast as theirs. The academy elder orders the hidden Gu Masters, dozens of rank two among them with rank three clan elders in reserve, to keep especially close watch over Fang Zheng, Chi Cheng, and Mo Bei. ^{ch. 73}

By sunset Fang Yuan has killed his twenty third boar of the day, and judges that the bag he carries will take first place on its own, with a second bag of teeth he buried the previous night still waiting to be retrieved. With the exam already won, he decides to spend his remaining time investigating one of the three red circles marked on old man Wang’s beast skin map, a spot only five to six hundred meters away rather than the fifteen minute walk back to his buried cache. He slips away from the hunt and reaches the marked location within seven minutes, finds a treehouse hidden in the branches of a huge tree, and climbs inside, his expression changing at what he sees. ^{ch. 73}