Chapter 79

With autumn arriving, Fang Yuan returns to the walled-in path before the giant round boulder blocking Flower Wine Monk’s inheritance, his body now visibly muscled from months of training. He judges that the White Boar Gu’s halt in strength gains three days earlier means he has finally reached one full boar’s strength, the threshold the inheritance demands, and braces to push the boulder again. Bracing in a bow stance, he rolls the boulder up the incline step by step, breaking his prior week’s record of forty five steps and forcing himself on to a full fiftieth step, at which point the pressure suddenly eases as the boulder rolls clear into a straight platform and opens a second secret room. ^{ch. 79}

In the damp soil before a rough rock door at the back of the room, Fang Yuan finds a second Earth Treasury flower and refines the Jade Skin Gu sleeping inside it, his sixth Gu worm and his first purely defensive one. It is a rare, highly rated rank one defensive Gu, but an expensive one to keep, needing two pieces of jade rock every ten days, and unlike Fang Zheng, whose clan leader patron supplies him jade rock freely, Fang Yuan would risk exposing himself by buying it on the open market. ^{ch. 79}

Pushing the heavy rock door open with his boosted strength, Fang Yuan finds a stone forest of more than thirty mu, many times the eleven mu of a standard football field, its walls standing over sixteen meters tall and lined with hollow stone pillars shaped like upside down, branchless trees. A moonblade thrown into one hollow draws out a jade eye stone monkey, which dodges two more moonblades in midair before a third finally kills it. Its stone corpse crumbles into fragments that leave behind two heavy jade green pearl eyes, each weighing at least fifty grams, confirming that the pillars house an underground colony whose eyes can solve his new Gu’s feeding problem. ^{ch. 79}

A single stone pillar alone can hold at least a hundred jade eye stone monkeys, with the forest’s total population left unknown even to Fang Yuan, and the monkeys are agile enough that killing one usually costs him four moonblades. Without the Jade Skin Gu’s defense he judges that even four monkeys attacking at once would kill him, while with it he could survive as many as twelve at a time. The monkeys rarely leave their holes unless approached within ten meters or otherwise provoked, so Fang Yuan resolves to search the stone forest carefully for Flower Wine Monk’s next clue while feeding the Jade Skin Gu on their eyes. ^{ch. 79}