Garbage teammate
Thrown clear by the wild boar king’s swing, Fang Yuan crashes through a tree canopy before landing on the snow largely unhurt thanks to his Jade Skin Gu, then stands and secretly checks that no other Gu Master witnessed the moment before choosing to feign a limp and stagger toward the fight with dirt and snow smeared over him. At the battlefield’s edge, Gu Yue Kong Jing calls him a scum responsible for Hua Xin’s death, and Fang Yuan protests that he did not mean it and could not hold on any longer. ch. 95
With the wild boar king’s fresh injuries mounting under the red lava python’s coils, Jiao San has Kong Jing throw a knife scale web woven with blades to entangle it, and calls for Fang Yuan to grab the other end, but Fang Yuan claims his injured leg cannot walk, forcing Kong Jing to cast the web alone. Once the web catches, Fang Yuan announces he will help and fires a volley of moonblades that shreds the steel threads, letting the struggling wild boar king tear the web apart and escape its hold, leaving Kong Jing and another female Gu Master stunned and furious while Fang Yuan insists he only meant to help. Jiao San curses him as garbage for a teammate and orders him to do nothing and wait aside, and Fang Yuan obediently steps back, snickering where no one can see. ch. 95
Jiao San finally releases his trump card, a poisonous yellow cloud from his nostrils that swallows both him and the wild boar king from view, and when Fang Yuan asks the remaining female Gu Master to heal his leg, she snaps that her sister is dead while his leg is merely hurt and tells him to go die instead. Weighing whether to kill the weakened group there and then, Fang Yuan judges that any Gu Master who witnessed him killing a clansman would doom him to execution and seven days and seven nights of torture, and that death is not frightening but the risk is not worth so small a group, so he lets the chance pass even as he regrets that the sickly snake group’s coming weakness will cost him this opportunity. ch. 95
Five minutes later the wild boar king collapses and the poison cloud clears, leaving Jiao San pale and drained of primeval essence, and he orders the group to dissect the corpse quickly before retreating with their spoils. As they cut into the still-warm carcass, a lightning wolf pack appears in the darkness, and Jiao San abandons the others to flee with Kong Jing close behind, both faces gone white with fear. ch. 95
Calculating that Jiao San’s group has no speed Gu and too little primeval essence left to outrun the wolves, Fang Yuan strikes the dazed remaining female Gu Master unconscious, drags her into the wild boar king’s cut-open stomach, and uses her body to seal the opening while he hides inside, reasoning that even discovery would leave him facing only about five wolves at most by his own experience. Inside the carcass, he listens to the wolves chewing outside and spends the waiting time drawing on his primeval stones to recover essence rather than let the moment go to waste. ch. 95
