Thunder Crown Wolf

The thunder crown wolf crouches still as a sculpture in the rearmost part of the packs while they rush the walls of Gu Yue village. It is tall and slim with strong limbs, its whole body covered in eerie blue scales, tufts of golden wolf fur on its claws and tail, and the fur on its head stiff and upraised into a towering crown. Around ten figures fly out of the village at it, all of them elders, with clan leader Gu Yue Bo in front. ^{ch. 163}

Clan elders led by Gu Yue Bo close in on the thunder crown wolf and strike it with a purple moonblade, wounding its right foreleg; a rank four Berserk Gu doubles its strength, speed, and agility, and a healing Gu worm on its body keeps mending its wounds as the fight drags on. It tears one elder’s skull in two when its speed doubles, and six clan elders are already lost before its Berserk Gu takes hold and a swipe of its right claw turns another elder to meat mush. Elders slow it with Wind Snare Gu and Swamp Gu, then bind it in an iron-chain snake net that roots to the ground, a hold its struggling is expected to break within five or six minutes. ^{ch. 164}

The thunder crown wolf breaks the iron-chain snake net, and the Blood Guillotine swarm the clan has fed with its own Gu Masters engulfs it, breaks through its armor, and drinks until almost half its blood is gone. The wolf escapes with its speed under a tenth of normal, and the lightning wolves it commands lose their fighting spirit as it runs. The wolf den holds three thunder crown wolves, all myriad beast kings, each with its own packs of tens of thousands of lightning wolves. Gu Yue Bo leads the seven elders still able to fight after the fleeing wolf, but the Bai clan, having already killed a different thunder crown wolf earlier in the wolf tide, has blocked this one inside a valley to contest the kill. The thunder crown wolf’s body holds many Gu worms, some of them rank four, and its blood, bone, eye, and fur are all precious refinement material the Gu Yue clan will not give up. ^{ch. 165}

With its blood loss near fatal, the thunder crown wolf turns to fight Fang Yuan as he closes in, but Fang Yuan veers off and Bai Ning Bing’s iceblade storm swallows the valley instead, killing it and mincing its exposed skeleton into bone matter as its Gu worms flee the dying body. Soon after, a wolf howl brings fresh lightning wolves down on the valley behind a mountain-like giant wolf, and the clan elders shout that there is a fourth thunder crown wolf. ^{ch. 167}

Clan elders count three thunder crown wolves reported in total, one already blamed for wiping out Xiong village, and debate whether the injured beast now approaching Gu Yue and Bai clan forces is that same wolf. The elders take heart at the beast’s shrivelled forelegs and kangaroo-like gait, the Bai clan leader then doubts it is a thunder crown wolf at all, and Fang Yuan names it a lightning lycan, a far smarter wolf type that looks like a thunder crown wolf while commanding the packs with intelligence no less than men. ^{ch. 168}

Fang Yuan judges the lightning lycan more cunning and harder to handle than the thunder crown wolf, doubting Bai clan or Gu Yue clan alone can withstand it without a rank five expert or an alliance between the two clans. ^{ch. 170}

Gu Yue Chi Lian, who follows Gu Yue Bo in assaulting the thunder crown wolf, is killed by the lightning lycan in the same chase. Gu Yue Yao Ji breaks her own arm to avoid joining the chase after the thunder crown wolf, which keeps her alive. As the wolf packs become self-sufficient and grow stronger over the next few years, new hundred beast kings appear as bold lightning wolves, thousand beast kings as frenzy lightning wolves, and myriad beast kings as thunder crown wolves. ^{ch. 171}