A battle in the poison grassland between Chang tribe's Wolf King Chang Shan Yin with his wolf packs and his enemy Ha Tu Gu with a gang of horse bandits, known from the battlefield it left and the grassland's talk about it.
The engagement reaches a reader in retrospect, through the ground it was fought on. Skeletons of humans and of wolves lie on the rotting grassland under thick purple fog, with deep pits and trenches that poisonous grass has already outgrown, and Ge Yao reads the traces as a fierce battle at least twenty years old. ch. 430
Grassland talk names the two who fought it. Chang tribe nurtured the enslavement path Gu Master they call Wolf King heavily, and the talk credits Chang Shan Yin with moving like the wind and attacking like the rain, with altering his battle formations as he wished, and with being a righteous figure extremely filial to his mother. The errand that took him in was that mother’s poisoning, a unique poison curable only by the snow wash Gu inside the spiraea, for which he ignored all opposition and ventured into poison grassland. The same talk calls the affair a huge scheme from start to end, laid by his enemy Ha Tu Gu, who wanted the Wolf King dead. ch. 430
The grudge
Chang Shan Yin was a rank four peak stage Gu Master, and Ha Tu Gu a rank five initial stage Gu Master who also led a large band of subordinates. The two were childhood friends who fell in love with the same woman, and when she chose Chang Shan Yin, Ha Tu Gu was filled with a jealous rage that left an unceasing hostility between them, a hatred narration says could only be washed away with the blood of the other. The poisoning of Chang Shan Yin’s mother is Ha Tu Gu’s, and the search for snow wash Gu is what took the wolf packs deep into the poisonous plains. ch. 431
The ambush
Chang Shan Yin set up an ambush on the plains, and when Ha Tu Gu brought his gang of bandits large groups of wolves attacked from all directions. It was a bitter fight to the death that lasted until the sun went down. Both forces were spent in it: the wolves were all killed, and the horse bandits were either killed or fled. So were both men, Chang Shan Yin at his limits and Ha Tu Gu’s primeval essence exhausted, and with nothing left to cast they wrestled together with bare hands, biting with their teeth, clawing with their hands and making use of everything in their surroundings, until they collapsed two or three steps apart with barely enough strength to breathe. Narration holds them there as a righteous hero and a demonic devil, both as fragile as a child, able to do nothing but gasp for air and stare at each other. The recovery rate of a rank five Gu Master’s primeval essence is the quicker of the two, and Ha Tu Gu’s came back first. ch. 431
Outcome
The grassland’s own account, in the talk Ge Yao remembers from her father’s tent, has Ha Tu Gu and all of the bandits with him killed and a huge pest eliminated for the grassland, and it has Wolf King Chang Shan Yin losing his life in the poison grassland. ch. 430 Narration keeps the first half of that and not the second. Chang Shan Yin took the poisonous bone spear Ha Tu Gu had cast at him and stabbed it into Ha Tu Gu’s eyes, ending the life of his mortal enemy, and narration calls the fight his win. The same spear’s poison had already spread through his whole body, so he spent the primeval essence he had just recovered on wolf fetus burial Gu, which is made from a hundred and eight different species of pregnant female wolves and whose specialty is to save a life so long as one breath is left, drilled into the ground and fell asleep. ch. 431 Ha Tu Gu’s rank five core Gu stayed on the ground he died on: the battle bone wheel became a wild Gu after his death and ate white bones for food, and it was still there to be met twenty years later. ch. 430
Chronicle
Connections(9)
0 later connections are veiled.