Blood Guillotine Gu

Fang Yuan watches fingertip-sized red locust-like Gu descend on the Gu Yue clan square during the wolf tide on Qing Mao Mountain, feed on volunteering Gu Masters, then surge out as a red tornado against the lightning wolves. He recognizes the swarm as Blood Guillotine. ^{ch. 165}

Appearance

Each worm is about fingertip size, shaped like a locust, with a scary face, and red all over. The group flies as a red cloud or a red tornado. ^{ch. 165}

Form and rank

Blood Guillotine is a rank five Gu. Each worm is about fingertip size, locust-shaped, red all over, with a scary face, and the group flies as a red cloud or tornado. ^{ch. 165}

Its strength scales hard with numbers. At peak it can engulf skies and lands and outmatch many rank six Gu; at one or two individuals it is worse than a rank three Gu. Without a user it can only attack head on, which leaves it weak against wide area countermeasures such as the thunder crown wolf’s rank four Gu. ^{ch. 165}

Effect

Usability and feeding are fused into one. The swarm enters living bodies, drains blood, and in a few breaths multiplies from one into many. Beast blood can be sucked dry for killing, but only a Gu Master’s origin blood that contains primeval essence lets the Gu multiply. When hungry and starved of that food, the worms eat each other and shrink the group to keep moving. ^{ch. 165}

When Blood Guillotine Gu advances into the rank six demonic Gu Blood Deity, that Blood Deity ranks 7th among the Top Ten Great Demonic Gu. ^{ch. 165} Much later, Fang Yuan still treats rank five blood guillotine Gu as the familiar example of a Gu that combines use and nurturing, and as a type with a vile reputation. ^{ch. 663}

Feeding

Feeding is the same act as combat use: Gu Master lives, bodies, and life-bound origin blood with primeval essence. Clan memorials say the first generation ancestor left these Gu and that they require Gu Masters’ lives before they will defend the clan. ^{ch. 165}

Clan defense on Qing Mao Mountain

During the thunder crown wolf crisis, Gu Masters sit on the village square and willingly let the swarm feed, leaving white bones once the Gu are satisfied and swell to tens of thousands. The swarm then tears through ordinary lightning wolves, struggles against the thunder crown wolf’s lightning, drills under its armor to suck blood, and finally thins out and flies a circuit around the village before vanishing into the clouds. The last prior crisis that used this defense was about two hundred years earlier; the first generation clan head had been dead for at least a thousand years. ^{ch. 165}

The summoning ritual sits only in the clan’s secret records, not in the falsified official history shown to outsiders. ^{ch. 180}

Path

Qing Mao Mountain chapters show Blood Guillotine as a rank five combat swarm without naming a cultivation path for it.

Origin under Blood Sea Ancestor

First gen Gu Yue’s use

Blood Deity naming later