— Gu are the very essence of heaven and earth, began the Elder of the Academy, his voice carrying easily through the room. In this world, millions of species exist all around us, deep within the ground, at the heart of plants, inside the bodies of the most ferocious creatures. They are everywhere, and they've always been everywhere.
He paused, letting his gaze move across the attentive faces of his students before continuing.
— The scholars of the past gradually unraveled the mysteries of these entities. Those who, like yourselves, have opened their Aperture can use their Primeval essence to nourish, refine, and manipulate them. Such individuals are called Gu Masters. Every person sitting in this room has crossed that threshold. You are all, as of this moment, Rank 1 Gu Masters.
He paced the length of the stage with the measured confidence of someone who'd delivered these words many times and hadn't yet tired of their weight.
— The path of cultivation has nine ranks. Each rank is divided into four stages: initial, intermediate, advanced, and summit. At present, you stand at Rank 1, initial stage. With diligence and resources, some of you will reach Rank 2 or Rank 3. How far each of you travels will depend, in no small part, on the talent you were born with.
He gestured toward the blackboard behind him, where the figures had been chalked in clean, unsparing columns:
- Grade D: Primeval Sea 20–39%. Regeneration: 2% per hour. Natural ceiling: Rank 2.
- Grade C: Primeval Sea 40–59%. Regeneration: 4% per hour. Natural ceiling: Rank 3.
- Grade B: Primeval Sea 60–79%. Regeneration: 6% per hour. Natural ceiling: Rank 4.
- Grade A: Primeval Sea 80–99%. Regeneration: 8% per hour. Natural ceiling: Rank 5.
— These numbers represent your ceiling, he said, and his tone carried no softness. The path of cultivation is paved with bones. Without resources, without perseverance, without the protection of this clan, most of you will stop one full rank below what's written there. A Grade C who doesn't work is nothing more than a Grade D who got lucky.
He paused again, letting that settle.
— As for Rank 6, they are living legends. This clan has never produced one. We have known Masters of Rank 4 and Rank 5, and those were extraordinary enough.
Without intending to, or perhaps intending to, many of the teenagers turned their eyes to the front row, where Fang Zheng sat with the slightly dazed expression of someone still adjusting to the weight of being looked at.
— Regarding the Rank 5 Masters this clan has produced, the professor continued, his voice taking on the particular warmth of someone recounting something they genuinely revered, our founding ancestor was the first. The second was our fourth-generation Chief, an exceptional man who reached that rank while still young. A man whose potential, had fate allowed it, might have carried him to Rank 6 itself.
He paused, and the pause itself was a kind of tribute.
— Unfortunately, he fell victim to the treacherous attack of a demonic Gu Master known as the Flower Wine Monk, a criminal of the highest order, infamous throughout the region and known by another name I will not repeat here. Three hundred years ago, the Monk came to Qing Mao Mountain seeking to attack the village. The fourth-generation Chief intercepted him. After a fierce battle, the Monk was defeated and threw himself to his knees, begging for mercy. The Chief, a man of generous spirit, was inclined to grant it. It was then that the Monk revealed his true nature, deploying a cowardly and underhanded technique that inflicted a mortal wound. The Chief, in his final act, ended the Monk's life and then succumbed to his own injuries shortly thereafter.
The Elder's voice had taken on the cadence of a story told so many times it had become something between history and scripture. He continued, elaborating the heroic arc of that death with the additions and refinements that three centuries of retelling had applied to it, the nobility of the Chief's final moments, the treachery of the Monk, the sacrifice that had preserved the village.
At the back of the room, Fang Yuan was no longer listening.
His hand moved absently along the edge of his desk while his attention turned inward, drawn back to the night of the awakening ceremony. The communal celebration, the tears, the noise. He'd left all of it behind and gone his own way.
The scent of green bamboo wine was still clear in his memory.
While the village burned with lanterns and the newly awakened celebrated with their families, Fang Yuan had slipped into the bamboo forest alone. Night had settled fully by then, and an almost-full moon sat in a sky of absolute clarity. Under that light, the bamboo stalks rose like columns of pale jade, arrow-straight, luminous, climbing out of lush grass scattered with small white flowers. Dragon Pill Crickets moved through the undergrowth in clusters, their bodies emitting a pulsing incandescent glow, leaving trails of crimson light against the emerald dark of the forest.
Fang Yuan had passed through it without stopping.
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Beyond the bamboo grove, a carpet of white and yellow flowers gave way to the sound of running water. He followed a narrow stream uphill until the rock face rose on either side and the stream disappeared into a crevice worn smooth by centuries of erosion, wide enough for two adults to enter side by side. He settled in a dry section of the passage and opened the jar he'd brought with him. The scent of alcohol bloomed immediately in the confined space, thick and sweet and unmistakable. He set the trap and retreated, leaving the smell to carry itself deeper into the dark.
A few hours later, he returned. The bottle was half empty. He pressed further into the mountain's interior.
The passage narrowed. The light from the entrance disappeared behind him, and the dark became total, the kind of dark that has weight to it, that pushes back. Fang Yuan moved through it without slowing. After roughly a hundred meters, a reddish glow appeared in the distance, faint at first and then steady. Fifty steps further, the passage opened into a cavity of about eighty square meters.
The walls and floor shone a deep rust-red, covered in a dense tangle of dead and withered vines. They lay over each other in intricate layers, dried to the consistency of old parchment, their flowers long since faded to dust. Plant skeletons, patient and still.
Flower Wine Gu and Pocket Rice Grass Gu, he noted, surveying the brown remains. Both had once been capable of producing nectar and rice when fed with Primeval essence. Now they were nothing, dried husks that had outlasted whatever had sustained them. But amid the desolation, nestled on the driest cluster of roots near the base of the wall, lay a small pearlescent silkworm, curled and motionless.
Fang Yuan crouched and picked it up with care.
The Liquor Worm. A rare Rank 1 Gu, coveted by practitioners for reasons that went beyond its immediate utility. It had survived here long after the vines that sheltered it had died, waiting, in the patient way that Gu waited, for someone who knew what it was.
In his previous life, finding this creature had cost him two weeks of increasingly frustrated searching. This time, his knowledge of the terrain and the Worm's habits had compressed that effort into a single night. No wasted movement. No uncertainty. Only the clean efficiency of a man retrieving something he'd already earned.
He rose and moved toward the back of the cavity.
Behind the withered roots, half-hidden in the shadow cast by the red walls, a skeleton sat against the stone, the remains of the Flower Wine Monk, undisturbed for three centuries.
As Fang Yuan stepped closer, a faint blue luminescence activated near the ground. A small insect with a crystal carapace stirred from its dormancy, the Photo-Audio Gu, awakened by his presence. It began to buzz with a low, continuous sound and projected a beam of focused light against the wall behind the skeleton, like a lantern with a lens.
The reddish walls and their tangle of dead vines vanished beneath the image that came to life.
The projection showed the summit of a devastated mountain, rock split and scorched, the air heavy with the aftermath of something catastrophic. A slender Gu Master in a pink robe dominated the scene from a standing position, his posture entirely without urgency, his gaze directed downward. Before him, another man knelt in the dirt, face smeared with grime, body bent forward in complete prostration. From his clothing, unmistakably, the insignia of the Gu Yue clan's chief.
— You have been poisoned by my Single Gate Poison Gu, said the standing figure. His voice, projected by the Gu's recording, was precise and without inflection. Without my counterpart Gu, your insides will liquefy within seven days.
— I'll give anything, gasped the man on his knees. Anything at all. I beg you, spare me. O Flower Wine Monk, I beg you…
— The "Hero of Gu Yue." The Monk's gaze was clinical. Reaching Rank 5 only to end up crawling in the mud. What a disappointment.
— Mr. Flower Wine please… remember my clan's hospitality toward you.
— Hospitality. The Monk's voice didn't change. You poured toxin into my drink at a banquet. How arrogant. To attempt to poison the one they call Flower Wine. If you had simply cooperated with the Orchids, none of this would've been necessary.
The Chief clutched at the hem of the Monk's robe from the dirt.
— Take a Gu Slave! Make me your dog, my life is yours, just spare me…
The Monk regarded him for a moment with those flat, measuring eyes.
— A Rank 5 Gu Slave is too valuable a thing to waste on a creature like you.
He fell silent. Something shifted in his expression, the first sign of anything that wasn't calculation. His eyes widened slightly. And then, in a single violent movement, he drove his foot into the Chief's face. The crack of cartilage was sharp and final. The Chief was thrown backward, blood streaming from his ruined nose, and then, through the blood, a smile spread across his face. The kind of smile that costs something.
— Heh heh... the Moon Shadow Gu, he said, pulling himself upright. Subtle enough to go unnoticed. Rank 4 only, but sufficient to paralyze your essence. Demon. You are finished.
— Die!
The word tore out of the Monk with something that hadn't been in his voice before. He crossed the distance between them in an instant and drove his fist into the Chief's chest. The sound it made was the sound of dry wood breaking, the ribcage collapsing inward, the body folding around the impact. The Chief was thrown like a doll, hit the ground, and lay there producing a wet, terrible sound.
— Are you... mad... we could have... negotiated...
His gaze fixed on something and stopped moving.
The image held for a moment, the Monk standing over the body, the devastated summit, the sky above, and then reset. The projection began its cycle again from the beginning.
The Monk had created this record with deliberate intent. Not to confess, and not to boast, but to ensure the truth survived him. A final act of spite, aimed past his own death at the reputation of the man who had caused it.
Three hundred years of praise for a man who begged for his life on his hands and knees, Fang Yuan thought, casting a cold glance at the skeleton. The Gu Yue clan feeds on lies to maintain its pride, and the truth rots here in the dust where no one thinks to look.
Strength without wisdom is fragile. Wisdom without strength is useless. Monk of Flower Wine, you built this record to break the honor of your enemies. But for me, you leave only tools.
Without a trace of disgust, Fang Yuan turned away from the projection and bent over the corpse. The past was nothing more than fertile ground. Only immediate profit mattered.