Now that Bai Ning Bing was outside the question of where she would actually start came to mind.
First off, Bai Ning Bing thought that she would try the members of the Beggar Sect. Shang Xin Ci had probably already tried herself, but Bai Ning Bing could be a lot more... persuasive than that girl could be.
She found a hobo lying down near the street soon enough (there was no shortage of such people in Shang Clan City) and went over.
"You. Get up," she barked.
"Lady, I already have a boyfriend," the man responded in a daze before he seemed to wake up. "Wait, no, I mean, I already have a girlfriend."
Bai Ning Bing was not in the mood and dropped an icicle dagger right near his neck. Even if the torn hat he was wearing partially covered his face, there was no way he wouldn't notice the cold as it seeped through his skin. He took off his hat and sat up, looking up at Bai Ning Bing who had a threatening look on her face.
There was no mistaking the letter '4' on her belt, nor the cold look in her eyes.
"Ah, Fairy, sorry about that. You want this spot?"
"No, I don't want the spot. I want to know where Fang Yuan is," she said. "Or... what was he called again? The Insane Reverend?"
"Oh, Supreme Elder? I haven't heard of him in a few weeks. I was actually wondering what was going on, because up until now we'd been promised a few primeval stones if we didn't get anything, but I've like... got nothin' and there hasn't been a meeting lately neither," he said.
"And no one else has seen him?" Bai Ning Bing asked, frowning.
"No," the man said, shaking his head. "At least not as far as I know."
With that target exhausted, Bai Ning Bing went to the next area that she thought Fang Yuan might frequent: the refinement shops located around the city. Shang Xin Ci had already been to a few of them, but Bai Ning Bing knew the ones that Fang Yuan tended to trust more.
She even went to the shop of Zhou Quan whom Fang Yuan had coerced into joining the Beggar Sect, yet he too had not seen him.
"No, I haven't heard of Fang Yuan for some time," he said, not that he seemed too disappointed by this fact.
Fang Yuan's usual restaurants had no traces of him. Neither did the gambling dens. Just to be thorough Bai Ning Bing even visited the brothels. None of them had heard of him. That evening, she returned empty-handed.
Bai Ning Bing didn't stop searching. Shang Clan City was large, and so she kept this up for about three days, wandering from one corner of the city to another looking for Fang Yuan.
When this turned up nothing, she moved on to her backup plan.
She purchased a Flash of Inspiration Gu, wondering if there was some kind of inspiration that could point to Fang Yuan's whereabouts which she had missed.
When it came to clues, she had very little. A message had come from Fang Zheng addressed to Fang Yuan a few days ago and mentioned little other than an update regarding New Gu Yue Village. That seemed to imply that Fang Yuan hadn't gone back there. If Fang Yuan had chosen to run away and start a new life under a new identity, he most certainly would've gone to Bei Gu Mountain to take everything not nailed down and then ran off.
Despite paying a hefty sum for this, it ended up telling her nothing after she used it. She had just ended up wasting the gu worm in question.
She had already tried several other reconnaissance-type gu worms in order to try to find Fang Yuan. Many of his articles were still in his room, indicating that he had probably intended to come back at some point. Yet Fang Yuan was still not there. And all of these gu could detect nothing.
"Its range of detection is quite large," Bai Ning Bing was assured by the shopkeeper. "So if you cannot find him even with this kind of gu, then he is likely not within Shang Clan City."
The evidence seemed to be incontrovertible.
Fang Yuan was not in the city.
How could this be, though? To have slipped through the fingers of the Shang Clan was nigh on impossible. Even Shang Yan Fei was somewhat perplexed. The departure of a Rank 5 Gu Master was just as important, if not more, than one walking into the city. And so the fact that Fang Yuan had vanished was extremely perplexing.
There was only one group of people who could have done something like that, and those were the Shang Clan Supreme Elders. Shang Yan Fei did not have regular contact with them unless there was something going on, but one of them would drop by asking for a summary of what was going on in the city about once a month. When Shang Yan Fei mentioned the issue with Fang Yuan, they had no answer and treated this as a worthless question.
With that, given more than a month had passed, even Bai Ning Bing finally could no longer sit still. It really did look like something had either happened to Fang Yuan, or he had wandered off on his own for some reason, leaving all of his valuables behind.
Given the fact no mention of him was heard from any other city, and the fact that Bai Ning Bing believed that someone like Fang Yuan could not go for longer than five minutes without doing something devious and deceptive, and knowing that there were no new Rank 5 Gu Masters reported anywhere along the Southern Border of note, she decided she had no choice but to go ahead and try and look for him.
"So you are finally leaving..." Shang Xin Ci asked, noting that Bai Ning Bing was going to set out to go and find Fang Yuan.
"Yes, I am," Bai Ning Bing said. "At this point I must."
Inwardly, she was cursing Fang Yuan, as their fates were tied together because of the Poison Vow Gu, and also because of the fact that he held the Yang Rotation Gu - the entire reason she was following him in the first place. So if he was not around, she couldn't just very well sit around twiddling her thumbs, hoping that he would show up.
Not to mention, an absence for so long could be interpreted as a sign that he was in danger, and would invoke the regulations placed upon her by the Poison Vow Gu to head towards his aid.
"Fang Yuan, you..." Bai Ning Bing muttered under her breath, thinking of several things that she wanted to say to Fang Yuan but couldn't.
That would have to wait until she happened to find him.
The White Form Immortal Snake required Rank 5 primeval essence to use. Although it was a Water Path Gu worm, Bai Ning Bing's Northern Dark Ice Soul Physique somewhat helped with boosting the effect her primeval essence had on it, even so, she still could not move it like she would've liked.
She was Rank 4 Upper Stage and had been holding off on advancing further until she could find a solution to her extreme physique. But even if she had been at Rank 4 Peak Stage, she would still have found piloting the White Form Immortal Snake for a long distance difficult. There was a reason why she tended to outsource that to Fang Yuan.
A single drop of her primeval essence was only about one-fourth as potent as Rank 5 Initial Stage immortal essence. That was a quantitative deficit, but there was also a qualitative one, in that the dragon-snake would not respond as well as it should have. In other words, her primeval essence was essentially cut to one-fourth effectiveness, and controlling her primeval essence so she didn't run out of it was still something that she had to adjust to, as there had been a long time when that was never an issue for her. She had also not really been put up against any fights since coming to Shang Clan City which had pushed her to a limit where she had to care about such things.
Even while consuming primeval stones while traveling, she was forced to land a few hours after leaving Shang Clan City despite not running into any major obstacles.