Concept · Wiki
Gu
蛊
Gu · The World's Foundation
The living creatures the whole world is built on, refined, fed, and used, and the reason humans were able to rise at all.
In the textevery mark is a paragraph; click one to read the line
Written into 73 of 346 published paragraphs (21%) — first at The preface, ¶11, most recently at chapter 5, ¶41.
What they are
The novel states the world's premise in one line, and it is worth quoting in full because everything else grows out of it.
Humans are the spirit of all living things; Gu are the essence of heaven and earth.
Chapter 2, paragraph 8
Gu are creatures. They are refined, held, fed and used, and a person who holds the right ones can do what the rest of the world would call magic.
What they make possible
The clan's entire economy rests on them. The one concrete Gu named so far, the Spring Autumn Cicada, was expensive enough to be worth a massacre.
To refine that cursed Spring Autumn Cicada, you slaughtered tens of millions of innocent lives!
Chapter 1, paragraph 3
And the Gu Yue Village's wealth is the raw material for them.
That spring produces large quantities of Primeval Stone, and it could be called the very foundation of Gu Yue Village.
Chapter 4, paragraph 7
Where a person starts
To use Gu at all, you must first be able to hold them, which is what the Aperture Opening Ceremony decides.
Right now, my primeval sea is not yet open; I have not even stepped onto the cultivation path of a Gu Master.
Chapter 2, paragraph 18
Why they matter
Every wiki can define Gu. This one can show you the sentence where the novel defines them, and where the reader learns that in this world, insects are what people are made of, what they kill for, and what they become.