Chapter 71 — He Got the Better Deal Anyway

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After dinner, Wei Zhao cleared the table. In the past, those Lock&Lock containers had always been collected by Uncle Qing first thing the next morning, and at the hotel there were naturally people assigned to wash them. But ever since Wei Zhao arrived, he found the greasy leftovers unpleasant, so he took care of them himself.

"Arrowhead Bro, you're quite the domesticated man—whoever marries you down the road will be lucky indeed! I'm heading upstairs!" Shen Yushu gave Wei Zhao a word of encouragement and went up.

Marry me? Wei Zhao felt a chill of revulsion. His first thought was that this girl had a taste for feminist role-reversal. But he was used to Shen Yushu's quirky antics by now and said nothing.

After scrubbing the food containers and bagging them in a plastic bag, Wei Zhao turned off the dining room light and headed toward his room.

The second five-year deadline was nearly upon him, and it made Wei Zhao somewhat restless. Although cultivating the first layer of the Xuanyuan Dragon-Taming Art had greatly transformed his constitution, making the meridians in his body more solid than before and his reflexes and agility far keener than an ordinary person's—

—in the eyes of ordinary people, that made him an expert among experts. But it only made Wei Zhao more eager. If the first layer was already like this, then the second layer... the third layer—what kind of power would they hold?

And beyond the stone door of that cavern hall, apart from the remaining volumes of the Xuanyuan Dragon-Taming Art, would there be other things as well?

Wei Zhao touched the jade pendant at his chest. This single pendant alone had already brought him endless benefits. If there were other good things behind that stone door... just thinking about it set his blood racing.

Many times, in fact, this pendant alone had saved the lives of both himself and his comrades! Even now, Wei Zhao had yet to fully master and understand the pendant's functions.

Yet the pendant's power was wondrous—it almost seemed to understand his thoughts. Whenever someone within a certain range meant him harm, the pendant could transmit a signal to warn him in advance.

It was precisely because of the pendant's early warnings that Wei Zhao and his comrades had been able to turn danger into safety time and again amid the bullets and gunfire of the primeval forest! That was the pendant's advance-warning function.

Another function was this: if someone he had seen before—someone who had once wished him harm—was within a certain radius of him, then even if that person concealed their killing intent and released no malice toward Wei Zhao for the time being, Wei Zhao could still use the pendant's signal to gradually lock onto that person's presence. The closer he drew to that person, the stronger the signal the pendant transmitted!

Duels between experts often came down in the end to ambush and assassination—strike once, miss, and withdraw at once, never a prolonged entanglement. Those who had crossed blades with Wei Zhao once, even if they escaped under cover, would in the end be inexplicably found and finished off by him.

That was why his teammates called Wei Zhao "Eagle." The eagle—once it fixes its eyes on prey, few can escape.

Of course, the pendant had many more extended functions. It could warn of bad things, and it could warn of good things too, though the signals it emitted differed slightly. Wei Zhao did not know by what means the pendant affected him or how it made him receive its warnings. At least, no one around him had ever been affected in any way.

But as for the meanings of the signals he had puzzled out, so far there were only these three. In other situations, the pendant sometimes emitted other signals too—only Wei Zhao did not know what they meant or what conditions triggered the pendant's response.

Shen Yushu went upstairs, pushed open the door to Gu Mengyao's room, and found her curled up on the bed with her knees drawn in, eating potato chips, an English tutorial book resting on her lap as she annotated it against today's exam paper.

"Too many snacks will stunt your growth, you know." Shen Yushu glanced at Gu Mengyao with a grin, and thinking of what had happened with Wei Zhao, her smile grew even wider.

"What are you laughing at?" Gu Mengyao felt baffled by Shen Yushu's laughter, thoroughly uncomfortable. She looked herself up and down but found nothing amiss—she had just eaten a bag of chips, hadn't she? Was that remark mocking her for having a smaller chest than Shen Yushu's?

"Yaoyao, let me tell you something fun! I've avenged you!" Shen Yushu plopped down slyly on the edge of the bed and snatched the chips from Gu Mengyao's hand.

"Didn't you just say snacks stunt your growth?" Gu Mengyao glared at her. "What revenge? Why so mysterious?"

"Hehe, my development is just fine—my height is quite proportionate, relatively speaking!" Shen Yushu said carelessly, fishing out a chip and popping it into her mouth. "Just now, after you left, I called Arrowhead Bro down to eat! Then I had him sit in the seat you'd been sitting in, and I told him I'd already served his rice for him, and so he just ate it..."

"What's so—wait, you're not trying to say he ate the bowl of rice I left behind, are you?" Gu Mengyao's eyes went wide.

"And he used your chopsticks too!" Shen Yushu said smugly. "Well? This time he's eaten your spit—that counts as avenging you, doesn't it!"

"What a load of nonsense!" Gu Mengyao shook her head at the sound of it. "Doesn't that just mean he got the better of her?"

"Well..." Shen Yushu thought to herself, so her taking his saliva means she lost out, and him taking hers means he gained? But on second thought, that really was how it worked. If it had been any other boy at school, he would probably have been secretly gloating.

"All right, let's not talk about him anymore." Gu Mengyao was feeling a little irritated and did not want to bring up Wei Zhao. "Aren't you going to go over the questions you got wrong on today's English test?"

"Yeah, I'll do it now." Shen Yushu stopped joking around and immediately dug out her test paper from her schoolbag, and she and Gu Mengyao began sorting through it together.

Though neither Gu Mengyao nor Shen Yushu lacked intelligence, intelligence alone was useless without hard work. Their families were well off, yet both girls still worked diligently, especially Gu Mengyao, who did not want anyone saying she had gotten into the elite class of a key high school on the strength of her family background.

After sorting out the English test paper, the two of them reviewed a few other subjects for a while. After all, they were already in their final year of high school, and the college entrance exams were fast approaching. Whether it was Gu Mengyao or Shen Yushu, getting into a top university through their family connections would not have been difficult, but passing the exams on their own was, in the end, something altogether different.

Seeing that it was getting late, Gu Mengyao yawned, and Shen Yushu was feeling sleepy too. The two of them took a hot shower in the bedroom bathroom, lay on the bed watching an episode of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf on an MP4 player, and then went to sleep.

Wei Zhao, however, spent another whole night cultivating the Xuanyuan Dragon Taming Art. The stamina restored by a single night of cultivation was fully equal to several hours of deep sleep.

By the time Wei Zhao opened his eyes and exhaled a breath of turbid air, it was already past five in the morning. He went to the washroom, freshened up, and vowed that this morning he would not watch television no matter what.

Once he had the time, he would buy a laptop and hide away in his room, watching whatever he pleased.

Martial Movement and Universe