Chapter 2920 — A Disciple of the Dark Night Palace; And Liu Tianli Picked Up a Cigarette

Liu Tianli recoiled as though a scorpion had stung him. In a panic he flung the cigarette to the floor and stamped it out, as if facing a mortal foe.

"I've been played for a fool—played for a fool!" Liu Tianli shook his hand and went back to turning the whole affair over in his mind. How had he suddenly lost his wits like that? How could he have believed what President Lang told him before? Why had he smoked his cigarette at all? And never mind smoking it—how had he failed to notice there was something wrong with the thing?

He thought and thought, and could make no sense of it. In the end, when all was said and done, Liu Tianli concluded that he had simply been too desperate to free the Liu family from Wei Zhao's shadow, too eager to carve out a way forward for the family on his own.

And that was, in fact, the truth of it. Had Liu Tianli harbored no selfish desire, he would never have gone into the cigarette business with Xiao Chunjie in the first place. It was his greed, and his greed alone, that gave the hypnotist his opening.

Merchants chase profit, and Gu Pengzhan's being cheated was at least forgivable—after all, the Gu Group was a diversified conglomerate, and within it Gu Pengzhan answered to no one but himself. His greed had simply been seized upon by the hypnotist, who had found his way in.

But there was no excusing Liu Tianli's deception. At present, every last one of the Liu family's ventures existed for one purpose: to support Wei Zhao's Grand Physician Pharmaceuticals. That was the course Old Master Liu Zhenhu and Liu Jinghan had together charted for the family's future.

It was only that Liu Tianli could never shake the thought: they were leaning on Wei Zhao, and what if one day Wei Zhao fell? Would the Liu family not fall with him? And so his private misgivings got the better of him, and the hypnotist found his opening and put him under, clean and complete.

Otherwise—had the man harbored no selfish motives at all—no matter how formidable the hypnotist, a resolute will would never have fallen for the trick.

Liu Tianli clutched his head, sick at heart, and yet had no idea what to do. With a disaster this great now befalling the company, how was he supposed to tell his family? Above all, how was he supposed to face Wei Zhao?

Wei Zhao... would he kill him? What he had lost was not merely the Liu family's company, but the distributors' payments and the money meant to procure raw materials for Grand Physician Pharmaceuticals! With all that money gone, Grand Physician Pharmaceuticals would likely be plunged at once into a cash-flow crisis. Liu Tianli knew full well how grave the matter was—and the graver it was, the less he dared open his mouth and confess.

"Hah—" Liu Tianli picked up a cigarette at random, put it to his lips, and was just about to light it when it struck him—this was the drug! Yet even realizing what it was, he could not tear himself away. With trembling hands he meant to throw the cigarette from his mouth, but whether because the craving had come on or because, deep down, he still could not resist the cigarette's exquisite lure, he lit it after all, his hands shaking all the while...

He had to think of something now. He had smoked it, and smoked it was; once he had found a way out, it would be soon enough to quit. So Liu Tianli reasoned...

Only he could think of no way out at all. The smoke filled his mouth and brought an indescribable ease, an indescribable release, letting him forget his troubles for a time, forget this whole business...

Liu Tianli floated on air. In that moment, nothing else mattered—only the cigarette.

This time Secretary Zhang took a good long while. Investigating a company and investigating a pair of phone numbers were two entirely different matters, after all. But Secretary Zhang was a man of considerable resources; working through several chambers of commerce, he had finally traced President Lang's company by roundabout means. Yet once the company's records came to light, Secretary Zhang's brows knit tight.

Naturally, none of this was Secretary Zhang's to worry over. Once he had the materials in hand, he went straight to Liu Tianli's office. Seeing cigarette butts strewn all over the floor, he was slightly taken aback, but he still said respectfully, "President Liu, I have the materials. If you would be so good as to look them over."

"Set them down over there." Liu Tianli was blissfully puffing away, and at this moment regarded other matters as of little consequence; he felt no urge to look at the materials just yet.

"Very good..." Secretary Zhang did not dare say more. He set the materials down and turned to leave...

It was a long while before Liu Tianli roused himself from the drug's spell and remembered the materials. He hastily picked up what Secretary Zhang had delivered—but the moment he turned to the first page, he froze.

President Lang's company was registered in Bermuda, and no further relevant information could be found at all. All that could be turned up were promotional advertisements and encyclopedia entries about the company on search engines—and such things could never serve as evidence of anything. Anyone could edit them.

Liu Tianli tossed the materials aside and gave a bitter sigh. Of course. If the other party had decided to cheat him, they would hardly have left him anything to seize upon afterward, nor any genuine information for him to trace.

"Ai!" Liu Tianli bowed his head in helplessness, his hands clutching at his hair to no purpose. He did not know how to face it, and in his torment could only pick up another cigarette and smoke...

……………………

Two disciples of the Dark Night Palace had picked two trial spirit herbs off the corpses, and at the award ceremony they had successfully exchanged them for a single future elixir of Qi Condensation Pills. How long the pills would take to finish refining, no one could say, but this was the only way for Wan'er, Palace Mistress of the Dark Night Palace, to break through to the heaven rank...

If Palace Mistress Wan'er still could not receive the inheritance at the heaven rank, then another inheritor would have to be sought elsewhere. The pressure on the Dark Night Palace was heavy indeed.

The two disciples' successful return earned them praise from the Grand Elder: "You two did well, to pass through the perilous trial of the Xuan Dan Sect so smoothly!"

"In serving the Grand Elder, we disciples give our all. However perilous, we shall see it through," the two Dark Night Palace disciples said fawningly.

"Mm... Still, it is a pity you brought back only two trial spirit herbs. Why did you not pick a few more?" the Grand Elder asked.

"We... we did have a great many trial spirit herbs at first, but who would have known that a wretch named Wei Zhao would interfere, and extort all our herbs from us..." The two Dark Night Palace disciples had borne a grudge against Wei Zhao ever since. Had it not been for Wei Zhao, they could have reaped a great many herbs following Zhang Naipao—far more than these two. Yet it never once occurred to them that they had been helping Zhang Naipao extort Wei Zhao's friends at the time.

The disciples of the Dark Night Palace were all like their Grand Elder—snobs to a man. A disciple takes after the example set for him, as they say. (To be continued.