Chapter 3937 — The Cruel Final Battle

"What the devil is Meng Zhou up to in there? It can't be Meng Jueming torturing him inside, can it? Screaming that miserably—the man's gone stark raving mad!" Qiao Hongcai jeered with undisguised relish.

Xiao Che, meanwhile, hazarded a puzzled guess: "Could he be cultivating some sinister, unorthodox martial art? From what I know, only certain external-school deviant techniques put a body through that kind of punishment—but Meng Zhou is hardly an external-school adept, is he?"

Wei Zhao gave a faint smile and said thoughtfully, "My guess is he swallowed something that didn't sit well. Doesn't matter. If he wants to howl, let him howl."

Wei Zhao could more or less guess what Meng Zhou was doing now. After all, he had Li Zhengming as his inside man, and during that month in the outer reaches of the back mountain he had already heard from Shangguan Lan'er about the existence of the Midnight-Noon Heart-Shattering Pill. It did not take much to connect the dots.

Anyone else in his position would by now feel a measure of unease in his heart—the more sinister a power, the more likely it was to grow formidable in a short span, and such things were common enough in the cultivation world. Unfortunately for all such worries, Wei Zhao simply did not care.

Whether Meng Zhou grew stronger or was ruined outright, Wei Zhao had never taken it to heart. At present he cared about one thing only: to consolidate his mid-Foundation Establishment realm as quickly as possible and gain complete mastery over his newly surging power. Everything else was so much passing cloud.

Ten days later, all the newcomers of the Welcome Pavilion gathered in one hall to prepare for the final stage of the newcomer assessment—the stage that would decide their future prospects, the one that mattered most of all.

At occasions like this, Meng Zhou—arrogant and self-important as he had always been—would invariably arrive early, surround himself with a great crowd of Azure Cloud Pavilion newcomers, and hold forth at length with his cronies, terrified lest he fail to become the center of attention.

This time, however, the moment Meng Zhou appeared, he needed to say not a single word: every eye in the hall was drawn to him as if by nature.

"My heavens! What's happened to him? Why is his hair all turned white?" Qiao Hongcai stared blankly at Meng Zhou and could not resist rubbing his eyes.

"That hair... I don't think it's dyed. It looks naturally white. Surely it isn't the legendary 'white overnight'?" Xiao Che said, equally disbelieving.

Wei Zhao shook his head slightly. "The hair is beside the point. Have you not noticed that the man's entire bearing has changed?"

At Wei Zhao's words, Xiao Che and Qiao Hongcai finally caught on. Even the long-suffering senior brother said in astonishment, "Junior Brother Lin is right. Meng Zhou used to come across as a pure and simple fool—no real strength, no depth. But looking at him now, he's a different person entirely—sinister and warped, like... like..."

"Like a wounded beast—provoke it even slightly and it will exact a lethal revenge!" Wei Zhao's expression was placid, but inwardly he was thinking: just what manner of sinister pill is this Midnight-Noon Heart-Shattering Pill, to have turned Meng Zhou into another man in a mere ten days?

Had it merely transformed his strength, that would be one thing—a Foundation Establishment golden elixir could produce the same effect. But this Midnight-Noon Heart-Shattering Pill had changed the man's very temperament. It was simply inconceivable.

Over the past ten days, wave after wave of blood-curdling screams had issued without cease from Cave Dwelling No. 4 at the foot of the mountain. Meng Zhou was enduring inhuman torment nearly every moment, and at the midnight and noon hours each day his howls grew so heart-rending that they made one's scalp crawl. Small wonder that in a mere ten days the man had been warped into his present sinister, unearthly state.

Under the stunned gaze of the crowd, Meng Zhou swayed forward one step at a time until he stood before Wei Zhao. His eyes were shot through with savage blood vessels, and with a cackling laugh he said, "I've finally lived to see this day, Wei Zhao. Everything I am now, I owe to you. Are you ready to die?"

With that, without so much as a glance at how Wei Zhao might react, Meng Zhou turned and walked off to one side—as though, in his eyes, Wei Zhao were already a dead man through and through, no longer worth the slightest attention.

"Interesting." Wei Zhao smiled with a trace of amusement. Never before had Meng Zhou addressed him by anything but epithets like "posturing chief"—never by his full name.

It was a very subtle difference, but to a mindful man like Wei Zhao it spoke volumes.

Meng Zhou had never before called Wei Zhao by his full name; at bottom it had been a kind of psychological distortion. It showed, at the very least, that he could not face Wei Zhao's existence squarely and could only obtain a semblance of psychological balance through those mocking, insulting labels. Whatever strength or confidence the Meng Zhou of those days might have possessed, it had all been bluster over inner cowardice.

Now, judging purely by his tone, Meng Zhou had shed some of that mockery and swagger—yet for the first time Wei Zhao sensed a threat emanating from him, a threat that, given the slightest carelessness, might prove fatal.

"Junior Brother Lin, when things turn abnormal there must be something uncanny afoot. Even facing a defeated foe like Meng Zhou, you must never let down your guard," the long-suffering senior brother warned. He knew nothing of the Midnight-Noon Heart-Shattering Pill, but he could see plainly that Meng Zhou's strength had surged and that the man was no longer what he had been.

"Rest assured, Senior Brother Ku. I know what I'm doing," Wei Zhao said with a nod.

A short while later, Hu Yunfeng, master of the Welcome Pavilion, took the stage and announced to all the newcomers: "In the rivers and lakes, clashes and scrapes are unavoidable. Everyone has enemies and rivals, and among you newcomer brothers there are bound to be frictions and feuds. The rule of the cultivation world has always been that strength reigns supreme, and here in the Welcome Pavilion we are no exception. Therefore, this final stage of the newcomer assessment is designed precisely to settle your disputes: the challenge bout."

At this the newcomers broke into animated discussion. Even setting the newcomer assessment aside, challenge bouts were freely permitted at the Welcome Pavilion at any ordinary time—all one needed was a witness present and a report made to one's supervising senior brother. There was surely no need to create a special stage of the newcomer assessment just for that.

Clearly, the challenge stage Hu Yunfeng spoke of was not so simple as the challenge bouts everyone knew.

This was the stage that could settle the entire series of assessments with a single decisive stroke. Success or failure here would directly determine whether all one's previous efforts would be squandered, or whether one could overtake the leaders and pull off a stunning reversal.

"Every newcomer has one chance to challenge another newcomer, and one chance to be challenged. Beyond the usual rules of challenge bouts, this stage carries an additional wager: the victor of a challenge takes all of the loser's points! One more word—we do value assessment points, but at the end of the day strength is what rules. If you lack the ability to hold on to your points, that only means your strength falls short. You have no one to blame but yourself." R1152