Chapter 4048 — Was He Truly Favorable, or Merely Dropping a Hint?

No one could give Wei Zhao an answer to that doubt; he could only press it down for now and leave it to be proven in the days to come. And at present there was only one thing that truly demanded his attention: the great undertaking of artifact forging, already poised on the verge of release.

With this lesson standing before her, no matter how hard Shangguan Lan'er racked her brains, there was no finding an excuse to slip out of doors anytime soon.

Her bosom friend, it turned out, was none other than the daughter of the West Isle's Isle Master—Ning Xuefei!

Like attracts like, and people sort themselves into flocks. Apart from an utterly exceptional case like Wei Zhao, given Shangguan Lan'er's family standing, even without a trace of the young lady's temper or airs, ordinary folk were simply fated never to become her intimate friends. They moved on different levels and could not converse as equals, so there was naturally no such thing as pure friendship to speak of.

And across the whole of the North Isle's Triple Stack Pavilion, those whose family background could be mentioned in the same breath as Shangguan Lan'er's were few and far between to begin with; narrow the field further to girls of similar age, and they became harder still to find.

So Shangguan Lan'er's bosom friends were almost all on the outer isles, and Ning Xuefei was the closest of them by far.

Unlike the North Isle, the West Isle was not only a gathering place for women cultivators but still preserved the ancient customs of the matriarchal clans—women ruled and decided everything there. These women cultivators were all exceedingly powerful, in no way inferior to the forces of the other isles, and Ning Xuefei's mother was precisely the West Isle's Isle Master.

Across the five great isles of the Heavenly Tier, where the mighty emerge in endless ranks and experts gather like clouds, to become the master of an isle—even if not the Central Isle—already meant standing among the handful of foremost experts of the Heavenly Tier's five great isles, all the more so for a woman who had attained the station of a regional overlord. One need hardly imagine how hard that was to achieve.

In the ancient mortal world, this West Isle Master would have been comparable to Empress Wu Zetian herself, a legendary figure revered by countless multitudes!

So strictly speaking, Ning Xuefei's background was, if anything, superior to Shangguan Lan'er's rather than inferior!

Of course, what had made them bosom friends was chiefly that their temperaments were in harmony. As for family background and the like, that was simply outside the scope of their concerns.

Some time ago Ning Xuefei had written that she was going to the Far North Isle for an auction; Shangguan Lan'er had assumed she would drop by the North Isle on the way to visit her. Yet her friend had never come, and she had been nursing her regret over it all this while.

In this reply to Ning Xuefei, Shangguan Lan'er poured out all the gloomy things that had lately befallen her, from the birthday banquet before to this kidnapping—the whole lot, in one breath. Since being confined at home left her with nothing to do, she might as well share it all and have done with it.

It was hard on this young lady who claimed she could not write. She plied brush and ink for a whole day, filling a great stack of paper before she finally got the gist of it all down, and then sent it off, still reluctant to stop.

Several days later, Shangguan Lan'er received Ning Xuefei's reply, and its contents sent her cheering and leaping for joy—Ning Xuefei wrote that she had won her mother's consent and was coming to the North Isle to visit her!

Like Shangguan Lan'er, Ning Xuefei had very few bosom friends, and now that she had heard of Shangguan Lan'er's various misfortunes, she naturally had to come and comfort and care for her as a good friend should; as for the research on the automatic forging mechanism, that would naturally be taken up by her other good friend Han Jingyi.

Shangguan Lan'er had been sunk in gloom ever since her grandfather confined her at home, but now her spirits were at last lifted once more.

……………………

The Central Isle, the Pill Hall.

Of late, two things in the Pill Hall had drawn the most attention: first, the death of Zheng Tianjie; second, the ghost marriage between Tianchan and Zheng Tianjie.

At such a blooming, lovely age, dressed in bridal robes of a thousand charms and ten thousand graces—every dreamy girl had pictured such a scene many times over. Even cultivators infinitely close to transcendent immortals would surely, at such a moment, entertain the selfsame thought: better to envy the mandarin ducks than the immortals.

Yet what if the groom across from her were a cold, lifeless corpse?

Set against Zheng Tianjie's frigid body beside her, the more beautiful and moving Tianchan appeared, the more pitiable she seemed in the eyes of onlookers; even those who had never been close to her could not help but sigh over her fate.

For any other girl, however poor the match, people would at most say that a fresh flower had been planted in a heap of dung; but Tianchan's bridegroom, in the eyes of ordinary folk, was likely not even the equal of a heap of dung.

But these were only the views of others; Tianchan herself was thoroughly satisfied with the arrangement.

For although a ghost marriage to a dead man sounded thoroughly chilling, being Zheng Tianjie's widow brought Tianchan no small advantage: not only would no other tactless person come to pester her, but her standing within the Pill Hall had risen with the tide.

Without so many miscellaneous cultivation tasks, and no longer required to take part in the Pill Hall's routine training, Tianchan's life had in fact become far calmer and more peaceful than before the ghost marriage.

Deep in the core of the Pill Hall there was a most peculiar room, housing a strange patient. As an ordinary disciple, Tianchan could not easily have entered before, but now she came to visit this person whenever she had the time.

"Grandpa Ancestor, how are you feeling today?" Tianchan appeared once more at the doorway of the room and greeted him respectfully, a smile on her face.

A somewhat hoarse voice came swiftly from within: "I am not your Grandpa Ancestor. I have no ties whatsoever to your mortal-world Tian family, and there is no need for you to curry favor with me on purpose. I am a broken man now—no amount of flattery will do you any good! Zheng Dongjue will not heed my words either; if you mean to have me help you dissolve the marriage contract, you had best give up that hope while you can!"

Tianchan smiled faintly and said, "Grandpa Ancestor, no matter what, you are still Chan'er's elder."

"Don't talk to me of elders—I am no elder of yours, and it's hard to say which of us ranks higher in seniority; perhaps you are my elder sister!" the hoarse voice retorted irritably.

Tianchan was stumped for a good while by that remark, and could only smile bitterly. "Very well, Deputy Isle Master Tian. Even if your cultivation has gone awry and every meridian in your body is severed, do not lose heart. So long as you keep faith, there will come a day when you recover." (To be continued…) R527