Chapter 4696 — Matters of the Secular World

"All right, I really do have to hand it to you." Wei Zhao had no strength left to argue at this point; he simply settled down beside her, inwardly wondering just how this girl's mind was put together. Why was her thought process so wildly different from that of a normal person?

As it happened, Huo Yudie's face was flushed red as well. She herself could not have said why, but for some inexplicable reason she had desperately wanted Wei Zhao to sit with her for a while, and so she had racked her brains to invent all these bizarre excuses. It was not that her mind was genuinely broken.

Huo Yudie hurriedly shook her head with all her might. If she kept letting her thoughts wander freely like this, she suspected her brain would overheat and burn out. Why was it that whenever she was around this fellow, she only ever thought about such embarrassing things?

"What are you doing?" Wei Zhao turned his head to look at her in puzzlement. Though the light was too dim to see clearly, the motion of her shaking her head registered plainly enough with him. Surely the poison had not failed to clear completely, leaving her suffering some side effect?

"N-nothing... I'm not doing anything..." Huo Yudie started in fright, her face scarlet as she denied it vehemently, then seized on a flash of inspiration and blurted out an excuse: "There are mosquitoes here.[800]"

"Mosquitoes?" Wei Zhao was taken aback. This barren, desolate place had mosquitoes? And even if it did, his divine sense had been active the whole time—not the slightest stir within a hundred zhang could escape his all-pervading perception. How could he possibly fail to sense them?

"Right, mosquitoes!" Huo Yudie insisted stubbornly, afraid Wei Zhao would keep pressing, and hastily changed the subject. "Did you know? I've never known who my parents were, ever since I was little. I only survived thanks to my master finding me out in the wild. Otherwise I'd have been an abandoned infant with my bones long since rotted away."

"Oh, I'm much the same as you." Wei Zhao nodded. He had not expected this girl to have such a background—it made her feel a bit like a fellow sufferer to him.

"You? Aren't you from the secular world?" Huo Yudie said in surprise, but then immediately realized what a foolish question she had asked. Whether one came from the secular world had nothing whatsoever to do with one's origins. Cloud Terrace Island had abandoned infants, and the secular world naturally had them too.

"That's right. In the secular world I had an old grandpa who was half master, half elder. Medicine and all the rest of it—every odd scrap of knowledge I have, he found some way to pass on to me. He put me through no end of torment back then, heh." As he spoke, Wei Zhao could not help feeling a pang of nostalgia. He had been on Cloud Terrace Island so long now; he wondered how Old Man Wei was doing.

What set his mind somewhat at ease was that, judging by the reply from everyone in the secular world last time, Old Man Wei was living quite comfortably in West Star Mountain Village, and Aunt Qing had finally ended up with him. In that respect, the old man was actually rather blessed. There was truly nothing to worry about on his account.

"Same for me. My master was the same way—without her, there would be no me as I am today." Huo Yudie nodded again and again. With such similar backgrounds, she suddenly felt the distance between herself and Wei Zhao had shrunk, and that perhaps they would have a great deal in common. She paused, then asked, "So, have you ever wanted to go back to the secular world? Which is better—this place, or the secular world?"

"The secular world, naturally," Wei Zhao answered without the slightest hesitation. True, in terms of power and cultivation conditions, ten thousand secular worlds could not compare to a single Cloud Terrace Island. But he had always held that the secular world was where his roots lay.

Without the secular world there would be no him, and certainly no reaching his present level. Moreover, most of the confidantes he cherished most and thought of constantly were in the secular world; the young miss and the others were still waiting for him to return and heal them. So no matter what, even at the cost of everything, Wei Zhao absolutely had to return to the secular world—that was his greatest wish and goal!

"Why? Because there are rich suckers and universities there?" Huo Yudie suddenly asked, full of curiosity.

"Pfft... both, I suppose..." Wei Zhao nearly choked on her words again. Why was this girl so fixated on rich suckers? He had only mentioned it in passing at the very beginning, yet to his surprise she had latched onto it and never let go. As for universities, that too had probably been a casual remark of his that she had remembered.

But from this alone he could tell that the girl was quite interested in the secular world. She seemed much like Shangguan Lan'er—the sort who were full of fantasies and longing for the secular world.

"No wonder. That fellow Ren Zhongyuan is always buying all sorts of strange odds and ends at the Central Chamber of Commerce. He says they're all imported goods from the secular world, very handy, and apparently quite fashionable lately." At this point Huo Yudie could not help thinking of that camera.

It was a fine thing Ren Zhongyuan had paid a hefty price to obtain. When he first offered it to her, she had actually been extremely interested and had nearly accepted it on the spot. In the end, however, her loathing for the thing won out, and she had gritted her teeth and pushed the camera back. Thinking of it now, she did not regret it, though she still felt a twinge of regret.

"Mm, you could certainly put it that way." Wei Zhao nodded. If one were to name the greatest effect of the Central Chamber of Commerce's sudden emergence, it was that it had whipped up a tide of technology across Cloud Terrace Island, and this had raised the secular world's standing enormously. Nowadays, when the secular world was mentioned, at least no one would say it was utterly worthless.

As for these technological products alone, though they could not play a substantive role for cultivators the way divine weapons or pills did, many of their functions were still exceedingly practical. Even the lofty top-tier magnates of Cloud Terrace Island had to admit this; in certain respects they left even high-level cultivators far behind—the camera, for instance, or the mobile phone Wei Zhao carried.

However great one's divine powers, at most one could read another's divine sense—one could never do what a camera does, capture an image and show it to others as evidence, could one? (Today is the birthday of Zhang Duola, chief of the The Blossom Guardian Tribe—that is, Zhang Duopan's younger brother... just kidding, it is actually Doraemon's birthday. Happy birthday to him.) (To be continued.)