Chapter 1778 — Finding a Way
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
"Cooperate—of course we are all willing to cooperate. The crux is that there is no suitable point of dispute!" said the Right Family Ancestor. "Our two houses are evenly matched. If you say we are to fall into conflict and it comes to real swords and spears, we would surely suffer grievous losses and still might not have a victor. And without a fitting cause for the quarrel, anyone would see at a glance that it was staged! At our age, none of us are fools; we cannot be as hot-blooded as the young."
"That is true enough... But perhaps some here have heard that our Yu family lost a Qi-Gathering Pill not long ago!" At this, the Yu Family Ancestor glanced toward Old Master Zhao. In his estimation, Yu Xiaojin likely knew of the matter and would surely have told Old Master Zhao.
Old Master Zhao, however, mistook his meaning. His heart lurched, and he thought: Could the Yu family have learned something? Could that old fellow Yu Huoxing have a loose tongue and let it slip?
"That... I have heard a faint rumor of it..." Old Master Zhao said, forcing himself to remain calm. "But why bring it up so suddenly?"
"If that Qi-Gathering Pill were seized by another clan, then we would have our point of dispute!" said the Yu Family Ancestor. "Xiaochen could have advanced to the Heaven-rank. Such a fine opportunity, now gone—then whoever took the Qi-Gathering Pill would be our Yu family's mortal enemy. That our Yu family would throw its full strength into battle against them is entirely understandable."
"But our Right family could not possibly have stolen your Qi-Gathering Pill. Hard as the Qi-Gathering Pill is to refine, if we wanted one—heh heh—it is not as though we could not refine it. It is merely that the expenditure would not be worth it." The Right Family Ancestor chuckled.
No one present took the Right Family Ancestor's words as boasting. After all, though the Qi-Gathering Pill was already a top-grade elixir to the hidden clans, to the ancient sects it truly amounted to little—especially the Xuandan Sect, which could refine it at will if it so wished. Yet taking a Qi-Gathering Pill carried certain drawbacks, and only hidden clan juniors of mediocre talent like Yu Xiaochen would resort to it. After all, without the Qi-Gathering Pill, barring some stroke of fortune, Yu Xiaochen's cultivation would have stalled forever at the peak of the late Earth-rank. With the pill, he forced his way into the Heaven-rank; though any further advancement would afterward be doubly hard, Yu Xiaochen had never even dreamed of advancing further.
Such was the difference between the hidden clans and the ancient sects. The hidden clans were for the most part content with the Heaven-rank; with a Heaven-rank expert's protection, a family's enduring prosperity was assured. The ancient sects, by contrast, pursued a realm higher still than the Heaven-rank—the Way of Heaven!
Only, no one had yet broken through to the Way of Heaven. Those who had once pursued it had all vanished without a trace. So no one knew what power truly lay above the Heaven-rank, nor whether above the Way of Heaven there existed yet mightier beings.