Chapter 3602 — Truly Cannot Help!
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
"Well, well, if it isn't Pavilion Master Lu! It has been far too long!" Dai Wuchang rose to his feet at once to greet Lu Bianren with a smile, while the put-upon senior brother trailing behind was simply ignored outright.
Awkward as Lu Bianren's position at the Welcome Pavilion might be, he was still at least a vice-pavilion-master of some stripe—within the Spirit Jade Hall, that made him genuine upper management, hardly comparable to a mere steward-in-charge like Dai Wuchang. What was more, back in the days at Azure Cloud Pavilion, Lu Bianren had shown him no small kindness, so the two had always gotten on fairly well.
"Ha, and from the look of you, Brother Dai, I would say you are riding high!" Lu Bianren answered with a smile. Dai Wuchang handled matters of contract; if one wanted to move Wei Zhao to another mining zone, this was the best place to force a crack, for the Spirit Jade Hall had its rules—once a contract was signed, under ordinary circumstances it could not lightly be altered.
"Brother Lu, you are a rare guest indeed—come to inspect your Welcome Pavilion's newcomers down in the mining zones, have you?" Dai Wuchang asked cheerfully. At Lu Bianren's level, no matter how ill-favored one's lot, one would never descend to mine, so a visit here invariably meant inspecting the newcomers.
"I will not hide it from you, Brother Dai—I came this time looking for you specifically, to beg a favor," Lu Bianren said, coming straight to the point. "Owing to a bit of misunderstanding, a newcomer brother of our Azure Cloud Pavilion has been assigned to Number Ten, the dead mining zone. As old hands of the Azure Cloud Pavilion, we cannot simply leave him to it and let him waste all his best years for nothing."
"The newcomer Brother Lu speaks of—could it be Wei Zhao?" Dai Wuchang's expression changed at once.
"The same. Wei Zhao it is. Might Brother Dai do us this kindness?" Lu Bianren nodded.
"That..." Dai Wuchang could not help but look troubled.
To him, Wei Zhao was a nobody of no consequence; since Lu Bianren had spoken up on the boy's behalf to his face, granting the favor would have been a trifling lift of the hand, and there was no cause to offend anyone over so small a thing. Only—this Wei Zhao was a stubborn thorn that Meng Jueming had gone out of his way to warn him about!
On one side stood Lu Bianren, on the other Meng Jueming—and so Dai Wuchang found himself caught squarely in the middle.
One had to understand that independent departments such as the Spirit Jade Hall and the Welcome Pavilion, though in name standing apart from the Threefold Pavilion, in practice had every post from top to bottom appointed uniformly by the Threefold Pavilion; their people were all selected from within the Threefold Pavilion's own ranks, and the right to conscript them back was retained at all times.
That is to say, whether it was a vice-pavilion-master of the Welcome Pavilion like Lu Bianren or a steward of the Spirit Jade Hall like Dai Wuchang, however splendidly they might flourish out in the wider world, at bottom they remained people of the Azure Cloud Pavilion. The moment the final time limit came due, they would be conscripted back.
And this Lu Bianren, however far he had fallen, was after all still a vice-pavilion-master of the Welcome Pavilion; if he were recalled to the Azure Cloud Pavilion in days to come, he would surely be a figure holding real power. For Dai Wuchang, if only for his own future, it could never be a bad thing to do the man a cheap favor now. The trouble was that this matter also dragged in Meng Jueming!
Though Meng Jueming was at present but a petty steward of the Welcome Pavilion, his standing nothing beside Lu Bianren's, and though by title he remained Lu Bianren's subordinate, so that the choice looked not so very hard—yet the crux of it was this: what Lu Bianren offered Dai Wuchang was only some distant future favor, whereas Meng Jueming touched his immediate vital interests!