Chapter 3668 — Reaching the Canyon
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Coming out of the space, he found the rain had passed and the sky cleared—perfect conditions for moving. Wei Zhao promptly led the Thunder Pig down to the ground, and the next order of business naturally fell to the Thunder Pig.
Having never seen the Heart-Devouring Linglong Grass, even a born treasure-hunter like the Thunder Pig could not search for it directly; it could only follow Wei Zhao's instructions and look for places suited to its growth.
Two conditions: ample light, and dryness. Very simple conditions—but in this stretch of back-mountain outskirts that resembled a tropical rainforest, finding such a patch of ground was no easy matter.
For the Thunder Pig, however, this was a piece of cake.
Its gift was less treasure-hunting than a complete perception of its surroundings; its nose was far more precise than the most delicate detection instruments of the mortal world. If it so wished, it could grasp every subtle shift in the environment around it without missing a jot—and that range could extend for miles in every direction.
Equipped thus, the Thunder Pig naturally had no trouble finding a place that met Wei Zhao's requirements.
"Squeak squeak!" The Thunder Pig, seeing the light of day again, cried out twice in delight!
"By the way, Senior Ghost, back in the mortal world I heard that once spirit beasts reach the Heaven Tier, they can speak human language. But this Thunder Pig of mine still seems to squeak?" With the danger gone, Wei Zhao asked with some curiosity.
"Some spirit beasts are like that, but some are not! Don't take the ignorant spirit-beast lore of your mortal world as gospel," the Ghost Thing said flatly. "In the mortal world, all you ever see are low-tier spirit beasts. They've been through a long evolutionary process, so by the time they reach the Heaven Tier, practically all of them can speak! But this little thing of yours had its strength forced up by you—it hasn't yet reached the point where it can speak, so naturally it can't open its mouth! It's like a child learning to talk: there's a gradual process, and simply raising its strength isn't enough. Besides, on this Cloud-Tier Island, some spirit beasts are born at the Heaven Tier—how would they talk?"
"So that's how it is!" Wei Zhao said, taking the lesson to heart. The Ghost Thing was surely an authority on such matters, so Wei Zhao believed him utterly.
As it led Wei Zhao from one potential destination to the next, the Thunder Pig did not forget its old trade; man and pig stripped clean every spirit herb they came across along the way. The result was that the points displayed on Wei Zhao's back-basket shot straight up to seven hundred and thirty-eight.
By the usual logic of trials, the final scores of past rookie trials of this kind generally hovered around five hundred. Yet less than a day had passed, and Wei Zhao had already overfulfilled the task.
Led by the Thunder Pig, Wei Zhao trekked through the dense forest for a full day, until the sun was about to set in the west, before he finally reached a destination that met his conditions: a great canyon.
The canyon was a good ten-some zhang wide and was marked on the map provided by the back-mountain hall. Normally a place like a canyon is hard to associate with words like "sunlight" and "dry," but here on the back-mountain outskirts, this was already a rare spot that could satisfy both conditions.
The canyon plunged several dozen zhang deep, with a rushing river at the bottom. Because of the recent rainfall, the current was especially turbulent now; judging by the look of it, one misstep and a fall—even for a skilled hand like Wei Zhao—would mean at best losing several layers of skin, if not his life outright. RS