Chapter 3817 — Three Sets of Materials!
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 3
On Meng Zhou, that mud that would not stick to any wall, he was willing to sink such heavy stakes. Yet for one who was just as loyal, or at least had been loyal until now, he could not bear to part with even a single Foundation Establishment Pill. To play favorites to such a degree was simply too chilling to the heart!
Thank goodness he had been wise enough to secretly throw in his lot with Wei Zhao as an inside man. Had he truly set his heart on following a lousy patron like Meng Jueming and toiling like an ox or a horse for him, then he, Li Zhengming, would indeed have been blind as a bat, driving himself down a dead-end road!
Seeing Li Zhengming's utterly disappointed expression, Meng Jueming knew that doing this was somewhat indefensible. After thinking it over, he added: "But though I have no Foundation Establishment Pill on hand, I did specially prepare three sets of spirit-herb materials for refining Foundation Establishment Pills for you, Zhengming. I can give them to you once we get back. Just find a pill refiner to help you, and never mind one Foundation Establishment Pill—even three would be no problem at all, guaranteed to be enough for your Foundation Establishment attempt!"
Li Zhengming was stunned. At first he thought Meng Jueming had, for once, had a twinge of conscience, but by the end of it—hell, the man was actually giving him materials to take to a pill refiner himself! What kind of con was this supposed to be!
Foundation Establishment Pills were indeed exceedingly hard-to-come-by elixirs for a Heaven Tier great consummation expert like him, but strictly speaking, they could hardly be called rare or uncommon at all. The spirit-herb materials needed to refine a Foundation Establishment Pill were, by and large, common goods.
Even measured by market selling prices, one set of Foundation Establishment Pill materials was worth at most three or four spirit jades. Three sets together would, at the absolute most, fetch a price of ten spirit jades.
In other words, Meng Jueming was willing to spend at most ten spirit jades on him, Li Zhengming. If he wanted him to invest a single coin more than that—not a chance in the world!
Meng Jueming would not even be willing to fork out those ten spirit jades. His words sounded very fine—specially prepared for Li Zhengming—but common goods like Foundation Establishment Pill materials needed no special preparation whatsoever. Any cultivator with even a shred of foundation, through the unconscious accumulation of the past, could probably rummage several sets of such spirit-herb materials out of his personal store at random!
When all was said and done, these spirit-herb materials were utterly dispensable goods to Meng Jueming, junk tossed in a corner that he normally could not even be bothered to glance at. And now he had made a smooth virtue of necessity and called them spirit-herb materials specially prepared for Li Zhengming!
Had he not borne a blood feud for so many years and cultivated such extraordinary powers of forbearance, Li Zhengming would have nearly cursed aloud on the spot. Meng Jueming, you bastard—do you have to be this rotten to your own people!
Had he simply shaken his head and refused, then even if that was mean and ungrateful, it would at least have been aboveboard and honorable. But this fellow Meng Jueming did not want to give a Foundation Establishment Pill, yet still fretted over his reputation, and so insisted on fobbing him off with materials he himself would not even look twice at, all the while making it seem as though he were magnanimous and considerate of his underlings!
What did it mean to play the whore and set up a chastity arch at the same time? This was it!