Chapter 3937 — The Cruel Final Battle
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Under the stunned gaze of the crowd, Meng Zhou swayed forward one step at a time until he stood before Wei Zhao. His eyes were shot through with savage blood vessels, and with a cackling laugh he said, "I've finally lived to see this day, Wei Zhao. Everything I am now, I owe to you. Are you ready to die?"
With that, without so much as a glance at how Wei Zhao might react, Meng Zhou turned and walked off to one side—as though, in his eyes, Wei Zhao were already a dead man through and through, no longer worth the slightest attention.
"Interesting." Wei Zhao smiled with a trace of amusement. Never before had Meng Zhou addressed him by anything but epithets like "posturing chief"—never by his full name.
It was a very subtle difference, but to a mindful man like Wei Zhao it spoke volumes.
Meng Zhou had never before called Wei Zhao by his full name; at bottom it had been a kind of psychological distortion. It showed, at the very least, that he could not face Wei Zhao's existence squarely and could only obtain a semblance of psychological balance through those mocking, insulting labels. Whatever strength or confidence the Meng Zhou of those days might have possessed, it had all been bluster over inner cowardice.
Now, judging purely by his tone, Meng Zhou had shed some of that mockery and swagger—yet for the first time Wei Zhao sensed a threat emanating from him, a threat that, given the slightest carelessness, might prove fatal.
"Junior Brother Lin, when things turn abnormal there must be something uncanny afoot. Even facing a defeated foe like Meng Zhou, you must never let down your guard," the long-suffering senior brother warned. He knew nothing of the Midnight-Noon Heart-Shattering Pill, but he could see plainly that Meng Zhou's strength had surged and that the man was no longer what he had been.
"Rest assured, Senior Brother Ku. I know what I'm doing," Wei Zhao said with a nod.
A short while later, Hu Yunfeng, master of the Welcome Pavilion, took the stage and announced to all the newcomers: "In the rivers and lakes, clashes and scrapes are unavoidable. Everyone has enemies and rivals, and among you newcomer brothers there are bound to be frictions and feuds. The rule of the cultivation world has always been that strength reigns supreme, and here in the Welcome Pavilion we are no exception. Therefore, this final stage of the newcomer assessment is designed precisely to settle your disputes: the challenge bout."
At this the newcomers broke into animated discussion. Even setting the newcomer assessment aside, challenge bouts were freely permitted at the Welcome Pavilion at any ordinary time—all one needed was a witness present and a report made to one's supervising senior brother. There was surely no need to create a special stage of the newcomer assessment just for that.
Clearly, the challenge stage Hu Yunfeng spoke of was not so simple as the challenge bouts everyone knew.
This was the stage that could settle the entire series of assessments with a single decisive stroke. Success or failure here would directly determine whether all one's previous efforts would be squandered, or whether one could overtake the leaders and pull off a stunning reversal.
"Every newcomer has one chance to challenge another newcomer, and one chance to be challenged. Beyond the usual rules of challenge bouts, this stage carries an additional wager: the victor of a challenge takes all of the loser's points! One more word—we do value assessment points, but at the end of the day strength is what rules. If you lack the ability to hold on to your points, that only means your strength falls short. You have no one to blame but yourself." R1152