Chapter 4016 — Heavenly Chan?!
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
At any auction, top-grade pills were the grand finale, the crowning treasures; to procure three or four was considered quite a feat. A hundred and more was simply beyond imagining—unless one kept a Pill God like Zhang Lifeng enshrined at home.
From the expected nothing at all to a conjurer's trick of a full hundred-odd top-grade pills—this sudden reversal was too astonishing, too outrageous for heaven itself!
"Well now, my fellow tradesmen, we meet again! I trust you have all been in good health these past days? I do hope the humble wares of my little shop are not beneath the notice of your distinguished eyes?" Hong Zhong, savoring their choking expressions, beamed with the benign smile of a man who would not hurt a fly.
My heavens! The crowd nearly spat blood again. A full hundred-odd top-grade pills, and he called it a little shop's wares beneath their notice—then what were their own goods, dung trodden into the street?
All that scheming, all that elaborate maneuvering over so long, and in the end they had not only failed to crush Hong Zhong and the Hong Clan Merchant Guild—they had brought about this embarrassing, astonishing spectacle instead. The faces of Manager Hao, Wang Tong, and the rest were now so dark that water seemed to drip from them.
Hong Zhong might be an honest and generous elder, but the words he chose at this moment could kill a man with vexation and not even owe him a life for it!
Wei Zhao watched from the side, secretly amused. More than a hundred top-grade pills—the shock and awe they carried was more than even the most worldly and experienced could stomach, let alone this pack of skulking nobodies who had schemed so hard to bring the Hong Clan Merchant Guild to ruin.
In truth, it was not only these men; even those great personages from Middle Island who had arrived late now came crowding over at the news to join the excitement, their faces alight with amazement, whispering to one another and praising without end.
Amid the crowd, a figure in yellow suddenly made Wei Zhao's eyes brighten. Peering closer, he felt his mind go off like a thunderclap, and before he could stop himself he breathed out softly, "Heavenly Chan?!"
Face and form, speech and bearing—every detail proved that the woman in the crowd was Heavenly Chan!
Yet at Wei Zhao's soft cry, Heavenly Chan showed no reaction at all. She merely swept him with an indifferent glance, her gaze sliding straight past him, as though she had not the least idea who Wei Zhao was.
Wei Zhao was struck dumb. The woman was plainly Heavenly Chan—there could be no mistaking it. But he wore no Thousand-Silk Mask; how could she fail to recognize him?
When Wei Zhao would have said more, Heavenly Chan had already moved off with those great personages from Middle Island, and from first to last she did not look at Wei Zhao again, not even once.
Frowning as he watched Heavenly Chan depart with the others, as though she had never known him at all, Wei Zhao was left utterly stunned!
He could not have been mistaken, and yet Heavenly Chan's expression throughout had betrayed no peculiarity, nothing out of the ordinary—she had treated him as a perfect stranger. That was beyond all understanding.
"What is going on here?" Wei Zhao drew a deep breath as he watched her retreating figure. In all his time on Cloud Terrace Island, Heavenly Chan was the first cultivator from the mortal world he had seen besides Kang Jingming, Zhong Yongliang, and the others of his own island—and a woman bound to him by ties of no small intimacy, at that.
"Young Hero Lin, what is it? Is something the matter?" Hong Zhong, sensing that something was amiss with Wei Zhao, spoke up to ask.
In less than three days, to have refined more than a hundred top-grade pills without pause—such heaven-defying ability, such an immense debt of gratitude. Hong Zhong was now utterly prostrate before Wei Zhao, and had come to regard him wholly as one of his own. R1152