Chapter 4178 — The Man in Black Appears Again
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
At this moment, among the whole crowd, only Meng Zhou's expression remained unchanged; he simply watched Wei Zhao on the stage with perfect calm, and no one could tell what he was thinking.
As for the Nan Tianxiong and Nan Tianguan brothers, they exchanged glances, still shaken. After all, Su Zhaohe possessed the ability to kill opponents above his own rank—at the very least he was comparable to a peak early Golden Core expert—and yet Wei Zhao had still cut him down in a single move, like slaughtering a chicken. If it had been Nan Tianxiong in his place, the outcome would have been no better; and as for Nan Tianguan, who to this day had only reached Foundation Establishment grand completion, there was even less to say.
After today's battle, before their eyes Wei Zhao had truly become a figure they could only look up to. On their own, they would never dare provoke him again—that would be courting death outright.
Among the crowd, a man wearing a wide-brimmed bamboo hat that hid his face stared at Wei Zhao on the stage—unruffled as the wind and clouds, yet brimming with an overpowering air—and could not help but shudder. He shrank his neck and slipped away at once.
The man was no disciple of the Threefold Pavilion; he had mingled in with the crowd. Had Wei Zhao stood before him, he would surely have recognized the face beneath the hat at a glance—it was none other than that mid Golden Core expert he had encountered earlier at Husky Peak in the Tianwu Mountains!
Their last clash had left both sides gravely wounded; he had been forced into seclusion to recover for a full month, and only recently had his injuries barely healed enough for him to emerge. And the very first thing he did was report to Su Zhaohe the matter of Wei Zhao killing Su Zhaohu and the others—with one goal only: to borrow another's blade.
Wei Zhao's identity exposed, Su Zhaohe's public challenge before the crowd—everything was unfolding exactly as he had envisioned. In his mind, though he had been duped once by Wei Zhao's so-called dan-fire bombs and still felt a lingering dread at the memory, given Su Zhaohe's long-celebrated genius and strength, dealing with a mere Wei Zhao should not go far wrong, even if it proved less smooth than expected.
Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined things would suddenly come to such a pass!
Su Zhaohe, an early Golden Core expert, was so utterly helpless before Wei Zhao. His own strength might surpass Su Zhaohe's, but only by a very limited margin—how could he possibly be a match for the Wei Zhao of today?
What baffled him even more was this: barely a month ago Wei Zhao had clearly been only at Foundation Establishment, so how had he suddenly become an early Golden Core expert? Could he have been concealing his strength all along?
Even a Ten-Thousand-Tribulation Golden Core Fruit would normally only be used to boost the strength of Golden Core experts—it could not possibly let a Foundation Establishment expert condense a core in one leap, could it? Such a thing had never been heard of, and was simply impossible!
Try as he might, the man in the bamboo hat could not puzzle it out, and in his heart, besides hatred for Wei Zhao, there now lurked a faint, inexpressible fear.
The Wei Zhao who had only been at Foundation Establishment had already fought him to a mutual ruin. Now Wei Zhao was early Golden Core, his strength likely surging more than tenfold—how was he supposed to manage that?
Ambush Wei Zhao when the chance came? The moment the thought surfaced, the man in the bamboo hat felt his own resolve falter. If he truly tried it, the odds were nine in ten that Wei Zhao would be perfectly fine while he himself followed in Su Zhaohe's footsteps.
But to simply watch Wei Zhao roam free and unfettered—his heart felt clawed by a hundred talons, and he absolutely refused to let the matter rest.