Chapter 4191 — The Third Pavilion Master of the Welcome Pavilion
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Though not everyone had arrived yet, a rough count of those gathered showed at least seventy Golden Core experts, and in the end there might well be eighty, or even close to a hundred.
Any single Golden Core expert sent out among other sect powers would be counted an elite. The Sandie Pavilion well deserved its name as the colossus straddling all of North Island—such deep foundations were truly no small matter.
In Wei Zhao's eyes, a power as vast as the Sandie Pavilion likely gave away nothing even to the top sects of Middle Island. From this one could see that the so-called five great heaven-tier islands—the other four were certainly not mere appendages of Middle Island.
The inner-sect disciples had not yet all arrived, so Wei Zhao, like the others already present, simply found an empty seat and sat quietly to wait, while keeping a careful eye on those around him. The opponents he would face next were among these people.
And while Wei Zhao was observing his opponents, the Welcome Pavilion newcomers' tournament, after several days of fierce contention, had finally drawn to a close.
Fierce it may have been, yet in truth the strong and weak were sharply divided. Even if everyone had started from the same line when they first arrived, after a year of jockeying, their strengths were now as different as heaven and earth.
Even setting aside monsters of the early Golden Core stage like Wei Zhao and Meng Zhou, the remaining newcomers were still clearly graded. Take the Qingyun Pavilion newcomers: Xiao Che, Qiao Hongcai, Li Zhengming, and Murong Zhen were all experts at the peak of the early Foundation Establishment stage, indisputably the first tier, with all the rest trailing behind.
Such being the facts, the results of the newcomers' tournament held no surprises. Xiao Che took the top seat without wind or wave, while Qiao Hongcai and Murong Zhen fought to a draw in which both were wounded, ending up tied for second, and as for Li Zhengming, he quietly placed fourth.
Given Li Zhengming's true strength and depth, even if one would not say he stood shoulder to shoulder with Xiao Che, he was at the very least in no way beneath Qiao Hongcai and Murong Zhen. He merely feared the sea of blood-debt upon him, dared not show too much of his edge, and deliberately held his strength in reserve.
So long as he could lock in a top-five place, he would become an official outer-sect disciple of the Qingyun Pavilion. As for that top seat everyone yearned for, he did not care for it in the least. Apart from strength, everything else was illusory.
In the end, Xiao Che, Qiao Hongcai, Murong Zhen, Li Zhengming, and one other Qingyun Pavilion newcomer together became official outer-sect disciples of the Qingyun Pavilion.
As for the newcomers who lost in the tournament, they could only stay at the Welcome Pavilion doing odd jobs, and those like Zha Wu who had never established a foundation fared even worse—they had been driven off to mine at the Lingyu Hall before the newcomers' tournament even began. A fate too miserable for words.
The final results of the Chongsheng Pavilion and the Xuanji Pavilion likewise came without a ripple. Worth noting was that several of those who had come up together from the mortal world—Kang Jingming and Zhong Yongliang of the Chongsheng Pavilion, and Dongfang Badao and the Wufa Boxing Master of the Xuanji Pavilion—all smoothly became official outer-sect disciples of their respective pavilions.
Add to that Xiao Che of the Qingyun Pavilion and Wei Zhao, that monstrous freak of overwhelming, heaven-defying talent, and never mind how those on the other islands fared—at least here in North Island, this batch of arrivals from the mortal world had shone brilliantly, in fact trampling the native newcomers of Yunjie Island quite beneath them, stirring no small talk in the streets and changing many opinions of the mortal world for the better. R1152