Chapter 4271 — Another Band of Arrivals
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
The place was nothing short of a natural garden of spirit herbs. Spirit herbs met the eye wherever one looked, not only in great variety but of excellent quality. With this many, anyone else would have needed several days of hard work merely to have a chance at gathering them all.
But given Wei Zhao and Huang Xiaotao's terrifying efficiency, another stick of incense's time would probably see the whole place stripped clean—because they did not even bother to look at what kind of herb it was; they simply pulled whatever they saw, and once pulled, no protective measures of any kind were taken.
After Huang Xiaotao pulled them up, the only thing Wei Zhao had to do was stow the herbs away, planting each one into the jade pendant's space—and that was the whole job done.
The two were busily at work when Wei Zhao's brows suddenly knit slightly. From the dense forest in the distance came a rustling sound, and one could tell it was the noise of footsteps drawing nearer.
"From the sound of it, they should be people—and more than one. What do we do?" Huang Xiaotao caught Wei Zhao's expression and quickly sensed it too. In familiarity with dense forests and in perception within them, she was in no way inferior to Wei Zhao.
"Nothing to worry about. We keep at our work and pay them no mind," Wei Zhao said with a faint smile, showing not the slightest intention of avoiding them. The spirit herbs here were no rare treasures, but having them was better than not—and the jade pendant's space was vast enough, anyway.
What was more, Wei Zhao had a deeper consideration. If he and Huang Xiaotao deliberately avoided them and those people happened to notice, they might well conclude that the two had come by some great treasure and were therefore acting guilty.
Better to invite trouble that way than to simply keep pulling weeds as naturally as before. Plenty of cultivators came to Lufeng Forest to explore these days; so long as there was no conflict of interest, the other side ought not to start a fight unprovoked.
Of course, to conceal the existence of the jade pendant's space, Wei Zhao still fetched the basket from beside them and put the herbs they gathered from then on into it. It did not matter if Huang Xiaotao knew about the pendant's space, but outsiders were another matter.
The two went on pulling weeds, and sure enough, a short while later a group arrived before them. Wei Zhao glanced up at the newcomers: four men and two women, six in all—they must have been teleported in together as a team.
From the bearing and aura of these six, it was easy to judge that their leader was the middle-aged man in the blue robe walking in their center.
In build and features the man had nothing remarkable about him; at first glance he seemed altogether ordinary, his air much the same as Guo Dengtao's had been. But look closely and one would find his spirit and vitality brimming, and within those rather plain features there was in truth a certain martial gallantry. His gaze in particular was exceedingly sharp, like a keen blade—one casual glance from him was enough to set a man's heart trembling without his knowing why.
More crucially, among the six who had come, this middle-aged man in blue was the only one whose strength Wei Zhao's golden finger could not see through—which meant his cultivation was at least that of the Nascent Soul stage.
The other five were all fine hands of the Golden Core stage, the strongest at the very peak of late Golden Core, the weakest at least mid Golden Core.
Wei Zhao felt a chill of caution. The strength of this small team before him was more than a cut above that of his own team with Chu Bubai—they were not even in the same league.
But on reflection, only a team of this caliber would dare enter the depths of Lufeng Forest. Otherwise, a team like Chu Bubai's, lacking that route map, could never have reached the core region at all.