Chapter 4340 — How Does the Truth Stand?
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Qi Wenmo's gaze swept across the crowd and finally settled on Wei Zhao at the center. He could not help starting, and his expression turned somewhat complicated.
"Ling Yi, that traitor, has returned! Young Master, please punish him severely, to serve as a warning to others!" Seeing this, Li and Guan wore subtle expressions of their own and hurried forward to say.
Inwardly, the two were lamenting the lost chance. Ling Yi had already taken the bait—a single strike and all would have been well. But no sooner had he come than Qi Wenmo had to arrive at just this moment. Now the situation had slipped out of their control again...
Little did they know that had Qi Wenmo not come out, the two of them would already have become two corpses. They had circled once through the gates of hell without even knowing it, and were even regretting the missed opportunity—truly, the world lacks for nothing so much as it lacks for clever fools.
At these words Qi Wenmo's expression darkened. He looked Wei Zhao up and down and did not speak at once, but waved a hand at the two men, signaling them to be patient.
Ever since about a month ago, when Li Yanji and Guan Zhiyuan returned empty-handed and it was learned that the valuable shipment had been stolen, the Qingtian Escort Agency had passed these days in extreme hardship; and the young master, who was gradually taking over the running of the agency, was more frantic than anyone.
The reputation the Qingtian Escort Agency had built over decades suffered greatly from this affair, and even its standing in the Wei Arc sea region was left perilously shaken. Not only that, but per the contract signed beforehand, they had to compensate the Hong Merchant Guild a full three hundred thousand spirit jade at the original value of the goods, barely enough to keep the guild quiet and stop it from spreading the word far and wide.
The scale of these successive losses—to the Qingtian Escort Agency, and especially to the young master Qi Wenmo—could well be imagined. And according to the reports of Li Yanji and Guan Zhiyuan, the culprits behind all these losses were none other than Wei Zhao and his companion!
"The enemy had four experts at the peak of late Golden Core, formidable indeed, but we also had four men. Even with such a gap in strength, if we had fought to the death there would still have been a sliver of a chance. But never did we expect that Ling Yi and that junior apprentice sister of his would surrender on the spot the moment they met the enemy, and turn around to become the pirates' claws, aiding the tiger in its savagery. With no recourse, the two of us could only stand by and let the shipment fall into the pirates' hands." Such were the exact words Li Yanji and Guan Zhiyuan had spoken at the time.
If that were truly so, then the culprits of this affair were undoubtedly Wei Zhao and his companion; one might even reasonably suspect that the pirates had colluded with the two of them beforehand—otherwise they could not so conveniently have waited by the tree for the rabbit, nor would Wei Zhao and his companion have defected so naturally.
But Qi Wenmo had not wholly believed this one-sided account. When he heard those words at the time, he had in fact felt considerable puzzlement.