Chapter 4696 — Matters of the Secular World
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
"All right, I really do have to hand it to you." Wei Zhao had no strength left to argue at this point; he simply settled down beside her, inwardly wondering just how this girl's mind was put together. Why was her thought process so wildly different from that of a normal person?
As it happened, Huo Yudie's face was flushed red as well. She herself could not have said why, but for some inexplicable reason she had desperately wanted Wei Zhao to sit with her for a while, and so she had racked her brains to invent all these bizarre excuses. It was not that her mind was genuinely broken.
Huo Yudie hurriedly shook her head with all her might. If she kept letting her thoughts wander freely like this, she suspected her brain would overheat and burn out. Why was it that whenever she was around this fellow, she only ever thought about such embarrassing things?
"What are you doing?" Wei Zhao turned his head to look at her in puzzlement. Though the light was too dim to see clearly, the motion of her shaking her head registered plainly enough with him. Surely the poison had not failed to clear completely, leaving her suffering some side effect?
"N-nothing... I'm not doing anything..." Huo Yudie started in fright, her face scarlet as she denied it vehemently, then seized on a flash of inspiration and blurted out an excuse: "There are mosquitoes here.[800]"
"Mosquitoes?" Wei Zhao was taken aback. This barren, desolate place had mosquitoes? And even if it did, his divine sense had been active the whole time—not the slightest stir within a hundred zhang could escape his all-pervading perception. How could he possibly fail to sense them?
"Right, mosquitoes!" Huo Yudie insisted stubbornly, afraid Wei Zhao would keep pressing, and hastily changed the subject. "Did you know? I've never known who my parents were, ever since I was little. I only survived thanks to my master finding me out in the wild. Otherwise I'd have been an abandoned infant with my bones long since rotted away."
"Oh, I'm much the same as you." Wei Zhao nodded. He had not expected this girl to have such a background—it made her feel a bit like a fellow sufferer to him.
"You? Aren't you from the secular world?" Huo Yudie said in surprise, but then immediately realized what a foolish question she had asked. Whether one came from the secular world had nothing whatsoever to do with one's origins. Cloud Terrace Island had abandoned infants, and the secular world naturally had them too.
"That's right. In the secular world I had an old grandpa who was half master, half elder. Medicine and all the rest of it—every odd scrap of knowledge I have, he found some way to pass on to me. He put me through no end of torment back then, heh." As he spoke, Wei Zhao could not help feeling a pang of nostalgia. He had been on Cloud Terrace Island so long now; he wondered how Old Man Wei was doing.
What set his mind somewhat at ease was that, judging by the reply from everyone in the secular world last time, Old Man Wei was living quite comfortably in West Star Mountain Village, and Aunt Qing had finally ended up with him. In that respect, the old man was actually rather blessed. There was truly nothing to worry about on his account.
"Same for me. My master was the same way—without her, there would be no me as I am today." Huo Yudie nodded again and again. With such similar backgrounds, she suddenly felt the distance between herself and Wei Zhao had shrunk, and that perhaps they would have a great deal in common. She paused, then asked, "So, have you ever wanted to go back to the secular world? Which is better—this place, or the secular world?"
"The secular world, naturally," Wei Zhao answered without the slightest hesitation. True, in terms of power and cultivation conditions, ten thousand secular worlds could not compare to a single Cloud Terrace Island. But he had always held that the secular world was where his roots lay.