Chapter 3651 — More Than Expected

"Very well, then—many thanks, Junior Brother Lin." Miserable Senior Brother thought it over and at last accepted them, though inwardly he was groaning that his debt of gratitude to Wei Zhao was growing larger by the day. How was he ever going to repay it?

To shield Wei Zhao from harm in every way possible while his strength was still far from formidable—perhaps that was the only way he could ever repay him!

Miserable Senior Brother smiled wryly to himself. He was plainly the senior, so why was he forever on the receiving end of favors from Wei Zhao, his junior? It seemed Senior Brother Lu had been right after all: this Junior Brother Lin of theirs was no fish destined to linger in a pond—sooner or later he would soar into the heavens!

He carefully stowed away the two Foundation Establishment Barrier-Breaking Pills, said a word of farewell to Wei Zhao, and hurried off, eager to attempt his breakthrough.

Wei Zhao, for his part, glanced up at the sky. Not a trace of the fatigue from a whole night's labor showed on him; he reported to the Spirit Jade Hall and went mining as usual. It was not that he was not tired—joyful news lifts the spirits, and at this moment he was in excellent humor.

As for the reason, it was naturally the fruit of the previous night's pill refining, which had handed him a tremendous surprise.

And that surprise was not the three Foundation Establishment Barrier-Breaking Pills that Miserable Senior Brother had imagined. In truth, when he opened the cauldron and searched through it, he fished out a full six pills! One more, even, than the tablet had initially predicted!

At the very end, the words displayed on the tablet were: "Congratulations, Brother Wei Zhao—one more than expected!"

Wei Zhao did not know whether to laugh or cry. But afterward he kept turning the question over in his mind: why had there been one extra?

The conclusion he finally reached was this: the medicinal ingredients of Cloud Terrace Island were richer in spiritual energy than those of the mortal world, and therefore of higher quality. With the same quantity of ingredients, more pills would naturally be refined.

A full six Foundation Establishment Barrier-Breaking Pills—and every single one of them crowned with a pill halo!

And this was precisely the root of those incessant abnormal reactions from the Divine Farmer's Cauldron during the refining process. He had clearly put in ingredients for only three batches, expecting five pills, yet in the end six Foundation Establishment Barrier-Breaking Pills had come out, each one a top-grade specimen that could not be sought even if one wished for it. Where was the logic in that?

Three batches of ingredients had suddenly yielded six pills, while the cauldron's program had still been refining on the assumption of five. The resulting anomaly, Wei Zhao reckoned, was fortunate to have occurred in the Divine Farmer's Cauldron; with an ordinary fourth-grade cauldron, it would surely have exploded!

Still, Han Jingyi must have accounted for the possibility of an extra pill being refined unexpectedly—otherwise those final words would never have appeared on the display. So, perilous as it had been, Han Jingyi had likely built in safeguards, and that was why the refining had succeeded.

These were fourth-grade pills, and six of them had been refined in one go! If word of this ever got out, it would blind every pill refiner alive with envy. Dying of shame and fury would be the least of it—some of them would probably drag Wei Zhao off for vivisection, and only carving him into a thousand pieces would soothe the hatred in their hearts!

Comparisons are odious. With a freak like Wei Zhao around, how were the lofty, self-satisfied pill refiners of the Pill Hall supposed to go on living? Fellow tradesmen are natural foes—that saying was certainly no lie!

Fortunately, both Miserable Senior Brother and Wei Zhao himself would keep the matter of this batch of Foundation Establishment Barrier-Breaking Pills strictly confidential.

An innocent man is guilty by virtue of his treasure—that saying was no idle talk. If word truly spread, it could bring down a catastrophic disaster at the slightest misstep, and a good thing would turn into a bad one. That plainly ran counter to the strategy of keeping a low profile that Wei Zhao had always followed.

Until his strength grew great enough to crush all before him, keeping his head down and making his fortune in silence—that was the kingly path to surviving on Cloud Terrace Island.

Of the six Foundation Establishment Barrier-Breaking Pills, he had given two to Miserable Senior Brother, leaving four in his own hands. Once he refined some Foundation Establishment Golden Pills after a while, the two kinds working in concert would mean he need never worry about advancing his strength through the Foundation Establishment stage.

For the days that followed, Wei Zhao's daily routine was simply to report to the Spirit Jade Hall and spend the whole day in Mining Zone Ten.

Since he made a point of secretly pocketing two or three pieces of scrap jade each day, the number of good jade he finally handed in for quality inspection kept fluctuating between eight and twelve pieces.

For a dead mining zone universally acknowledged to be the worst, digging out so much good jade every day was absolutely jaw-dropping—yet where Wei Zhao was concerned, everyone had grown rather inured to it.

In the past, Meng Jueming and Meng Tong and their lot would surely have made trouble, scheming every which way to uncover the trick. But after that business of swapping mining zones back and forth last time, the two of them had utterly given up on the idea.

Wei Zhao simply had good luck—simply could dig out so much good jade in Mining Zone Ten. What was anyone to do about it? Put anyone else in there, and they would be lucky to dig out a single piece!

Having learned his lesson the hard way last time, Meng Jueming had accepted this ironclad fact, and simply chose to keep his eyes shut so as not to vex his heart.

In his view, even if Wei Zhao kept up such high output, a month's work would at most earn him a reward of three spirit jades. And when the time came, even if he got that reward, one word to the new recruits under his command and the few good jades in Wei Zhao's hands would soon be swapped away for scrap.

A fool is a fool. So what if he earned a few more spirit jades? In the end it would all just benefit his own crowd!

Thus, in this way, Meng Jueming found himself rather hoping Wei Zhao would dig up more jade—the more he dug, the bigger the cut his own people would take afterward!

With Meng Jueming and his men no longer obstructing him, Wei Zhao's mining days seemed rather uneventful. And just when he thought this calm could last until the twenty-fifth—on the very day before the new-recruit trial that all the newcomers so eagerly anticipated—an unexpected little interlude occurred.

And the source of this interlude was his rival, Meng Tong.

That day, Meng Tong reported to the Spirit Jade Hall as usual.

He had originally meant to slack off—after all, mining day in and day out was so dull and tedious it made a man's balls ache. Unfortunately, though he had Meng Jueming as a backer and could ask for leave without a second thought, if he wanted more spirit jades he still had to sweat for them himself. Otherwise even Meng Jueming, his ninth cousin and a relative by blood, would not hand him spirit jades for nothing. (To be continued)

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