Chapter 3956 — Any Last Words?

"What the hell kind of nonsense are you spouting?" Meng Jueming's nerve faltered at once. Even with Wei Zhao's fatal weakness clenched in his hand, the gulf in strength between them meant that the weak would always fear the strong by instinct—an inborn terror no one could escape.

Strictly speaking, he, Meng Jueming, was a mid-stage Foundation Establishment expert no different from Wei Zhao; it was not as if he stood no chance in a fight.

But who could forget that Wei Zhao had once cut down Nan Tianyong—a peak late-stage Foundation Establishment master—in a single strike? In the eyes of any sane person, Meng Jueming himself included, no one believed they could cross blades with a madman, a monster like that. It would be no different from walking into certain death.

Wei Zhao's intent could not have been clearer. Sensing the waves of killing intent radiating from him, Meng Jueming's hair stood on end. Pale with fright, he cried, "You actually mean to kill me? Are you out of your mind? To kill me in a place like this—do you think you'll survive it yourself?"

The possibility that Wei Zhao might risk everything to strike him down had crossed Meng Jueming's mind long ago, though in his view it was vanishingly small.

Wei Zhao was a newcomer of boundless promise and a cool head. So long as he was not driven into a corner, so long as a single thread of room remained to turn things around, he would never gamble everything on a desperate move.

Few as they were here, two guards were still watching from a distance. If Wei Zhao dared to act, he would be smashing his own pot for spite—whether or not he managed to kill Meng Jueming, he himself was as good as dead, and dead in a most wretched way.

However formidable Wei Zhao might be, he was still nothing but a newcomer, utterly insignificant before such colossi as the Hall of Enforcement, the Hall of Spirit Jade, and the Threefold Pavilion.

Yet Wei Zhao merely smiled, unconcerned, and turned to go, leaving one sentence behind: "Under normal circumstances, yes, it would be inconvenient to kill you. But if you were to die in a mining accident, I don't suppose there would be any problem at all."

"A mining... a mining accident?" Meng Jueming gave a start. Before he could react, Wei Zhao had already shouldered his spirit jade basket and was striding toward the mine tunnel, every inch the man ready to hand in his day's quota.

In an instant, cold sweat broke out all over Meng Jueming. If it truly went as Wei Zhao said—if he died not by Wei Zhao's hand but in a mining accident—then his death would count for nothing. No one would ever connect it to Wei Zhao.

Then, all at once, Meng Jueming burst into a fit of near-hysterical laughter. Pointing at Wei Zhao's receding back, he jeered, "A lovely wish, that. What a pity mining accidents happen once in several hundred years. To pin your hopes on something so far-fetched—should I call you foolish, Young Hero Lin, or simply say you've been driven to such a dead end?"

Mining accidents might be common enough in the mortal realm, but here on Cloudstep Island—and above all within a mine under the direct jurisdiction of the Hall of Spirit Jade of the Threefold Pavilion—with layer upon layer of formations guarding them, the odds of one occurring were, as Meng Jueming said, next to nothing.

In truth, in nearly a hundred years there had been no record of any mining accident under the Hall of Spirit Jade's jurisdiction. As a rule, because every mine had guards posted, the slightest anomaly would be discovered and repaired at once; the Hall of Spirit Jade set great store by such matters.

And to reckon at the lowest, even if a mining accident did occur, and only of an ordinary scale, a mid-stage Foundation Establishment expert like Meng Jueming would hardly be in any real danger to his life.

Unless it were the nightmarish mine collapse of legend—and a mine collapse, of course, might not happen once in a thousand years. It need not be considered at all.

So it was that after his cold sweat, Meng Jueming quickly regained his composure. A mining accident, of all things—pure nonsense.

At that, Wei Zhao paused mid-step and glanced back at him mildly. "A dead end? I suppose so. After all, you know too much. If I don't bury you here today, it would be a great inconvenience to me."

Meng Jueming froze. He was just opening his mouth to sneer when his expression abruptly changed—the rock wall behind him had begun to tremble violently, and cracks were spreading across it, thread after thread of fierce, tyrannical true qi seeping out from within.

"Impossible! What devilry is this?" Meng Jueming was beside himself with terror. A moment ago he could still laugh off Wei Zhao's talk of a mining accident; now cracks were opening in the heavily warded tunnel walls, and the mining accident had become a reality before his eyes.

Sensing the danger, Meng Jueming turned and bolted without a moment's hesitation. With his mid-stage Foundation Establishment strength, he was confident he could weather an ordinary mining accident—but given the chance, he would of course rather put plenty of distance between himself and it.

Besides, however hard it was to believe, this mining accident was nine parts out of ten Wei Zhao's doing behind the scenes—any fool could see that—and if he took it lightly, he might well capsize in a ditch.

Meng Jueming's reaction was swift indeed, yet before he had run more than a few steps, the tunnel wall behind him exploded with a roar. At the same moment, the other twenty-two points Wei Zhao had probed burst apart as well.

Boom! The layers of protective formations laid over the mine collapsed in an instant. The vast No. 10 mine caved in with a thunderous crash; countless shards of rock flew in every direction, mingled here and there with no small amount of spirit jade. Even the roof of the tunnel began to come down in great collapsing sheets—a terrifying spectacle of the end of the world.

"Just as expected. Twenty-three true qi bombs detonating at once is more than enough to manufacture a mining accident!" Wei Zhao looked back at the scene and nodded to himself.

For a full three hours and more that afternoon, under the pretext of searching for the top-grade spirit eye, he had planted twenty-three true qi bombs in the tunnel walls right under Meng Jueming's nose. So long as they were detonated simultaneously, a mining accident could be engineered—and Meng Jueming buried here for good.

Such was Wei Zhao's plan. He had no way of knowing how much force it would take to pierce the various protective formations here, and so he had spent all that time pushing the power at his command to its very limit.

Twenty-three true qi bombs—that was the utmost Wei Zhao could control at present, for each one had to be held in check by his spiritual sense lest it detonate at once, and taken singly, each was far weaker than the top-grade true qi bomb he had used against Nan Tianyong. But the twenty-three together, in total true qi and in sheer destructive force, far surpassed that earlier strike—five times over at the very least. R1152