Chapter 4191 — The Third Pavilion Master of the Welcome Pavilion

"Third Pavilion Master of the Welcome Pavilion?" Shangguan Lan'er tilted her head and thought it over, then reluctantly nodded. "That's more like it. Grandfather, you can't go back on your word, you know. Let's pinky-swear!"

"Fine, we'll pinky-swear. That old saying about daughters being outward-facing is truer than true." Shangguan Tianxia shook his head with a laugh of helpless exasperation. "But we agree on this first: this stays between you and me. You mustn't breathe a word of it to Wei Zhao ahead of time, understand?"

"I know!" Shangguan Lan'er stuck out her tongue cutely.

Several days later, the annual year-end tournament of the inner-sect disciples finally raised its curtain.

Following the notice he had just received, Wei Zhao made his way to the tournament grounds. The place was no stranger to him—it was North Island Arena, where he had once slain Su Zhaohe in a single move.

What surprised Wei Zhao immensely, however, was that this time he was not the only newcomer from the Welcome Pavilion taking part in the inner-sect tournament—Meng Zhou was there as well!

Gazing at the white-haired figure ahead in the distance, Wei Zhao was secretly startled. This fellow's strength had somehow reached the early Golden Core stage without his noticing. How was that possible?

Had his golden finger not been infallible, Wei Zhao would have suspected his own eyes were playing tricks on him. Lately Meng Zhou had been inseparable from Xu Lingchong, and Wei Zhao had rarely run into him at the Welcome Pavilion—it had been quite a long while since he had seen the man.

But the last time Xu Lingchong brought his people to corner him, Meng Zhou had been present too, and back then the fellow's strength was merely the mid Foundation Establishment stage. Now, less than two months later, he had become an early Golden Core expert—was that not a bit too uncanny?

Wei Zhao himself was a precedent for such madness, true, but his own rise had been forged by a succession of fortuitous encounters, top-grade elixirs, and all manner of heaven-defying golden fingers. Surely one could not claim Meng Zhou had that many hidden cards as well?

What astonished Wei Zhao even more was that Meng Zhou was now walking alongside Xu Lingchong, and amid their conversation, the word "dual cultivation" seemed faintly to come up.

Dual cultivation? Wei Zhao was instantly intrigued. The two of them were inseparable, always in each other's company—it did rather look that way. But the problem was, both of them were men! Even if Xu Lingchong had been snipped, that at most made him neither male nor female, not a woman by any stretch. How could the two of them dual cultivate? What a bizarre puzzle!

Beyond that, seeing Meng Zhou also taking part in the inner-sect tournament actually set Wei Zhao's mind at ease. It meant that even if his being forced into the tournament truly was Xu Lingchong's doing, this young master Xu at least had not yet reached the point of covering the sky with one hand—otherwise there would have been no need to drag Meng Zhou along as a foil.

Moreover, Wei Zhao actually felt little resistance to the inner-sect tournament itself. The core inner-sect disciples were all Golden Core experts, and this was a rare chance for real combat experience—he could not have asked for more.

Perhaps once the inner-sect tournament ended, the opportunity for a breakthrough would arrive, and he would surmount the bottleneck in one stroke to become an expert at the peak of the early Golden Core stage. That would be a fine thing indeed!

Arriving at North Island Arena, he found several dozen people already scattered across the surrounding stands, each of them standing like a deep pool or a mountain, not to be taken lightly. These were plainly all Golden Core experts.

There should be no idlers or riffraff here at such a time. Wei Zhao surmised that everyone present must be core disciples of the Sandie Pavilion taking part in this inner-sect tournament.

Though not everyone had arrived yet, a rough count of those gathered showed at least seventy Golden Core experts, and in the end there might well be eighty, or even close to a hundred.

Any single Golden Core expert sent out among other sect powers would be counted an elite. The Sandie Pavilion well deserved its name as the colossus straddling all of North Island—such deep foundations were truly no small matter.

In Wei Zhao's eyes, a power as vast as the Sandie Pavilion likely gave away nothing even to the top sects of Middle Island. From this one could see that the so-called five great heaven-tier islands—the other four were certainly not mere appendages of Middle Island.

The inner-sect disciples had not yet all arrived, so Wei Zhao, like the others already present, simply found an empty seat and sat quietly to wait, while keeping a careful eye on those around him. The opponents he would face next were among these people.

And while Wei Zhao was observing his opponents, the Welcome Pavilion newcomers' tournament, after several days of fierce contention, had finally drawn to a close.

Fierce it may have been, yet in truth the strong and weak were sharply divided. Even if everyone had started from the same line when they first arrived, after a year of jockeying, their strengths were now as different as heaven and earth.

Even setting aside monsters of the early Golden Core stage like Wei Zhao and Meng Zhou, the remaining newcomers were still clearly graded. Take the Qingyun Pavilion newcomers: Xiao Che, Qiao Hongcai, Li Zhengming, and Murong Zhen were all experts at the peak of the early Foundation Establishment stage, indisputably the first tier, with all the rest trailing behind.

Such being the facts, the results of the newcomers' tournament held no surprises. Xiao Che took the top seat without wind or wave, while Qiao Hongcai and Murong Zhen fought to a draw in which both were wounded, ending up tied for second, and as for Li Zhengming, he quietly placed fourth.

Given Li Zhengming's true strength and depth, even if one would not say he stood shoulder to shoulder with Xiao Che, he was at the very least in no way beneath Qiao Hongcai and Murong Zhen. He merely feared the sea of blood-debt upon him, dared not show too much of his edge, and deliberately held his strength in reserve.

So long as he could lock in a top-five place, he would become an official outer-sect disciple of the Qingyun Pavilion. As for that top seat everyone yearned for, he did not care for it in the least. Apart from strength, everything else was illusory.

In the end, Xiao Che, Qiao Hongcai, Murong Zhen, Li Zhengming, and one other Qingyun Pavilion newcomer together became official outer-sect disciples of the Qingyun Pavilion.

As for the newcomers who lost in the tournament, they could only stay at the Welcome Pavilion doing odd jobs, and those like Zha Wu who had never established a foundation fared even worse—they had been driven off to mine at the Lingyu Hall before the newcomers' tournament even began. A fate too miserable for words.

The final results of the Chongsheng Pavilion and the Xuanji Pavilion likewise came without a ripple. Worth noting was that several of those who had come up together from the mortal world—Kang Jingming and Zhong Yongliang of the Chongsheng Pavilion, and Dongfang Badao and the Wufa Boxing Master of the Xuanji Pavilion—all smoothly became official outer-sect disciples of their respective pavilions.

Add to that Xiao Che of the Qingyun Pavilion and Wei Zhao, that monstrous freak of overwhelming, heaven-defying talent, and never mind how those on the other islands fared—at least here in North Island, this batch of arrivals from the mortal world had shone brilliantly, in fact trampling the native newcomers of Yunjie Island quite beneath them, stirring no small talk in the streets and changing many opinions of the mortal world for the better. R1152