Chapter 4899 — One of the Three Fairies

"So he can't even take a hit..." Wei Zhao watched the scene and shook his head with some regret. He had already worked out in his mind a brand-new move combining four attributes, just waiting for the fellow to show a bit of backbone and break through the encirclement—and yet the man had gone and passed out cold. What a letdown.

If Chang Laiting could have heard that remark, he would likely have died of sheer fury even while awake. As it was, he had already grasped the gap between their strengths: Wei Zhao could match him evenly with a mere dual-attribute martial technique, and the moment he brought out a three-attribute one, Chang Laiting was no match at all.

That a piece of Northern Island trash should be a Three-Spirit Profound Ascension expert just like himself—had he not experienced it firsthand, Chang Laiting would never have believed it. And if he had known that Wei Zhao was an unprecedented Eight-Spirit Profound Ascension expert, one who was planning to use him as a sparring partner to test moves one after another, there was no telling what expression the fellow would have worn—at the very least, he would surely have wished himself dead.

"Master Lin, you're actually a Three-Spirit Profound Ascension expert too—that's incredible!" Lu Xiaozhong sidled over with a look of awe. He had wanted to fuse three spirit roots at once himself, but the tribulation lightning had lacked sufficient power, and in the end he had fused only two before hastily calling it off; knowing full well how fearsome the difficulty was, he admired Wei Zhao all the more.

The fellow had not witnessed the scene where Wei Zhao's casual bolt of lightning rivaled a tribulation thunderbolt. Otherwise he would surely have taken it as matter-of-factly as Wang Xinyan and Huang Xiaotao did.

Wei Zhao smiled without taking it to heart, his gaze falling on the woman named Ni Caiyue. At that moment she was staring blankly at Chang Laiting, who lay not far from her. This was one of the Four Young Masters of the Nascent Soul stage—someone whose early Profound Ascension strength was at least comparable to the mid Profound Ascension stage. How had he been so easily beaten to the ground?

Ni Caiyue stood stunned for a long while, then suddenly smacked her own head as it came to her: since Chang Laiting had been knocked unconscious, didn't that mean she could escape?

But when she looked up and saw that all four of them were studying her, Ni Caiyue at once became somewhat fidgety. She certainly wanted to flee right now, but she felt that simply leaving without even a word of farewell seemed a bit improper.

Whatever their motives, they had after all helped her by knocking out that bastard Chang Laiting—otherwise how could she have been so easily freed from her predicament? Before leaving, she ought at least to thank them. The problem was, how did one go about thanking someone in the cultivation world?

After pondering for a long while, Ni Caiyue's eyes finally lit up. Having settled on her words, she turned back to Wei Zhao and said, "This young woman thanks the young hero for saving her life!"

With that she even gave Wei Zhao a proper bow. But who would have thought that as she bent at the waist, the veil covering her face slipped right off—after all, she had been chased the whole way by Chang Laiting, and the fastenings on either side of the veil had long since worked loose. It would have been stranger still if it had stayed on when she bowed.

Wei Zhao and the others stared at her blankly, feeling their eyes light up. They had already guessed that this woman must be no ordinary beauty, but now that they saw this stunning face, they realized at once that they had greatly underestimated her.

Such looks and bearing were far more than merely uncommon—she was a peerless beauty of the mortal world, and even set beside Wang Xinyan and Huang Xiaotao she was in no way inferior!

What was more, her air was on the cute side—"kawaii," as they said in the secular world—the sort that easily stirred a man's urge to protect her. Even Wang Xinyan and Huang Xiaotao could not help feeling a pang of tender pity at the sight. It was truly beyond them how a creature like Chang Laiting could bear to seize such a woman—and by status, no less, his own dao companion!

"Oh no!" Ni Caiyue froze for a moment, then, realizing the trouble, hurriedly snatched the veil up from the ground and without a second thought tried to plaster it back onto her face. But under the gaze of so many people she grew flustered, and the more flustered she became, the less it would stick.

Wei Zhao and the others exchanged a speechless look. Weren't these veils simply fastened on with the clasps at the sides? Who on earth just mashed one straight onto their face? It wasn't a human-skin mask, after all...

While they stood there speechless, Ni Caiyue over there had already worked herself into a frantic spin, pacing in circles and muttering aloud all the while: "What do I do! What do I do! Master said that when traveling abroad I must never let other men see me—if they see me, I'm no longer pure! Oh no, I'm not pure anymore!"

Wei Zhao and the others could only press their palms to their foreheads in silence, exchanging glances and at a loss for what to say, the same question rising in every mind: Was this woman a child going out into the world for the first time?

Spinning about in her panic, Ni Caiyue happened to plant her foot right on Chang Laiting's face. In her confusion she did not register it in time, and even gave it an instinctive kick. "What's this soft stone doing here?"

At such a sight, Wei Zhao and Wang Xinyan truly could not utter a single word. Setting her looks aside, this woman was an absolute oddity of the cultivation world. What kind of academy could be so outlandish as to produce a child whose mental age did not exceed seven?

"Master Lin, do you think there's something wrong with this woman's head?" Lu Xiaozhong asked in a low voice, waggling his eyebrows.

"Uh... her head should be fine, I'd say. She's probably just shut herself away in cultivation since childhood and rarely gone out..." Wei Zhao offered a fairly fair assessment.

In terms of strength, this woman was already at the early Profound Ascension stage; for an ordinary cultivator, that would mean she was at least several hundred years old. Yet from her behavior she was nothing but a clumsy child. One would probably find such a person only here in the Eastern Continent.

After all, only the Eastern Continent's academies had the means to cultivate a girl utterly ignorant of the world into a Profound Ascension expert—and one could be certain this woman's background was no small matter. Otherwise, forget advancing to Profound Ascension; she would have been hard pressed even to survive, long since trampled to death by disciples of other academies.

"Ni Caiyue..." Wang Xinyan frowned at this point and turned to ask the others in a low voice, "Didn't Chang Laiting call her Fairy Ni just now?"

"You mean she's one of the Three Fairies too?" Wei Zhao caught on at once. Whatever else might be said, this woman's beauty was indeed enough to stand alongside Wang Xinyan and Huo Yudie—she was a worthy member of the Three Fairies.

"That can't be right. Apart from Miss Wang and Miss Huo, isn't the other one of the Three Fairies Tong Caiyun of the Donghua Academy?" Lu Xiaozhong said in puzzlement. He was a true native of the Eastern Continent, and any man there could rattle off the Three Fairies of the Gaolin Sea Region like family treasures. Even if he was not as lovesick as some, he was hardly so ignorant as to not know their names.

"That was the version from a year ago. I hear Tong Caiyun went on ahead to the Mystic Tier Sea Region, so her place among the Three Fairies was filled by her junior sister. If I remember correctly, her name was something like Ni Caiyue," Wang Xinyan said after a moment's recollection.