Chapter 3563 — Allocation of Cultivation Caves
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 3
The Miserable Senior Brother sighed and went on: "For you newcomers, spirit jade is a hard thing to come by—apart from the single piece handed out each month, there's precious little chance of getting more. So what really decides the pace of your cultivation is your cave dwelling. With a good cave, your progress will race ahead a thousand li a day; with a poor one, it may be a little better than the outside world, but only just."
Though the Miserable Senior Brother addressed these words to Wei Zhao and Xiao Che, the others nearby could hear them as well, and for a moment every one of them fell silent without quite knowing why.
It was true that the ranking tournament would come after a month, but the starting line for this first month had already left them hopelessly strung out from one another. And the grass-roots rogue cultivators of Qingyun Pavilion were in any case far weaker than those of Chongtian Pavilion and Xuanji Pavilion. Seen this way, there might still seem to be a chance to flop over and turn one's fortunes around at the monthly ranking matches—but the difficulty of it was as steep as scaling the heavens.
Weak to begin with, then allotted the worst cultivation resources—when the tournament came they would win no better record, and so would remain ranked at the very bottom, and go on enjoying the worst resources. Thus the vicious cycle turned, the gap between them widening ever further; likely they would never turn things around in this lifetime. Clearly the debility of Qingyun Pavilion had been foreordained from the very start.
Just then Meng Zhou, up ahead, gave a sneering laugh. "Hey, even if we can't beat the lot from Chongtian Pavilion and Xuanji Pavilion, so long as I can make myself the strongest in Qingyun Pavilion, I'll still be able to rise higher in days to come. But as for you country bumpkins from the mundane world—I'd advise you to give up such impractical hopes, settle down, and get ready to spend a year doing hard labor. Hahaha!"
That was right—Qingyun Pavilion could never match Chongtian Pavilion and Xuanji Pavilion. But so long as one could trample one's own people underfoot, glory and fortune would still follow in days to come!
At Meng Zhou's words, the eyes of the Qingyun Pavilion newcomers all lit up, and they fixed their gazes on Wei Zhao and Xiao Che like hunters eyeing prey. One always picks the soft persimmons first—and these two country bumpkins from the mundane world were, needless to say, the softest of all.
Wei Zhao and Xiao Che exchanged a helpless glance. They had done nothing at all, yet for no reason had become the common target; such had been their lot ever since they arrived on Cloud Terrace Island. All told, it was a truly rotten piece of luck. But it did not matter—meet force with force, water with earth. Wei Zhao was a man who had fought his way up from the mundane world, so would he be afraid of this pack of local grass-roots cultivators who bullied the weak and feared the strong?
As they spoke, Meng Jueming at the very front had already come to a halt. There at the foot of the mountain lay a dense cluster of cultivation caves—fifteen in all, counted up, each one a small space no more than a man's height and generally about ten square zhang in area.