Chapter 3651 — More Than Expected
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
"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!