Chapter 3676 — A Stockpile, and a Failure
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
And with such a stockpile of herbs laid in, though it would still be unavoidable now and then to gather some particular ingredient on the fly, at least a good deal of pointless trouble could be spared. No longer would he have to dash about from place to place for a handful of basic herbs, wasting far too much energy on it.
At noon the next day, Wei Zhao appeared at Three Streams Mouth as agreed.
He had assumed Xiao Che and Qiao Hongcai would arrive before long as well. True, the dense forest of the back mountain made it hard to fix one's position, but the spot he had chosen, Three Streams Mouth, was nothing if not distinctive. Xiao Che and the other man were, by any reckoning, Heaven-Rank Great Perfection adepts by now—surely they were not so useless as to fail at even this?
Yet Wei Zhao wandered about near Three Streams Mouth and waited a full hour, and still not a shadow of either man appeared. A mutter of unease stirred in his heart: had the two of them run into some trouble?
If one had come quickly and the other slowly, that would have been understandable. Out here on the fringes of the back mountain, the unexpected could happen at any turn; failing to reach a destination on schedule was entirely normal. But for both men to be missing—now that was a problem.
"Could Meng Zhou and his lot have struck at them early?" A small stir passed through Wei Zhao's mind.
Judged by the timing, the last day of the newcomers' return journey to the Back Mountain Hall was the moment to strike for maximum gain. But then again, at such a time any newcomer would be doubly on guard and would not easily leave an opening.
And if one did the opposite—moved the attack a little earlier—the haul would be somewhat smaller, but the target could be caught completely off guard. That was by no means a bad choice either.
From how they had behaved before the trial, Meng Zhou and his crew were certainly looking for a chance to strike. Wei Zhao had assumed that their first target would be himself—after all, he had always been the thorn in their side and the ache in their flesh—but it had never occurred to him that they might go after Xiao Che and Qiao Hongcai first.
So they knew to pick the softest persimmon. If this guess was right, then the fellow Meng Zhou had actually learned a thing or two!
If he dared bring his men to block Wei Zhao's path directly, Wei Zhao would not mind giving him a proper lesson in why flowers bloom red. But if he skipped over Wei Zhao and went straight for Xiao Che and Qiao Hongcai, then even Wei Zhao, for the moment, could not think of a fitting countermeasure.
The most troublesome part of it was this: Wei Zhao had no idea where Xiao Che and Qiao Hongcai were right now!
One had to remember there was no such thing as a mobile phone on Cloud Terrace Island—and even if there were, there would be no signal. And if he went charging off to search now, quite apart from the slender odds of finding two men in this vast mountain forest, what if his guess was wrong?
If Xiao Che and Qiao Hongcai had merely been delayed by some other trouble, then for Wei Zhao to leave Three Streams Mouth now would be to miss them in good earnest.
Three Streams Mouth was one of the few places on the map provided by the Back Mountain Hall that was easy to identify. Since the three of them had chosen it as a rendezvous, what about Meng Zhou and his people? They had numbers on their side, and a large group had even more need of a highly recognizable meeting point—would they not come here too?
And if the guess was wrong, and Wei Zhao now rashly left this place to search for the two, then when Xiao Che and Qiao Hongcai finally arrived here after untold hardships, their situation would only be the more dangerous!
After turning it over for a while, Wei Zhao at last chose to wait another half day at Three Streams Mouth. It was the wisest choice available to him at this moment.