Chapter 3857 — Arrival of a Newcomer
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Only one thing could truly exert absolute influence over the rankings: the final stage.
Though Wei Zhao harbored this suspicion, for safety's sake he still had to warn Xiao Che and Qiao Hongcai, so they would be mentally prepared—lest they rashly run into a Meng Zhou at the peak of early Foundation Establishment and lose badly.
Dodging the eyes and ears of the crowd, he quietly sent Little Curly Bear off. But when Wei Zhao returned to the cave dwelling, he found the caves below in a great uproar—nearly every newcomer of the Azure Cloud Pavilion had come out and gathered together, buzzing with talk.
"What's going on here? Are they announcing some new rule for the newcomer assessment?" Wei Zhao could not help but wonder.
In two months, this was the first time he had seen the place so lively. Not only were Meng Zhou and his lot raising a din, but Xiao Che and Qiao Hongcai seemed to be among them as well.
Baffled, Wei Zhao approached the crowd—and one glance stopped him dead. Among these Azure Cloud Pavilion newcomers there was, for the first time ever, a woman—and a rather comely one at that!
"A woman?" In two months on Cloud Terrace Island, this was only the second woman Wei Zhao had seen. No—strictly speaking, it was the first woman he had seen since arriving on the island.
Shangguan Lan'er was charming and cute, but she counted at most as a girl, far from the mature allure of a grown woman. This one before him, though… After two months of blending in, even a newcomer from the mortal realm like Wei Zhao had gained a rough understanding of conditions on Cloud Terrace Island. Under normal circumstances, apart from exceptional cases like Shangguan Lan'er, the female cultivators of the five great Heaven-Tier Islands were generally concentrated on the West Island. This was an unwritten rule of the teleportation arrays, and a rule within the native cultivation tribes as well; barring the second or third generation of cultivators from the various islands, there were generally no exceptions.
Which meant that gathering places for cultivators like the North Island invariably had far more men than women—a woeful imbalance.
The Welcome Pavilion was even worse. Were it not for that eldest daughter of the Shangguan clan occasionally dropping by to show her face, the newcomers here could go a whole year without laying eyes on a single woman.
A cultivator's self-control far surpassed ordinary folk; many had even grown indifferent to the pleasures of the flesh. Normally they would hardly pine for women. Yet most cultivators were, in the end, still normal people, and the attraction between the sexes was an instinct of nature.
As the saying goes, after long enough among a crowd of men, even a sow would start to look fine-featured. And what had appeared before the crowd was no sow, but a living, breathing woman—and a beauty at that!
Only—how had such a woman come to be here?
Wei Zhao was just giving in to his puzzlement when his long-suffering senior brother, Xiao Che, and Qiao Hongcai squeezed their way to his side. Wei Zhao could not help asking, "What's all this? Is she somebody's wife or daughter, brought along for fun?"
That was the most natural guess. If she were not here for amusement, as Shangguan Lan'er had been before, then could she possibly be a new disciple who had joined the Welcome Pavilion?
The Tri-Stack Pavilion of the North Island generally did not take female disciples, and even if an exception were made, it could not possibly be made at such a time. Wei Zhao's batch of newcomers had already been here over two months; joining in now—what would that even mean? (To be continued…)