Chapter 4263 — Obtaining the Infant Ginseng
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
"That's utterly vicious! So Guo Dengtao and the others were all done in by him!" Huang Xiaotao was startled. Thinking it over carefully, it really was exactly so, and cold sweat broke out on her at once. Inwardly she rejoiced that Wei Zhao's judgment had been sound—had he not pulled her back in time, she would by now have become a stepping stone for the other man.
With Chu Bubai's cunning and depth, had Wei Zhao been anyone else, he would likely have been fooled as well. Then the five Golden Core experts would have become his pawns and tools, quietly and unassumingly tricked into the sacrifice for the infant ginseng.
Given the attacking power the infant ginseng had displayed before, an ordinary Golden Core expert going up against it had nothing to do but deliver himself to death. Once the five Golden Core experts were dead, no one would remain to compete with Chu Bubai, and at the same time the infant ginseng would lose its aggressiveness and become a truly ready-to-hand treasure of heaven and earth. That was a scheme to bag two birds with one stone, to gain two ends at one stroke!
Chu Bubai was a man who calculated every angle; from first to last he had laid a great trap, using the infant ginseng as bait, just waiting for the others to crawl inside. It was only a pity that for all his scheming, he had never reckoned that Wei Zhao would be so wary of him—that he and Huang Xiaotao would not charge forward at all, and that in the end he would be devoured and slain by the infant ginseng's backlash.
All that scheming, and in the end he had only benefited Wei Zhao and Huang Xiaotao. Had Chu Bubai known of it, he would surely have died with his eyes open in outrage.
"From the very start I could see there was something off about Chu Bubai, but I never imagined the man could be so venomous as to spend the lives of the five of us to clear his road for the infant ginseng. That heart of his is truly ruthless to a remarkable degree." Wei Zhao shook his head and sighed with emotion.
"But… Feng Hongyu was his Dao companion! How could he be so heartless?" Even in the aftermath of her fright, Huang Xiaotao still found it hard to believe.
"Before the infant ginseng, even a father and son or blood brothers will kill each other, let alone a mere Dao companion. Men of Chu Bubai's ambition think differently from the likes of us." Wei Zhao paused, then said with some regret, "It's only a pity about Guo Dengtao and Wang Feng. I didn't know them well, but one could see they were no sneaking villains—they simply ran into a teammate like Chu Bubai and were done to death for nothing."
At these words Huang Xiaotao too lowered her head in silent sorrow. She had survived because of Wei Zhao, but Guo Dengtao and Wang Feng and the others had had no one to save them.
Such was the cruelty of the world of cultivation. Wei Zhao could not possibly concern himself with the life and death of everyone; all he could do was look after those close to him. As for the rest, they could only fend for themselves and pray for good fortune.
"Still, that it takes the sacrifice of five Golden Core experts to strip it of its attacking power—this infant ginseng well deserves its name as the supreme of all spirit medicines." Seeing Huang Xiaotao's heavy mood, Wei Zhao changed the subject, weighing the infant ginseng in his hand.
"Indeed. No wonder one never even hears of infant ginseng on the market. It's already so rare and hard to find, and on top of that it costs the lives of five Golden Core experts—the difficulty is truly beyond imagining. If gathering it were always this hard, how many people would have to die!" Huang Xiaotao's attention was indeed diverted, and she covered her small mouth in astonishment.
"It needn't necessarily require sacrificing five Golden Core experts, though. That should be a rather unconventional method. Killing it outright as we did just now is probably the mainstream approach." Wei Zhao mused. (To be continued…)