Chapter 4795 — Fool!
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Following the voice, he saw a middle-aged man watering flowers in the garden beside him—lean of build, commanding of presence, radiating an authority that overawed without any show of anger. This was Ren Zhongyuan's father, Ren Tiansuo.
"Fa—Father!" Ren Zhongyuan hastily arranged a respectful expression on his face. For all his swagger abroad, before this father, the chief alchemist, he ordinarily dared not even breathe too loudly.
"Mm." Ren Tiansuo gave a slight nod and went on carefully watering each plant and flower around him. These were rare spirit herbs he had paid a fortune to have brought in; any single one was priceless, and so he tended them with his own hands.
Only after he had carefully seen to every last spirit herb did Ren Tiansuo turn to look at his son. One glance and his brows knit at once: "You've been poisoned?"
"Yes." Ren Zhongyuan nodded, his face grim. It was a humiliation such as he had never known—a mere mid-Nascent Soul cultivator's casual wisp of true qi, and he could not dissolve it. Were word to get out, men would laugh their teeth loose.
"Come here." Ren Tiansuo laid his hand on the acupoint at his son's wrist and mused for a moment, then tried sending in a thread of true qi to neutralize it. The next instant his expression turned ugly. "Who did you meet, and what happened? Tell me everything from the beginning, not a single detail left out!"
Ren Zhongyuan had no choice but to comply. Starting from his first encounter with Wei Zhao, he recounted the whole affair, trembling with fear, not daring to embellish, able only to tell the truth word for word.
Such was the lesson he had learned from childhood: so long as he told the truth, his father would side with him no matter what happened. But if there were the slightest concealment or lie, it could never escape his father's eyes, and the outcome would be worse than this.
"Wei Zhao? Even a realist like Oda Ba holds him in such esteem—so this is quite a remarkable young man, is he?" Ren Tiansuo narrowed his eyes.
"From what I can see, Father, his methods are indeed unfathomable and strange—but all crooked, side-door tricks. That business with the navigation was probably a fluke. What's most hateful is that the brat would even poison a man in public—utterly treacherous and cunning!" Ren Zhongyuan ground his teeth in indignation.
"Hmph. Is that your summary?" Ren Tiansuo gave him a cold look.
"I..." The temperature around them dropped in an instant, and Ren Zhongyuan sensed at once that something was wrong. Yet that was truly what he thought—if he had not been careless and underestimated his foe, he would never have come off worse against Wei Zhao. Was he wrong?
"How did I, Ren Tiansuo, ever produce a fool like you—a frog at the bottom of a well, absurd in your arrogance!" Ren Tiansuo was exasperated at his failure to meet expectations. "Oda Ba has roamed the seas for three hundred years—do you suppose his judgment is inferior to yours? And you still think, even now, that you were merely poisoned?"
"Er—wasn't I?" Ren Zhongyuan was struck dumb by the words.
"Fool! A fool beyond saving! If it really were the poison qi of a heart-piercing sea anemone, you would have died dozens of times over by now. Do you truly believe a random turtle-breath pill would have done you any good? Have all the years of pharmacology I taught you gone to the dogs!" Ren Tiansuo cursed in a fury. He had truly never imagined that the son he had raised with such care could commit an error so crude and laughable. (To be continued.)