adbindia Chapter 104 : Chapter 104
Chapter 104 : Chapter 104
Chapter 104: Song Chuhe’s Schemes Come to Nothing
Among the Divine Abilities he already had, there was nothing Li Mu urgently needed to raise any further.
But then he noticed an interesting one.
[A Trace of Heavenly Might]
Just unlocking it would cost 500 points.
That was not cheap, but Li Mu still chose to light it up.
[Consumed 500 Triumph Points. Learned “A Trace of Heavenly Might.”]
[A Trace of Heavenly Might: Summon a trace of heavenly might into the world and crush a region under overwhelming pressure. Its power is 10 times the current weight of Divine Weapon Art. Cooldown time: 2 minutes.]
The current weight of Divine Weapon Art was 3,870 jin.
Ten times that.
Which meant...
38,700 jin.
19.35 tons...
Even in the High-Martial World, that was not a weight a Sixth or Seventh Grade martial artist could casually withstand, was it?
At this point, he still had 3,675 Triumph Points left.
Li Mu looked through his Divine Abilities once more.
It seemed that Fiery Eyes and Golden Gaze had not been upgraded for quite a long time.
Come to think of it, although Fiery Eyes and Golden Gaze had no offensive power, it was still one of the Divine Abilities Li Mu used most often.
Li Mu immediately scrolled further down the skill tree.
Then, gritting his teeth, he spent 2,400 points and upgraded it six times.
[Routine Use: The True Qi consumption of Fiery Eyes and Golden Gaze is halved.]
[Countercalculation: After seeing through an enemy’s attack and counterattacking at that moment, True Qi strength is increased by 30%.]
[Thin Miasma: See through all illusions.]
[Cast Miasma: You may learn and cast any illusion you have previously seen through, in an even stronger form.]
[Clear Insight: With eyes open, observe the tiniest detail; with eyes closed, perceive everything around you.]
[Mastery of All Arts: When watching others fight, discern all of their strengths and blend them into your own abilities.]
It had to be said,
this really was one of the Great Sage’s signature abilities.
Every single upgrade even had its own little name!
It felt grand and imposing, while also being incredibly practical.
Aside from Clear Insight and Mastery of All Arts, which had cost more and together taken 1,200 points, the rest had been quite a bargain.
Compared with Blessed Field Art, this was indeed very cost-effective.
Li Mu could not wait to activate Fiery Eyes and Golden Gaze.
At once, everything before his eyes became extraordinarily clear.
Looking into the distance, he could see straight through the rear window of the car in front of them and make out the twenty-two flakes of dandruff on the shoulder of the person in the passenger seat...And when Li Mu closed his eyes, his perspective instantly changed into an all-around field of vision.
Within a radius of twenty meters in every direction—front, back, left, right—he had a full three hundred and sixty degrees of vision without a single blind spot.
And this perspective was not like looking down from above.
It was more like everything within that range was being projected directly into his brain.
He himself remained at the center, but nothing around him could escape his sight.
It felt more like a kind of...perception.
He had 1,275 points left.
Li Mu planned to save them for Divine Weapon Art for now.
As his cultivation rose, Divine Weapon Art was the thing that consumed the most scattered Triumph Points.
Not long after, Zhang Zhiwei brought Li Mu and Lu Chenfeng to a hotel owned by Zhang Group.
After washing up, the three of them all changed into clean clothes.
Li Mu did not stand on ceremony. He simply said that he needed a large batch of medicinal herb seeds.
At first, Zhang Zhiwei found that strange. Why seeds?
Would it not be easier for him to just give Li Mu the herbs directly?
But once he heard the quantities and types Li Mu wanted, he gave up on that idea immediately.
It was not that the herbs Li Mu wanted did not exist.
The issue was that many of them were herbaceous plants that needed decades to mature.
One had to understand that in the current market, even three- to five-year medicinal herbs were already considered highly potent.
Ten-year herbs were priceless and almost impossible to find.
As for herbaceous plants that had grown for several decades, unless one was talking about a major city that had begun developing its herbal medicine trade decades ago,
or certain ancient herb clans and deeply rooted factions, there was simply no way places like Ironhand City could supply them.
In a place like Ironhand City, even finding the seeds for such herbs was already no easy feat.
Zhang Group did not even consider doing business in herbs like these.
What a joke.
Plant them now and start making money several decades later?
That said, they did in fact resell seeds of this kind.
Some herb clans, factions, and research institutions possessed secret methods for accelerating the growth of seeds.
Those were the sorts of buyers these seeds were sold to.
After following Zhang Zhiwei around one of the group’s pharmaceutical companies for a while, Li Mu finally gathered all the seeds he needed.
If this batch of seeds matured successfully, he would be able to harvest at least ten pills each of Body-Fortifying Pill, Qi-Gathering Pill, and Earthvein Spirit Splendor Pill.
Of course, this batch of seeds alone was worth well over two million.
But Zhang Zhiwei made it clear that he would not allow Li Mu to pay.
Li Mu could not be bothered to put on airs about it.
What Zhang Zhiwei owed him was already far too tangled to sort out clearly.
At the same time, at Jinlin High School, inside the Student Council, almost every student who had participated in the Four-District Elite Tournament was present.
So were many of the school’s prominent students whose strength was above the Third Grade.
There were fifty or sixty people in the room in total, and the atmosphere was somewhat heavy.
Song Yan sat calmly in the seat of honor.
Her face was as cold and expressionless as fresh snow.
“Song Chuhe, have you made up your mind or not?”
one of the students asked impatiently.
Song Chuhe sat at the table with his hands clasped beneath his chin. He emerged from his thoughts
and gently shook his head.
“I oppose continuing the challenge against Blackwater High School.”
“The reason the competition was interrupted was the air-raid siren.”
“We already took seven of the top ten places. Capital has already taken notice of us.”
“We have already achieved most of our goal.”
“Three consortiums have already extended olive branches to us. That is the signal.”
“So I think the best choice is to let this matter end here.”
After speaking, Song Chuhe swept his gaze around the room.
This collective ranking-domination plan of Jinlin High School had been entirely orchestrated by him.
In order to win more benefits for his school, he had run all over the place, contacting school leadership, lobbying the student council’s resource backers, and mobilizing students to participate in the plan.
All of it had been his doing.
If the plan succeeded and Jinlin High School occupied the rankings across the board, it would inevitably cause a huge sensation.
Capital would come chasing after them in droves, and Jinlin High School would establish itself in one stroke as the top school in the entire city.
It would also bring enormous advantages for the students’ future admissions into university.
But Song Chuhe saw things very clearly. This incident had not gone perfectly, but it needed to stop here.
Obviously, Song Chuhe’s attitude made the students very dissatisfied.
“Song Chuhe, aren’t you a little too easily satisfied?”
“The organizers of the Ironhand City Elite Tournament came to us in person and asked us to continue the challenge.”
“If we offend them, how many more resources do you think you’ll still be able to pull in?”
someone asked coldly in return.
Song Chuhe frowned.
“What the organizers want is buzz. What they want is traffic! They are doing this for their own interests!”
“If we overestimate ourselves and insist on challenging Blackwater,” “then we’ll be the ones paying the price for the consequences!”
“When that time comes, the organizers won’t help us. If they do not kick us while we’re down, we’ll already be lucky!”
Several cold laughs immediately rang out from the crowd.
“Overestimate ourselves? Song Chuhe, aren’t you building up the enemy a little too much?”
The one speaking was Zheng Kuan, the same student who had challenged Li Mu at the competition.
Zheng Kuan said, “It’s obvious that Li Mu knew he couldn’t hold on to third place with his own strength.”
“So he conveniently used the air-raid siren as an excuse to run!”
“And now you’re saying we’re overestimating ourselves? So you mean we’re weaker than him?”
Zheng Kuan was the strongest supporter of continuing the challenge against Blackwater High School.
And it had to be him who did it.
Although Song Chuhe’s plan had been framed as serving the greater good, the personal benefits of sitting in the top five were also unimaginably huge.
And Zheng Kuan just so happened to be the one who had been about to challenge Li Mu.
If he succeeded in that challenge, he would become one of the top three in the entire city.
No one was more justified than he was in challenging Li Mu.
Now Song Chuhe was opposing the proposal, which was the same as blocking his road to wealth.
Song Chuhe said, “What I mean is that if we do not continue the challenge, we are actually in a more advantageous position.”
“Because everyone knows Li Mu and Lu Chenfeng never made a move, so no one knows the depth of their strength.”
“Some people will also speculate that they avoided battle, and that is a good thing.”
“It basically amounts to them having lost! And it does not really harm our interests.”
“But if we continue the challenge, then if—even if I only say if—we lose even one match, the result will be worse than it is now!”
By the end, Song Chuhe’s tone had grown somewhat urgent.
He wished he could break his words apart, grind them up, and force-feed them to these people.
There was one more thing he did not dare say.
That was that Li Mu’s Merit Points were absolutely higher than they imagined.
He might even already be an officer.
Otherwise, it would have been impossible for him to possess that kind of authority, with all the reservists following his lead.
But Song Chuhe did not dare say it aloud. He was afraid these people would drown him in their ridicule.
Trying to challenge an officer was absolutely no different from courting death.
“Hmph. All I know is that if we don’t continue the challenge,” “then people will only think our school is afraid of Blackwater!”
“The people from Blackwater High School didn’t do a damn thing, and they still get to sit securely in the top ten.”
“They’ll be laughing themselves awake in their dreams! I can’t accept something that grieves our own side and delights the enemy.”
Zheng Kuan spoke coldly.
Song Chuhe’s brows drew together tightly.
The enemy?
I put forward this plan for the sake of collective interests.
The other schools were merely the ones caught in our scheme.
If anyone really wanted to argue the point, the champions of the other two districts were the true victims—the ones squeezed out by sheer numbers.
What enemy was there to speak of?
But Song Chuhe could also see things clearly enough.
Zheng Kuan had already been blinded by personal gain.
His mind held nothing now except that top-three position in the whole city. No matter how much Song Chuhe said, no matter how reasonable he was, it would be useless.
So Song Chuhe stopped bothering with him and turned to look at Song Yan instead.
“Goddess Song, say something.”
He knew full well that although he had been the one to devise the plan, his strength was inferior to theirs, and these people looked down on him.
When he had lobbied the students to participate in the plan, he had first convinced Song Yan.
It was through Song Yan’s influence that things had progressed this far.
So he hoped Song Yan would step forward and speak.
Yet Song Yan seemed not to care in the slightest about what either side was saying.
Instead, she stared off in one direction and murmured coldly to herself,
“What kind of strength does a reserve officer have?”
“It should be... very interesting, shouldn’t it?”