Chapter 180: Assuaging Feelings
Zou Tian stood anxiously outside the Trials Pagoda. With a new day dawning, someone needed to make use of the facility, and Yang Xiu had decreed that, barring someone with a specific need, she would choose the order of entry based on cultivation strength. She and Yang Ru, obviously the strongest members of the sect, had already had a turn, so the next logical choice was Wan Ai.
Who had promptly refused.
It had been funny watching his sweetheart, who never stood up for herself ever, squaring off against Yang Xiu and adamantly rejecting the choice. Wan Ai would work for each advance she received, “Thank you very much.”
Zou Tian would seek to change her opinion about that stance, but he’d have to approach the subject carefully. The Trials Pagoda was too big of an advantage to pass up, and as she was the lead alchemist, the sect needed her to improve as quickly as she could.
He suspected, though, that her main problem was fear. She didn’t want to be the first to fail and the attention that would come along with something like that happening to her.
Understandable. As he stood in front of the Pagoda, that fear was way, way too understandable.
Yang Xiu and Yang Ru had breezed through their trials. Of course. What were the chances of either of them failing at anything ever? They each had more talent in their pinky toes than Zou Tian had total, though.
Failure was definitely an option for him.
He’d tried to refuse the honor and had even had a good excuse. Both the expert blacksmith, Xun Wu, and his apprentice, Shi Long, were also in the seventh minor realm of Qi Gathering, and all three of them were anticipated to break through to the eight minor realm in a relatively close time frame. The thing was that both of the other two were likely to advance before Zou Tian, a month for Xun Wu and a couple of weeks for Shi Long.
Therefore, Xun Wu deserved the honor based on being higher in terms of cultivation.
The problem was that Yang Xiu believed they needed martially inclined members to advance much more than they needed blacksmiths, and no one, not even Yang Ru or Kang Lin, could convince her otherwise. Maybe, if Xun Wu or Shi Long had fought for the opportunity, one of them could have changed Senior Sister’s mind, but neither of them seemed to care one way or the other.
Which left Zou Tian stuck with accepting the honor.