"No one's around," Wen Jifei said.
Returning straight to their cave under those circumstances would have been foolish, of course. The group walked through the mountains for quite a while, finally shaking off anyone who might have suspected and tracked them, before stopping in a clearing deep within a dense forest.
"Quick, take it out and let's have a look! I haven't even seen one yet," Wen Jifei said excitedly, rubbing his hands together.
"Yeah, just one look, Qingzi," He Tangtang chimed in, crowding close. "That thing must be worth forty or fifty source energy blocks, right? How is it? Is it big?!"
Right then, even Shen Yixiu leaned forward in her full suit of iron armor, looking at Han Qingyu with eager anticipation. "Can you let me touch it?"
Han Qingyu stood there, lost in thought.
"Oh, so you did get it! You just hid it away to keep people from backing out and fighting again the moment the metal block appeared."
Yin Caixin stood by, wearing a pensive expression as she murmured to herself, then squeezed in past Shen Yixiu's shoulder, looking up at Han Qingyu expectantly.
Should he tell them?
Actually, as far as the other three were concerned, Han Qingyu felt it wouldn't matter much if he told them now. He had already revealed to Rusty Sister that he was essentially a gas canister, and as for Wen Jifei, it was merely that the occasion had never come up.
The problem was that Yin Caixin was here. She was a foreigner. That single reason, combined at most with the fact that they weren't very close yet, was enough to rule her out.
Aside from that, the fact that she was a girl, that Wen Jifei said she could be considered very pretty, or that she was a bit foolish—none of those factors had any significance, nor could they influence Han Qingyu's judgment in the slightest.
"There really wasn't one. How can I show you something that isn't there?" Han Qingyu looked helpless, spreading his hands. "Why does everyone think I got it?"
Wen Jifei nodded, straightening his upper body and widening his eyes. "Obviously! Going by your usual track record, if you weren't certain you could get it, would you ever volunteer to have everyone leave it to luck?! Only a ghost would believe you."
"Exactly," He Tangtang agreed. "If you hadn't gotten it, would you have just walked away like that in the end?! You'd have pinned every single person down and stripped them bare to search them."
Those two bastards could be ignored for now. Han Qingyu paid them no heed and turned to Shen Yixiu, hoping for trust from the iron armor.
"I... I thought you wanted to try your luck first, and then if it didn't end up being ours, you'd turn hostile and fight," Rusty Sister said earnestly. "I was getting ready to make a move."
So Rusty Sister's point was the same: she still thought Han Qingyu had gotten it, or else the whole matter could never have ended so peacefully.
Han Qingyu: "..." Is that really what I look like to you people?
On the spot, only Yin Caixin raised her hand. "I kind of believe you. Under those circumstances just now, you didn't have the time or the opportunity to hide it, right? How could you hide it with so many people watching?"
"There was a way! In fact, I thought of it back then," Wen Jifei said. "If it were me, I'd press my face right against the water's surface, shouting babble while groping around. The moment I felt it, I'd shove it straight into my mouth under the water... If that didn't work, I'd swallow it first, and then..."
Then he startled himself. "Could someone actually have done that?!"
"Stop talking, Brother Plague Chicken," He Tangtang said, smacking Wen Jifei's shoulder with the back of his hand and whispering, "Keep talking and Qingzi might go back and slice them all open to check. Most of them are allies; that wouldn't be good."
Amid their laughter, the nonsense finally derailed the topic for the moment.
Han Qingyu fell silent for a moment.
"All right, stop guessing wildly. There probably really wasn't one there," he said. "Let's move. Finding the other piece is what matters." With that, he took the lead and walked forward.
Actually, he had said "the other piece."
Wen Jifei caught the slip. He thought for a moment: since Qingzi had decided to keep it secret, then... He didn't speak up.
He only wondered to himself: Did Qingzi discover something... Is Yin Caixin actually a spy? A spy this dumb? That really is terrifying.
...
The trial grounds were far too vast, and the terrain was overly complex.
When an ordinary squad operated, the first priority was to maintain concealment and avoid running into overly large groups. At the same time, the personnel of every team were largely moving and hiding, on guard against one another.
Just like that, walking from morning until dusk, Han Qingyu and his squad still gained no information regarding the other metal block.
"If it comes down to this, we'll have to take down the Great Spike in the end to get that piece and the bonus metal block that comes with it."
A metal block consumed by Han Qingyu could not be spat back out, nor could it be channeled into others. The only thing he could channel into others was the liquid source energy absorbed from blue crystal blocks.
Therefore, for the sake of Rusty Sister and the others' survival and growth, he couldn't just directly consume them all. He had to keep one or two physical blocks to take back and refine into blue crystal blocks.
On this point, he had also inquired in advance: for metal blocks obtained from competitions and trials like this, taking them back to have the research institute refine them would incur only a ten-percent fee for labor and material costs, unlike the routine battlefield spoils of ordinary squads, where the institute took the lion's share.
Ten percent still pinched, but it was just barely acceptable.
"Come look, Qingzi." The five of them lay prone in the grass in a fan formation. Wen Jifei jerked his chin downward.
Han Qingyu slid over and took a look.
Far below, members of the Alphonse family were collecting corpses.
It was said that by today, the fourth day of the trial, more than thirty people had already died. A two percent casualty rate—was that high? One could argue it wasn't, but this was a trial, not a war. Wasn't it a pity for people to die or be injured like this?
In his field of view, two figures dressed in black silently slipped the corpse into a bag and carried it away.
The hosts handling the cleanup of corpses seemed beyond reproach in principle, yet for some reason Han Qingyu felt something was off... But if asked to pinpoint what was wrong, he couldn't explain it.
In the end, all he could do was refocus his attention on the metal blocks while remaining a bit more vigilant.
No matter what, throughout the decades of repeated trials, the vast majority of participants had ultimately walked away safe and sound, and almost every time, someone had won and claimed the rewards.
"Let's head back." The sky had darkened, and Han Qingyu called for a return to the cave.
On the way back, they happened to pass near the cave where they had stayed before.
Then they all paused, freezing in place.
"Why not give it back to him, Qingzi? Maybe that spear is very important to him," Shen Yixiu said after watching from a distance for a while.
On the opposite hillside, that black-clad figure was searching under the bushes again and again. Sometimes he stood observing; sometimes he crawled entirely beneath the undergrowth, disappearing for quite a while before popping up somewhere else.
"Has he been looking all day?" Yin Caixin asked.
"Afraid that if he doesn't bring it back, that old auntie will give him trouble." Wen Jifei had already seen Wu Xu's status among their group that morning, and he had also learned earlier that Wu Xu had been left behind to hold off enemies—one man against more than twenty, while not a single teammate looked back.
It was baffling and lamentable, but it was someone else's affair; they ultimately had no way to intervene.
"Is this guy an idiot?!" As a man, He Tangtang felt indignant on his behalf, saying in exasperation, "Or did he eat some slow-acting poison from that auntie's family and have to take an antidote regularly?"
That was common logic in wuxia stories, but in reality, of course it didn't exist.
No one could understand.
With this guy's combat skills, if he went to Azure and was equipped with a ninth-generation apparatus, by the time he graduated from recruit camp, every squad would be fighting tooth and nail over him.
Han Qingyu raised a hand, motioning for the others to stay hidden on this mountain, and then descended the slope alone before climbing up the opposite side.
Hearing the movement, Wu Xu looked back. Seeing it was him, he lowered the dual blades in his hands slightly.
Han Qingyu took no defensive stance. Pausing a few paces away for a few seconds, he asked, "Did you find it?"
Wu Xu shook his head.
"Actually, I was just bluffing this morning. I didn't throw the spear away... Don't get agitated yet; in your current condition, you definitely can't beat me." Laying it out plainly, Han Qingyu stepped forward instead of back. "Answer a few questions for me. If you answer, I'll return it to you."
Wu Xu looked at him, thought for a moment, and nodded.
"Your name is Wu Xu? Which Xu?"
"'Heart' and 'blood.'"
"Oh, the xu for compassion." Han Qingyu thought to himself that ordinary people would rarely use such a character for a name. Pausing, he asked, "What is your identity? Can you say?"
Wu Xu began to shake his head, then hesitated halfway.
"A war slave of the Yu clan," he said.
A war slave? Han Qingyu froze for a second, then asked several more questions in succession. When he finally got clear answers, he found it somewhat hard to accept. It was already the nineties—could such people really still exist?
This was utterly dehumanizing.
"Any interest in coming to our Azure?" he asked.
Wu Xu looked at him and shook his head.
"...Fair enough." Han Qingyu straightened up. He didn't believe he could alter the thinking and logic drilled into a person bound since childhood. Feeling some regret but helpless, he said, "I can't bring you back to my hiding place, and it's a bit far from here... How about this: follow us for a stretch, and then I'll go fetch it and return it to you."
Wu Xu looked at him for a few seconds, then finally gave a nod.
He waited for Han Qingyu to start walking, then trailed behind at a distance of about twenty to thirty meters. Even when Shen Yixiu and the others appeared later, his stance didn't tense, nor did his behavior change; he simply kept following.
Finally, having him wait in a river valley, Han Qingyu returned to the cave alone, fetched the black spear, and tossed it back to him.
This was the first time Han Qingyu had ever returned something he had plundered to someone else. If asked for a reason, he couldn't quite explain it. Perhaps it was simply because in Wu Xu, he saw what survival looked like at its most grueling.
"That medicine—you can use it," he said.
"Mm... Thank you." The medicine was in his pocket, and Wu Xu decided to use it. Han Qingyu's demeanor convinced him that this person wouldn't stoop to underhanded tricks.
After a brief pause, he raised the black spear in his hands and said to Han Qingyu, "Actually, this spear is inauspicious. Its name is Binggu."
With that, he squatted down toward the ground, seeming to set something down, then turned silently and vanished into the dark woods.
Han Qingyu waited until he had gone far off before stepping forward to look.
On the ground lay, unexpectedly, a silver dollar.
And a hole was bored through it, as though it was normally worn hanging on a cord.
"Is this payment for the medicine, or a token of thanks?"
Though he was worth a hundred thousand now, in the spirit of diligence and frugality, Han Qingyu still picked up the silver dollar, blew on it, and listened to the ring. Finding nothing unusual about it, he slipped it into his pocket.
Chapter 134