But today, this man was so clever it was astonishing. He had only just joined the sect and already discovered the Shadow-Sound Pearl. Deliberately using his impatience as an excuse to fly into a rage, he had brazenly destroyed it, then promptly laid out the benefits.
Even if the person on the other end had noticed the final scene, they would only assume some sudden mishap had occurred and that they had run into an ignorant hothead. They would never investigate further.
"Clever. Truly clever. Someone like you—I'd be damned if I didn't help you. I doubt even Heaven could stand by and watch."
The middle-aged scholar in Confucian robes took the ten Spirit Stones and put them into his Sumeru Ring, then lifted the purple-red gourd and took a hearty swig.
"I had no choice. Please don't hold what I did earlier against me."
Xu Yi's face was only so thick.
The middle-aged scholar waved his hand. "Don't give me that. If for no other reason, just for the first bit of extra income I've had outside my salary in twenty-three years, I'm damn well going to help you." He spoke through gritted teeth.
As it happened, he had been stuck in this position for more than twenty years precisely because he had offended someone.
Being pinned to one position wasn't frightening. What was frightening was being pinned to a position with no perks at all. Worse still, everyone else was raking in the spoils, while his superiors had planted a Shadow-Sound Pearl on his desk under the pretext of "earning people's trust," monitoring his every move.
After more than twenty years of this, even a normal person would have been driven to wildness.
The middle-aged scholar spent his days drinking himself senseless, a barely concealed outlet for his