It was a strange fruit. The instant Zhang Tie saw it, several images flashed through his mind, as if he had seen this kind of fruit somewhere before.
The fruit's shape was simply too strange—so strange that it hardly looked like a fruit at all, but rather a complex three-dimensional pattern, utterly different from the other fruits Little Tree had produced for Zhang Tie.
The Seven-Power Fruits Little Tree had produced before were already very strange in shape, each resembling a tiny animal statue. Yet this fruit was stranger still. Its surface was entirely covered in a beautiful, intricate pattern made up of circles.
The moment he thought of the word "statue," Zhang Tie's spirits jolted. He finally understood why this fruit looked familiar—he really had seen it on a statue.
The image in Zhang Tie's mind stopped on the two lion statues outside the Clan Affairs Pavilion of Huaiyuan Hall. Lion statues were among the most common statues in the Hua Clan. Such statues were generally placed at the entrances of important institutions and organizations; some grand mansions also set a pair outside their gates. Among those lion statues, one would usually have a spherical object with circular patterns beneath its paw. And now Zhang Tie discovered, upon closer inspection, that the fruit growing on Little Tree was identical to the spherical object beneath the Hua Clan lion statues' paws.
Countless circular patterns linked together across the fruit's surface. Once these countless circles connected, a six-petaled flower naturally formed at the center of each circle, while the outer rim of each circle was also divided into interconnected petals similar to the six petals at its center. Every petal appeared in this circle and in that one. At first glance, it seemed simple, but upon closer examination, the pattern felt