"Xiao Hua, you little bastard, you've gone too far!" Zhong Peiyuan's furious, exasperated voice followed close behind.
"I've had my fun today. Consider this little punishment a warning for the Zhong family!" With that, Xiao Hua whistled away from one side of Zhongling Mountain Villa.
Just how did the family head provoke this plague god? Zhong Yu hated Xiao Hua so much his teeth itched. For more than a month, he had stood night watch every night, terrified that something might go wrong—yet disaster had still struck today!
As for Xiao Hua, over the past several dozen days, he had gone west of Fortune City and inspected everything within several hundred li. He had also distributed many fine seeds from his space, leaving him deeply satisfied. Today, while passing Zhongling Mountain Villa on his return, he used the Method of Earth Evasion to visit the ancestral hall again. Yet the hall's defenses were extremely tight, and Zhong Tianyao was even personally guarding it. Xiao Hua immediately knew that, aside from the gold foil, the Zhong family's ancestral hall must contain other hidden things.
Thus, Xiao Hua wandered elsewhere with great interest, intending to do something that would disgust Zhong Tianyao. Who would have thought that the entirety of Zhongling Mountain Villa was so heavily guarded? It seemed patrolling disciples were everywhere. Since Xiao Hua did not wish to make things difficult for those low-level disciples, he headed southwest.
That southwestern area appeared sparsely populated and lightly guarded. Yet upon careful inspection, Xiao Hua discovered an exceedingly formidable restriction underground. After breaking through it and entering, he found a remarkably complete artifact-refining facility—and Zhong Peiyuan was inside as well!
"Damn it, I only swiped some of their artifact-refining materials in passing. That hardly counts as a lesson!" Xiao Hua was somewhat