"Wait until I finish this cigarette!" The old face reader ignored Chen Jue, getting up on his own and strolling toward a nearby restroom as he smoked.
But he was gone for more than an hour. The sun had begun sinking in the west, and the last rays of sunset cast an unusual golden-red glow over Quanzhen Rock.
There were fewer and fewer tourists nearby. After all, night was approaching, and lingering on the mountain would mean nothing but freezing.
Unless, of course, they had booked rooms at a mountain hotel and planned to get up early the next morning to watch the sunrise over Mount Hua.
Chen Jue, however, remained patiently seated before the divination stall. Only when even the owner of the little shop beside it began packing up to head down the mountain did the old face reader emerge from somewhere, ambling over with his hands behind his back.
"Fellow Daoist, it's nearly dark. Why haven't you headed down the mountain while you still can? What's the point of hanging around an old fellow like me?" The old face reader dropped his earlier flippancy and sat back down at his stall, staring straight at Chen Jue with a serious expression.
"Senior Luo, you haven't finished my reading yet! So I've been waiting for you to come back." Chen Jue smiled. The moment he first saw the old face reader, he had noticed the perfectly rounded, restrained quality about him. He was clearly an accomplished Golden Elixir cultivator who had attained the Dao.
"Oh? You know me, fellow Daoist?" Old Man Luo put away the trendy eight-treasure tea he had been selling at his stall, then fished out a Golden Toad with several copper coins in its mouth from underneath and set it on the table.
"I learned