Yet in the three years he had spent on Cloud Terrace Island, his strength had surged and his views had shifted along with it. However one looked at it, he could no longer be counted an ordinary man of the secular world; as his level changed, so too did his horizons and his angle of vision. To stubbornly cling to the values of an ordinary man was not only unscientific but wholly out of keeping with the world he now moved in.

He remembered how, back in the secular world, having several girlfriends at once had been scandalous beyond words—yet on Cloud Terrace Island, strength commanded all respect. A man like Zhang Liju with several wives bore no stigma at all; on the contrary, he was looked up to and talked of with relish, and no one had ever called it improper.

In the end it came down to a shift in thinking. Wei Zhao had been a textbook product of secular values, convinced that monogamy alone was fairest and most reasonable. But as time went on he found he no longer minded; love between man and woman was a thing that followed its natural course, neither to be forced nor firmly refused.

Cultivation was not merely a matter of power; more important was the cultivation of the heart. As the saying went, the Dao follows nature, and the highest good is like water. The higher one's level, the more broadly one saw things, and the fewer one's obsessions. This imperceptible shift in Wei Zhao's thinking was itself a kind of transformation.

After all, it was not only Zhang Liju—even the top-tier figures he revered, men like Shangguan Tianhua, had more than one wife. And it was precisely because he had come to see things this way that he could accept Huang Xiaotao, Ning Xuefei, and Huo Yudie as a matter of course, and that he now pursued Leng Leng as he did.

Setting aside the fact that his starting point was to sound her out for information, Leng Leng herself was a girl who invited tenderness. A fair maiden is a gentleman's natural quarry; to claim he felt not the slightest impulse in that direction would be pure self-deception.

As these strange feelings stirred in Wei Zhao's heart, Leng Leng, who was sitting almost pressed against him, felt much the same. Given her cold nature, she would never normally let anyone come this close, yet for some reason she did not recoil from this slightly intimate gesture—just as she had not back on the bus.

She even found the feeling faintly warm and sweet. Stealing a glance at the young couple nearby, also huddled together over a phone, Leng Leng felt her pretty face flush.

Wei Zhao soon noticed this and glanced at her with some surprise. Once this little ice girl really warmed up to someone, she seemed fairly uninhibited—could she be the classic cold outside, passionate within?

They were sitting so close that when Wei Zhao turned his head, she could feel his breath distinctly. Leng Leng finally grew flustered; with a small cry she hurriedly edged a step away.

"What's the matter?" Wei Zhao asked, feigning bewilderment.

"N-nothing. Let's just go to the jade market—the phone business can wait." Leng Leng's expression held a note of embarrassment. Though she did not mind this intimate yet not excessive contact, she was still shy at heart.

The crux was that she knew she and Wei Zhao could never be together, and so she truly did not want to give him the wrong idea. To offer someone a misty hope for what was plainly impossible, only to snuff it out with one's own hands—nothing in the world was crueler than that.

"All right." Wei Zhao felt a touch of regret, but such things could not be rushed. To have made such intimate contact today was already a rare breakthrough; had she gone further just like that, he would have been astonished. As things stood, it was quite good enough.

The two set off for the jade market. Despite the name, it did not sell only jade; there were gold and silver jewelry shops and even curios, calligraphy, and paintings. To be precise, this was a jewelry street.

Xima was, after all, only a small county-level city, not a metropolis like Donghai with its clusters of shopping districts and malls where one could buy nearly anything one wanted. Here every sort of jewelry, jade, curio, and painting was concentrated on a single street—the only way to draw enough foot traffic.

"I honestly wouldn't have guessed. Tiny little Xima actually has a jewelry street of this scale, with no shortage of shops selling jade and curios. Coming here today was the right call." Wei Zhao stood at the entrance, somewhat surprised.

In the secular world nowadays, even the smallest city was sure to have all kinds of jewelry stores, but shops dealing in jade and curios were far fewer—not every small city had them. Judging by the scale here, Xima could almost rival some major cities, a sign of how brisk its commercial life was. That was rare enough.

"Mm, there really are so many." Leng Leng echoed his delight. In the Taigu Minor Jianghu, at least, there was no jewelry market this bustling. She had not held out much hope of finding spirit jade today—the odds were bound to be infinitesimal—but with so many stalls and shops here, with a little luck she might truly gain something!

The two plunged into the crowd and began browsing the jewelry street. Wei Zhao was purely killing time, knowing there would be nothing good here and that spirit jade was sheer fantasy. But Leng Leng took it seriously; to her mind, if Wei Zhao could pick up a top-grade spirit jade by chance, one would lead to two, and she must search shop by shop in earnest.

Gold and silver jewelry, of course, she did not so much as glance at. She looked only at jade, and wished she could take every piece in hand to feel it—only thus could she judge accurately whether it held spiritual energy.

But this made her behavior rather odd. Who went through every piece of jade on a stall and then bought not a single one?

The stall owners were puzzled, but they were in business, and Leng Leng was a rare beauty; having a few pieces of jade handled cost them nothing, so they swallowed their complaints—though their expressions remained rather strange.

Leng Leng paid no mind to the reactions of these irrelevant bystanders, but she did fear Wei Zhao might grow suspicious. True, she had already been full of holes earlier, but caught up as she was in her own affairs, she assumed Wei Zhao had noticed nothing amiss.

She absolutely had to search carefully for the spirit jade, but at this rate Wei Zhao was bound to ask just what she was looking for. How was she to fob him off then?

As Leng Leng stewed over this, Wei Zhao suddenly proposed, "The jade you're after is probably something like the piece I gave you before, right? This jewelry street is too big—searching shop by shop, who knows how long it'll take. Why don't we just split up? It'll be faster, and we can still make it to lunch on time. What do you think?"

"All right." Leng Leng could not have asked for more. The two went their separate ways at once, and Leng Leng continued searching stall by stall—yet from one end of the street to the other she found nothing at all. There was no lack of jade here, but not a single piece truly held spiritual energy; not one came anywhere near being spirit jade.