Chapter Ninety-Six: Yang Dawei’s Sincere Intentions

After a round of affirmatives on the other end of the line, the call finally ended.

Yang Dawei’s coming over so quickly to express his thanks was not surprising; what remained to be seen was just what form that gratitude would take.

At the moment, Wu You was once again at his sketchboard, drawing and revising, erasing and redrawing. Many of his ideas went through several rounds of alteration before taking shape.

Even the blue whale he had captured last time, along with a number of other comparatively rare materials, each had several possible alchemical formulas.

That blue whale had been chosen with a target of at least silver rank in mind.

And this giant squid, caught by chance along the way, was an even greater surprise. It would be a shame to waste it casually.

Perhaps the Norse sea monster, or some other famous tentacled horror, would ultimately be represented by it.

Of the four silver-grade beings he had so far, each one had appeared in a highly representative way.

The thunderous azure flood dragon had emerged at the very brink of Wu You’s true struggle between life and death. If the creature he had created then had failed to meet the mark, he might well have ended up as food in the belly of some beast in Ten Thousand Beasts Mountain.

The mountain tree had come from a wild and explosive notion born in a moment of inspiration, and the material used for it was no exaggeration the finest he had employed to date.

Qiongqi had been the first third-tier alchemical creation, and at the same time the product of another one of Wu You’s mad ideas. It had also consumed the greatest amount of mental power.

As for Garuru, as a guardian beast in the truest sense, it had been the first creature to advance by seizing the transcendence energy of a corrupted offshoot.

By now, Wu You could already make a preliminary judgment.

The emergence of silver-grade beings, or rather high-level bronze beings on the verge of the threshold, was closely tied to the degree of his imagination and the strength of his spirit.

In other words, he needed to unleash his wild ideas with force.

Of course, the potential of the material itself could not be too poor.

These attempts had left behind fairly reliable guidance for future alchemy.

...

In truth, Yang Dawei had nothing pressing to do right now and could have gone straight to Wu You’s home.

But arriving in Qiantang immediately would be too abrupt; a direct visit would seem rude.

So he phoned Wu You first to ask for the address, then planned to pay the visit in person that afternoon.

As for the gift of thanks, it was the document in his briefcase.

At two-thirty in the afternoon, Yang Dawei and his secretary arrived together outside Xu Gou Village.

After asking the villagers for directions, they found Wu You’s home with ease.

Like everyone else who saw the vine wall and archway for the first time, the two of them lingered for quite a while, admiring and examining them.

“So beautiful. Are those roses?”

The female secretary could not help praising the rose-thorn vines.

Yang Dawei, meanwhile, was looking toward the vine wall.

The rose-thorn archway was certainly stunning, but the towering vine wall, and the sense of depth that stretched faintly along one side toward the mountains beyond sight, were even more remarkable.

That plant must be worth a fortune.

He very much wanted to find the internal support structure that held up this wall of vines, but the holes in the growth were packed so tightly together that he could not see inside.

And because of the warning sign, he did not approach too closely.

If Lu Zhiyou and Hou Li were here, they could tell him that the vine wall had no support frame at all.

Just after waking from his noon nap and coming out to dry herbs in the sun, Bai Yanxi spotted a man and a woman standing outside the gate from a distance and called out.

“Hey, where are you from? Looking for someone?”

The old man truly lived up to his reputation as a health enthusiast; despite his age, his voice was powerful enough to startle Yang Dawei out of his daze.

The secretary beside him hurriedly replied.

“We’re here to see Mr. Wu. Is he at home?”

Bai Yanxi muttered something under his breath, then shouted to them.

“Then come in. Why are you standing outside? There isn’t even a doorbell there.”

After that, he raised his voice toward the upper floor.

“Young Wu, someone’s looking for you again.”

Bai Yanxi’s words made Yang Dawei feel a little awkward; he really had been about to look for a doorbell outside the yard.

When he entered with the secretary, he was somewhat surprised to see that Wu You’s home was merely an old rural tiled house.

There was indeed a building beside it that looked like a villa under construction, but work had stalled and it was clearly unfinished.

Wu You naturally knew Yang Dawei had arrived; he was simply being lazy and lingering in bed after his nap.

Only after hearing Bai Yanxi call out did he finally drag himself out, unhurriedly, to get up.

By the time he reached downstairs, Yang Dawei and the female secretary were already seated on the long bench in the house.

This was because Wu You’s parents were both away.

Bai Yanxi rarely helped out and brewed each of them a cup of tea, while he himself held his own cup and savored the aroma of the post-rain sunlight tea.

Yang Dawei was not much of a tea drinker, but he too inwardly praised the fragrance and flavor of the tea.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Yang. I was taking a nap just now and didn’t receive you properly.”

Yang Dawei hastily rose from the bench.

“No, no, Mr. Wu, you’re being too polite. It was we who came so abruptly.”

Since the two of them were seated at opposite ends of the same bench, Yang Dawei’s sudden standing caught the female secretary by surprise.

She nearly toppled off balance from the bench, which only made Yang Dawei even more embarrassed.

Bai Yanxi, watching from the side, could not help but smile to himself.

The older one gets, the more strange things one sees; he had always believed that. Yet in the few months since coming to Wu You’s home, he had witnessed more oddities than most people would in several lifetimes.

Wu You did not mock them, though. At the very least, Yang Dawei’s demeanor made it clear that he held him in great respect and concern.

“Mr. Yang, there’s no need to keep me guessing. Since you’ve come to visit me, you must have some reason, don’t you?”

That was already a very direct way of telling Yang Dawei: I know you brought a thank-you gift, so just take it out.

Yang Dawei was equally straightforward. He immediately took a stack of documents from the briefcase on the table.

“Mr. Wu, please have a look.”

Wu You took them and saw that the first page was headed by large characters announcing a share transfer agreement.

He quickly scanned through all the A4 pages.

The general content was that Yang Dawei would gratuitously transfer forty-five percent of his shares in Sofia Grand Hotel and several three-star hotels to Wu You.

It also listed the fixed asset values of the hotels and their combined annual net profit, roughly thirty million.

In other words, he was freely giving away fixed assets worth over a hundred million, along with annual profits of more than ten million.

This was money exchanged for face, yet Wu You accepted it without the slightest psychological burden.

Compared with the losses he had helped Yang Dawei recover, these things could only be said to be a gift that cost him no dignity.

Wu You might not be as rich as the world’s wealthiest man, but to him money was more like a number.

Now, obtaining money for him was simply too easy.

Taking the pen handed over by the female secretary, Wu You signed his name at the end of the document without hesitation.

“Mr. Yang, I accept your sincerity, but I won’t continue interfering in your business matters.”

“How could I keep troubling Mr. Wu forever?” Yang Dawei said. “Now that I’ve gotten through this unexpected hurdle, if I still can’t seize the opportunity, then all these years of business experience of mine would have been wasted.”

With that, Yang Dawei stood again, this time more carefully.

“Mr. Wu, now that the gift of thanks has been delivered, I should not linger here any longer and disturb you.”

Hearing this, the female secretary also rose at once.

“You’re leaving already, Mr. Yang? Won’t you stay a little longer?”

Having delivered such a substantial gift and then leaving immediately was somewhat surprising to Wu You.

“No, no. I still have to catch the earliest flight back to Yunnan. There’s a mountain of things waiting for me there.”

Since it had come to this, Wu You, who had wanted them to leave early anyway, did not try to keep them further and personally saw them to the garden gate.

Watching the chauffeured car disappear into the distance, Wu You entertained a half-joking, half-dark thought: perhaps he should simply turn that shrewd Yang Dawei into a mythical fraud-beast instead.

At that very moment, Yang Dawei, seated in the back of the ride-hailing car, suddenly shivered.

“Mr. Yang? What’s wrong?”

The female secretary asked with concern.

“Nothing, nothing. Maybe it’s just a bit chilly by the mountain just now.”

Yang Dawei replied with a trace of inexplicable guilt.