Chapter 62: Recruitment and Acquiring the Divine Flower

With that match lost, Zhang Ji and Lobo exchanged glances and decided to call it a night.

Lobo stepped closer, handing over a trench coat. "That acting was so convincing. For a second, I thought you were actually going to die."

"I could take a dozen more of those clowns with one hand tied behind my back," Zhang Ji said softly as he put on the coat.

Mid-conversation, they prepared to leave.

"Gentlemen, our boss would like a word!" George intercepted Zhang Ji and Lobo as they tried to make their exit.

"Sorry, we have places to be," Zhang Ji said.

"Our boss, Damian, would like to invite the two of you for a meeting," George said earnestly.

"Can I drop him?" Zhang Ji asked Lobo in a low voice.

"Better not..." Lobo muttered. "The Damian Syndicate also runs smuggling operations."

Zhang Ji understood.

If they started a fight here, the divine flower might never arrive.

"Let's go meet him, then. Lead the way," Zhang Ji said.

Fortune favors the bold. Given his current strength, even the official armed forces of some minor nations would struggle to match him, let alone a mere city gang boss. There was nothing to fear.

George turned around and personally escorted the two men to the elevator, pressing the button for the top floor.

Before long, the elevator arrived at its destination.

The doors opened, and Zhang Ji and Lobo stepped out. In the sprawling penthouse suite, Damian sat in his chair, fixing his gaze upon them.

"Mr. Lobo," Damian began. "The men I sent to invite you have vanished. Before I even had the chance to look for you, you waltzed right into my establishment to rake in cash. Isn't that a bit disrespectful?"

"What? Boss Damian? Did you send people to look for me? I didn't see anyone. Must be some kind of misunderstanding. A lot of strangers have been flooding into Midelisi lately, and the security has really gone downhill..." Lobo replied smoothly.

"Let's set your little stunt aside for a moment." Damian shifted his gaze from Lobo to Zhang Ji. "Care to introduce your friend here?"

"My newly hired bodyguard, Zhang Ji. Knows a thing or two about fighting," Lobo said.

Damian looked at Zhang Ji's scarred and mutilated face, caring little about his past.

Right now, he had only one thought in mind: to recruit Zhang Ji as his own subordinate.

Transcendent-tier martial artists were exceedingly rare.

Calling them one in a hundred thousand was no exaggeration.

It was a stroke of luck that such a rare talent had fallen on hard times and drifted into a place like this, and he had no intention of letting him slip away.

"Zhang Ji? Do you understand Old Ning dialect?" Damian asked, looking right at him. "Come work for me. I can pay you ten million New Francs a month."

A monthly salary of ten million meant an annual income well over a hundred million.

And that was in New Francs. Due to local economic peculiarities, their purchasing power was even slightly higher than the currency of the Eastern Polar Nation.

This clearly showed that Damian was offering a genuine display of respect.

"Apologies, I have my own matters to attend to," Zhang Ji said indifferently.

"You probably don't know me very well," Damian said, taking a cigarette from a nearby subordinate, lighting it, and taking a drag. "I don't like hearing 'no'."

"Oh, then you probably don't know me either," Zhang Ji replied with a faint, amused smile. "I've always loved telling people 'no'."

It had been a while since he last encountered such a posturing pretender, and he genuinely found it entertaining.

Damian handed the cigarette back to his subordinate, stripped off his jacket, and said to Zhang Ji, "Fine. Men with ability always have an attitude."

*Boom!*

In an instant, Damian vanished from his seat and reappeared right in front of Zhang Ji.

An uppercut was already thrown when he was still five meters away.

The air shrieked with a sonic boom as his fist shattered the sound barrier.

Zhang Ji hadn't expected to encounter a grandmaster in a place like this.

Instantly shifting into the Spirit Crane Stance, Zhang Ji watched as Damian's speed slowed down drastically in his perception. With a light, effortless sweep of his palm, Zhang Ji met Damian's incoming fist.

With a subtle ripple of muscle tension, Zhang Ji redirected the force, slapping Damian's punch harmlessly to the side.

Damian's expression flickered slightly. He abruptly bent his knee and drove a kick toward Zhang Ji's chest, but it was once again intercepted and batted down by a single palm from Zhang Ji.

This time, it was a display of absolute, crushing strength.

*Crash!*

Damian's knee was forced straight down into the floor. The grayish-blue patterned ceramic tiles shattered instantly, leaving a deep impression of his kneecap in the ground.

Just as Damian attempted to launch a follow-up attack, Zhang Ji's hand descended upon his shoulder. With a sudden vibration through his palm, Zhang Ji pressed down, forcing Damian entirely flat onto the floor.

Cracks spiderwebbed outward from every point where Damian's limbs made contact with the ground.

Had Zhang Ji not held back, Damian would have crashed straight through to the floor below.

Lifting his hand, Zhang Ji spoke with casual detachment, "Having a clear and realistic perception of oneself is a virtue. Unfortunately, most people lack this capacity, viewing the world through a lens of arrogance."

Damian picked himself up, brushed the dust off his clothes, and looked at Zhang Ji with an expression of utter disbelief.

The gap in their strength was far greater than he had imagined.

A martial artist of this caliber would likely rank comfortably in the top hundred back in the Roman Empire.

Such a figure should be holding a prominent position in the World Martial Artists Association.

How on earth had he ended up stranded in a dump like this?

"Let's go," Zhang Ji called out to Lobo.

Lobo was still in a daze.

The movements of Zhang Ji and Damian had been far too fast, and Zhang Ji had controlled the impact so perfectly that no massive shockwaves were generated. To Lobo's eyes, it simply looked like Damian had flashed forward and then collapsed onto the floor.

"Boss?"

One of Damian's subordinates stepped forward, extending a hand to make a slicing gesture across his throat.

"Don't. He isn't a stray hyena running for its life; he's a tiger passing through," Damian said, his eyes narrowing slightly. "Injured though he may be, he is still a king of the jungle."

Even among Transcendent-tier fighters, Damian's strength placed him in the upper-middle tier.

Yet facing Zhang Ji, he had been utterly powerless to resist.

He could sense that Zhang Ji was still holding back a vast amount of reserve strength.

This was an absolute apex predator, easily comparable to those inhuman freaks he knew.

A person like that could probably only be subdued by someone on the level of the president of the Martial Artists Association.

...

Inside the pickup truck.

Lobo asked Zhang Ji, "Did you guys actually fight? I couldn't even see what happened!"

"He's a master too, so it's normal you couldn't keep up," Zhang Ji said.

After exchanging those couple of moves with Damian, he had roughly gauged the man's strength.

He was around the middle-to-late grandmaster stage—roughly tier seven, if quantified.

However, his style reeked of back-alley, unorthodox methods.

There were hardened calluses on his hands and feet, suggesting a fighting style derived from the Old Ning traditions.

It was a crude, brutal training regimen that sacrificed one's long-term potential in exchange for the fastest possible growth in combat power.

His techniques were wide and sweeping, leaning heavily into a trade-blows-for-blows mentality.

It was a miracle he had managed to push himself to the grandmaster level with such a self-destructive method.

"How strong is he?" Lobo asked.

"On a global scale, he probably squeezes into the top tier of the martial arts world—maybe the top five out of ten thousand," Zhang Ji said.

A martial artist in the top five out of ten thousand globally wasn't bad at all.

Out of ten thousand professional fighters, only five achieved grandmaster status.

"And he still lost to you just like that? Just how strong are you?" Lobo asked in astonishment.

"I'd put myself around the top one or two out of ten thousand," Zhang Ji replied.

That's right, he estimated his current strength sat right around that tier.

Which was infinitely close to the B-tier threshold.

As for true B-tier fighters...

In the current world, they represented one in a hundred thousand. Out of every one hundred thousand professional fighters, only a single one reached B-tier.

There were fewer than two hundred of them across the entire globe.

As for Holy Kings, that was a description reserved for one in several millions.

When the Holy King wars broke out, there were only five such individuals.

Based on the information Zhang Ji possessed, there were probably only three Holy King-tier fighters left in the world right now.

The remaining two future Holy Kings were still stuck at the B-tier and would likely require another two years to finally break through to A-tier.

"Could you win against the Old Ning royal guards?" Lobo asked.

Zhang Ji glanced sideways at Lobo. "Never fought one, hard to say."

Zhang Ji was well aware of Old Ning's royal Sun Guards.

Every single one of them was a martial artist carrying the bloodline heritage of the Titan Deila.

Their baseline strength was at the grandmaster level.

The elite guard commanders among them even reached the B-plus tier.

That was simply the terrifying potency of bloodline power.

Because their ancestors were monstrously powerful, their descendants inherited that greatness.

Zhang Ji could handle an ordinary Sun Guard, but a captain-tier opponent would require considerable effort. As for a commander-tier guard, his only option would be to run—and even then, escape wasn't guaranteed.

He knew full well why Lobo was asking this.

If the fact that Lobo was still drawing breath ever came to light, Old Ning's Sun Guards would hunt him down without mercy. And they wouldn't just send a captain; they'd dispatch a commander-tier powerhouse to ensure zero margin for error.

Sneaking into the royal mausoleum and draining that much blood from the corpse of the War God Deila—the magnitude of such a sacrilegious crime was something that, in Old Ning, couldn't be washed away even by a thousand cuts.

Come to think of it, the fact that Lobo had pulled it off was utterly absurd.

Even for players, the Old Ning royal mausoleum was a death trap requiring at least a B-tier party to dare a raid.

Yet Lobo, who wasn't even a professional martial artist at the time, had managed to infiltrate the sanctum, pierce the defensive hide of an A-tier martial artist's corpse, and extract his blood.

No matter how you looked at it, it was a miracle.

Regrettably, the official lore never revealed the specific details.

Players could only piece together from scattered clues that he somehow seduced a royal princess to gain entry. As for any further details, nobody knew.

"By the way, how much did you make?" Zhang Ji asked.

"Sixty million New Francs!" Lobo exclaimed. "I kept betting on you to win, and for the fifth round, I bet on you to lose! Money multiplies really fast this way!"

"Did you get the item?" Zhang Ji asked.

"Well, I've already transferred the funds. Whether we actually get it now depends entirely on that guy's personal integrity," Lobo said, scratching his cheek.

Zhang Ji raised an eyebrow.

Why did this channel sound so thoroughly unreliable?

...

Unreliable as it felt to Zhang Ji...

True to form, on the third day, the shipment actually arrived.

The seller even seemed keen on establishing a long-term business relationship, inquiring if Lobo wanted to purchase a couple more blossoms.

Lobo popped open the sealed metal case. Inside rested a small white flower rooted in blue soil.

It looked no different from a common wildflower growing by the roadside.

Yet this was the legendary "Divine Flower."

It was a species that only the royal family of the Thrushe Empire could cultivate.

The blue soil beneath it wasn't dirt at all, but rather the dung of a rare, giant elephant native to the Thrushe Empire.

The people of Thrushe referred to those beasts as Divine Elephants. Even an adult was at least C-tier, while the Elephant King could reach B-tier.

The Elephant King possessed a colossal physique comparable to a small palace, consuming enough food every single day to form a small mountain.

And its health bar was truly staggering.

During his past life when tackling this quest, Zhang Ji had needed two or three attempts to clear it.

This time, however, there was no need to fight an elephant; a traitor within the royal family had simply plucked the flower and sold it off.