Nine-layer armor-breaking

Chapter 328 Human Heart
Those who refine pills are divided into two types: alchemists and pharmacists. However, whether they are alchemists or pharmacists, those who can consistently refine high-quality pills are often monopolized by large households.

Those wealthy families with less power usually employ pharmacists of average skill. However, if a family is a well-known and powerful clan that occupies a certain area, its pharmacists will certainly be quite famous, and they are impossible to poach, steal, or even dare to steal.

Therefore, he was aware of the side effects of elixirs, and because of his cautious nature, he dared not take elixirs of unknown origin casually.

Because if some martial artists who take pills experience adverse reactions or potentially serious consequences after taking them, and they do not have a wealthy and well-connected family or support system to back them up, then the martial artists who experience adverse reactions or serious consequences after taking pills will be in danger of losing their lives.

However, he was well aware that the team he was on could not provide him with a safety net.

Before the falling out between him and his boss, he wanted to take some pills to enhance his strength, simply because he wanted to quickly increase his strength and pass through the stage he was stuck in.

At that time, he knew that his chances of success were slim for the team.

If something were to happen to him, his relationship with the team wouldn't be good enough for everyone in the team to agree to use the team's resources, that is, most of the financial resources, to save him.

At the time, he didn't think about whether his boss would come to his rescue in an emergency; he never even doubted it.

However, he felt that when the time came for his boss and the team to contribute money and effort to rescue him, if that situation really occurred, it would probably put his boss in a very difficult position.

He didn't want his boss to be in such a difficult situation, nor did he want his boss to go against the majority opinion, thereby creating a rift between him and his team members.

Therefore, he gave up the idea of ​​using pills to enhance his strength.

After he successfully established his prestige within the team and gained some confidence to try his hand at elixirs again, he searched several times but was unable to find a suitable pharmacist.

As he had more and more things to worry about in the team, he temporarily put this matter aside and pinned his hopes on their targets, namely the wealthy families.

However, before he could get the pill he wanted, that incident happened, and he was rejected by most of his teammates. He no longer had the confidence to risk taking the pill, so the matter was temporarily put on hold.

Later, after he had a falling out with his boss, he considered taking a gamble to find some pills that could improve his strength, and he was already saving up that amount of money.

However, the kind of pills that can enhance strength cannot be accumulated by robbing a few people. The chances of encountering and successfully robbing a wealthy person are too few. Therefore, he has not yet saved enough money to buy the pills.

After falling out with his boss, he had the first thought to take a gamble.

He was originally very afraid of the adverse consequences that might be far beyond his imagination from taking those pills of unknown origin, but his time in the team was simply worse than death.

Every day, he inevitably faced faces that both loathed him and were loathed by him, especially his boss's hypocritical face, which he saw as extremely hypocritical, constantly appearing before him, making him feel nauseous.

So ever since he figured that thing out and emerged from its shadow, he hasn't had a single day when he didn't want to escape from that place he hated.

The impact of that incident on him is indelible and can never be erased by anything.

Even so, the impact of that incident, as time goes by, gradually blurs his memory of it.

The pain of that time is etched in one's memory, but the scars left behind can cloud judgment and cause those who experienced it to gradually underestimate the event.

Some things, once they happen, are simply happened.

The impact on those who experienced it firsthand is also long-lasting and profound.

However, he is trying his best to transform some of the negative impacts and painful memories into motivation for moving forward.

He had thoroughly investigated the pills available on the market several times before he was trapped in the team.

Therefore, he also knew that the quality of pills on the market varied greatly. Even pills that looked similar in quality might contain different impurities.

These impurities not only affect the efficacy of the elixir, preventing it from exerting the full effect of the medicinal ingredients and producing undesirable results, but may also have some very serious consequences if the pharmacist does not control the amount of impurities in the elixir properly.

Therefore, even though he hadn't saved enough money to buy the pills, he didn't care about the pills that were openly sold on the market.

Only those pills handled by large trading houses or auction houses can be considered somewhat guaranteed.

When he still held considerable influence within the team, he was also thinking about significantly improving the strength of himself and his teammates so that they could face greater "challenges," rob larger and wealthier families, and rely on their own strength to protect their lives should things go wrong or be exposed.

However, things in the team were so chaotic and complicated during that time that he felt a little overwhelmed.

For a period of time, his boss delegated almost everything to him, so he had no choice but to take on all the tasks that his boss needed to worry about.

However, this does not entirely include matters concerning the steward in the courtyard.

Even when he was highly respected in the team, even when he worked hard for the team every day, even when his boss and his teammates saw his hard work, he still couldn't move his boss to reveal everything about the person in charge.

Not only that, even his teammates, after all those rumors, didn't show him any leniency because of his efforts. Instead, he was like a deflated balloon, hated by everyone because of his loss of power.

The most that was about the manager was to have him lead some teammates to deliver messages for his boss and to give the manager some tasks.

As for the rest, he didn't know much about the manager.

However, one thing always puzzled him. Every time he sent the leader to see the steward, he was given some trivial matters. The steward and the courtyard seemed to be a warehouse that provided supplies for their team, or a place of support during wartime and a temporary refuge, like a protective lock for his team.

Of course, that's putting it nicely.

In fact, most of the team members agreed that the courtyard was a relatively hidden shop that could store general merchandise, and the manager was someone who helped the team feed some horses and also looked after the shop.

Therefore, even though they were intimidated by the manager's cold aura when they first met him, they thought he was just a paper tiger because he didn't get angry or talk much. They didn't care about his emotions and became even more carefree when they spoke.

However, he did miss out on his freest days with the team because of all the trivial and complicated things in the team.

During that period, he was still able to come and go from the team very freely. He even thought that he had earned the title of "Second-in-Command" and might actually become the second-in-command of the team.

At that time, he was even somewhat smug.

His smugness was not arrogance, nor was it a loss of peaceful coexistence with his teammates. Rather, it transformed into a more proactive approach to team affairs and a tireless dedication to planning for the team's future.

He felt incredibly energetic every day, as if he had an inexhaustible supply of energy, and those were truly happy and fulfilling days.

But later, he gradually came to his senses and stopped letting those illusory and ethereal things cloud his mind. He began to analyze the purpose of everyone in the team treating him, or rather, what the intention of each person in the team was in treating him this way.
The more he thought about these things, the clearer his mind became, and the less confused and easily deceived he was.

He then stopped letting his teammates call him "Second Brother Bone," "Second Brother," or even "Second Boss."

He also realized that an invisible danger was approaching him step by step.

Later, when he looked back, he realized where the inexplicable sense of danger he had felt during that period of self-reflection came from.

Although he did not become complacent or arrogant because of those titles, his attitude towards his boss did not change at all, and was even more affectionate than before.

But these things, whether it was his ability to handle team affairs or the way he addressed the team members, were all observed by his boss. One day, the seeds of jealousy and fear quietly took root in his boss's heart.

That marked the beginning of the tragedy that had befallen him during his long time with the team.

"Perhaps, people are just like that, changing their tune with the wind!" This was the conclusion he came to during that period, a sigh, and a sense of relief.

It was precisely because he comforted himself in this way that he became less afraid of and indifferent to those rumors or malicious words.

Humans are flesh and blood; to say that they don't care at all or are unwilling to accept it is all a lie.

If this happened to anyone, how many people could truly be indifferent?

That was the team he had poured his heart and soul into, and the teammate he had personally taught and guided each and every one of them.

He even has a very clear understanding of everyone's strengths, weaknesses, and fatal flaws.

He understood others, and he assumed that others would pay attention to him and understand him as much as he did. However, he did not expect that those people were simply incapable of distinguishing right from wrong.

Is it that those people are unable to distinguish right from wrong, that they truly cannot tell the difference, or that they are simply unwilling to spend even a tiny bit more time on him, unwilling to discern right from wrong?

He never imagined that those who spent every day with him and who were always smiling at him would disregard his explanations and immediately assume that he was an utterly wicked person.

Aside from the hypocritical leader who spread the rumors and Xiao Lu, the only one on their side, everyone else in the team immediately believed that the rumor about him, the rumored star, was the real him. The person who had always been friendly to them, the person who had carefully nurtured and cared for them, seemed to have never existed in this world, and had disappeared forever from their hearts.

Therefore, after giving so much only to receive the opposite result, how could he possibly be truly indifferent?

He believed that everyone has a heart of flesh and blood, and that his teammates must also have hearts of flesh and blood. Living in the same world, he had never imagined that people's thoughts could be so different, and that the contrasting differences between them could be so vast.

He thought his teammates' hearts were as warm and compassionate as his, but he never expected that their hearts were made of stone, cold and indifferent, showing no sentimentality whatsoever.

The leader who spread the rumors is no good person, and his teammates who believed the rumors are definitely not kind people either.

Judging from his teammates' swift change of attitude, he even had a feeling that his teammates might have long harbored some resentment towards him and were taking this opportunity to bring him down in one fell swoop.

He considered the possibility that his teammates might not care about the truth of the rumors at all; they might only want to achieve the results they themselves desired.

In order to achieve the results they want, they are only willing to determine the "correctness" of certain things for their own benefit, even though they know that the result they have determined may be wrong, and even though they can roughly know and guess what the truth of the matter is.

Perhaps they knew that the backbone of their team, with whom they had spent many days, was of good character, and they even secretly questioned the veracity of the rumors.

However, perhaps because of these various reasons, they all look down on their leader.

It could be because of his nagging, because he was blocking someone's way, or because some people in the team wanted to be as successful as him and become the team's second-in-command, or even the actual leader of the team.

However, reality is often cruel.

(End of this chapter)