Chapter 213: He Is a Talent

Led by Fatty, they turned through three streets in the not-too-large Wang City, and Mo Xiaobai immediately noticed a house with a very strange style.

Squeezed among a large patch of wooden shingle houses was a cylindrical stone building with a dome structure. Both the walls and the stone pillars were covered with various complicated carvings.

Before even meeting this Alchemist, Mo Xiaobai had already automatically filled in a series of identities for him in his mind.

Alchemist was definitely his main profession.

An artist’s aura rushed to his face; he might even have a bit of a philosophical flavor.

To be able to build a house like this in the Western Regions, if one said he didn’t understand mathematics and physics, Mo Xiaobai wouldn’t believe it himself, so perhaps he was also a science scholar?

“Is this Aristotle respawned? Or Archimedes reborn?” A strange thought rose in his mind, and Mo Xiaobai stepped up the stone stairs and knocked on the door.

After a while, the door opened with a “creak”.

What appeared before Mo Xiaobai was indeed a middle-aged man with brown curly hair on his head, an aquiline nose, and green eyes.

“May I ask, are you Master Creyce?”

“I am Creyce.”

The middle-aged Greek man nodded. After looking at Mo Xiaobai and Luyu and A-Dai behind him, he immediately spoke: “Why are you here again? I said I would not work for you.”

Creyce was speaking the Han Language. Although his pronunciation was a bit strange, communication was not a problem. Hearing him say this, Fatty and A-Dai both looked a bit awkward, while Mo Xiaobai secretly shook his head with a smile.

No wonder he was so eager to bring me here; it seemed Fatty had eaten a closed door but still did not give up.

“Master Creyce has misunderstood. I just heard that you live here, so I came to visit out of curiosity. Doesn’t Master plan to invite us in to sit for a while?”

“Then come in, but you must not touch my things randomly. This is my advice to you.” Creyce nodded, then led Mo Xiaobai and the other two into the house.

The entire small house was divided into two floors. Mo Xiaobai glanced around and saw bottles and jars piled up everywhere, as well as some simple compasses and stone carvings of different sizes.

Mo Xiaobai did not have much interest in the mysterious alchemy; he just wanted to know how much metal purification technology Creyce had mastered.

So after walking up the stairs to the second floor, Mo Xiaobai took a look at Creyce’s “laboratory” and spoke directly: “I heard from my friend that Master, you can make iron harder, just like this sword, reaching a standard of higher purity?”

“Hey~ That is just my toy for spare time. I am a great Alchemist, pursuing the secret of immortality, unlike you who only know how to use some rough weapons and fight and kill all day long.”

Creyce glanced at the one-handed sword sold to Fatty, then walked to his workbench and picked up a Gold Coin half a palm’s size: “Look at this, this is my latest achievement. The purity of this Gold Coin is already close to perfect in my eyes. Look at the soft luster on it, does it look like the glory of immortality?”

“This is what I study, these more meaningful things.”

Just like many Greek sages, Creyce’s brain was also filled with a bunch of strange thoughts and theories, but this did not affect Mo Xiaobai’s appreciation of the Greek Alchemist before him.

Because from the color of the Gold Coin alone, one could see that the purity was very high. When Mo Xiaobai weighed the Gold Coin in his hand a little, this judgment became even clearer.

The Gold Coins used in the Plane were all above 24K purity. And the Gold Coin refined and made by Creyce before his eyes was almost exactly the same as the Plane Gold Coin in size and weight.

At this moment, the timeline in the Instance was still 90 AD. Even in the Great Han at this time, it was impossible to smelt Gold with a purity exceeding 18K.

But in the Western Regions, Creyce had done it.

“This guy is a talent!”

Almost without needing to think much, Mo Xiaobai already had a clear judgment of Creyce.

Not to mention other aspects, in metal purification and smelting, he absolutely belonged to a genius across time and space. Since such a talent appeared before him, how could he not take him back to Daming Town.

As for his identity as a Greek, this was not a problem in Mo Xiaobai’s eyes.

In the future Plane, which Great Lord did not have a few foreign talents under his command, not to mention Creyce could also speak the Han Language, and the most troublesome communication problem had already been solved.

It was just how to persuade Creyce that Mo Xiaobai was still pondering.

Speaking rashly would definitely not work; one did not need to think to know that nine times out of ten he would be rejected like Fatty. Mo Xiaobai did not want to be rejected once and then never have the chance to take him out of the Instance again.

So Mo Xiaobai was not in a hurry at this moment. Instead, he listened with great interest as this guy introduced his set of strange theories between metal and eternity.

The four of them chatted for a full hour. When Creyce checked the sky outside the window several times in a row, Mo Xiaobai guessed that this guy also had things to do, so he immediately proposed to leave.

Creyce seemed to really have something to do. The second Mo Xiaobai said he was leaving, he stood up to see them off.

A few moments later, Mo Xiaobai and the other two walked out of the Greek hut. Luyu immediately could not help but ask: “Bro, what did you mean just now? Not interested in this guy?”

“No, I am quite interested. He is a talent.”

“He is a talent, yet you didn’t even mention a word about recruiting him? Or did you get confused listening to the story just now?” Luyu said depressingly with a pout. He thought Mo Xiaobai could successfully take Creyce back to the Plane, but Mo Xiaobai did not say half a sentence related to that.

“Now is not the time yet. Let’s go back first.”

“Not the time?”

“Yeah, there will be opportunities in the future.”

Mo Xiaobai smiled mysteriously and glanced sideways at the hut with the closed window. He already had a rough plan on how to deal with Creyce.

…

Congling, the peak of the snowy mountain.

The sound of neighing horses kept spreading from the mountain road below the snowy mountain. Thousands of war horses trod on the snow, adding a bit of human presence and liveliness to the originally quiet snowy plateau.

One Kushan Cavalryman after another revealed their figures from the foot of the mountain, muttering constantly in their mouths, seemingly cursing this damn mountain and climate.

When this group of Kushan Cavalry crossed Congling and entered the boundary of the Western Regions, on a hillside highland two or three miles away from them, two Han Cavalrymen were quietly watching their advancing steps.

“Those foreign cavalrymen should be the Kushan Troops and Horses mentioned by My Lord. I will continue to keep an eye on this first batch of vanguard Troops and Horses. You hurry back and report to My Lord.”

“Okay, be careful yourself.”

After a brief exchange between the two Han Cavalrymen, one of them rode his horse down the mountain and galloped towards the Wang City of Yarkand.

Half a day’s return journey passed in a flash. When the Han Cavalryman sent back the news that the enemy army had left Congling, Li Ji immediately ignited the wolf smoke in the beacon tower.

As the rolling wolf smoke rose straight up, beacon fires were also lit in the fortresses and passes dozens of miles away from the Wang City.

The war between empires had finally arrived!