Beneath Sōkyoku Hill, the Grand Inquisitor looked at the somewhat youthful face before him, but there was no trace of contempt or arrogance left in his heart.
Originally, he had believed that someone like Asano Kiyoshi—famous at a young age and exceptionally gifted—might possess great strength, but had never truly entered the Gotei 13. Even if he was that old man's final disciple, they had spent less than a year together.
And within that one year, no matter how talented the boy before him was, there was no way he could have completely learned that set of rhetoric and tactics specifically designed to deal with him.
Yet from their exchange just now, the Grand Inquisitor had already found him slightly troublesome.
Still, he remained quite confident that he could keep Asano Kiyoshi in hand. After all, this time, he had received the full support of those two families! What he held in his hands was more than enough to make that brat suffer!
The most important thing now was to figure out how to answer that boy's question from earlier. What an annoyingly difficult question.
And when the other side was clearly in the right, while you truly had no decent argument to explain yourself, there was only one best method.
If you could not refute the point someone raised, then all you had to do was slander the person who raised it.
Once the person raising that point had been smeared, there would be no need for you to act. Others would naturally rush to refute and attack everything he said on your behalf. In the end, once the momentum had built, you would not even need to do anything; no one would believe a single word spoken by the person whose point you could not refute.
Thus, the