Chapter 713

(Spent the evening with diarrhea, constantly running to the toilet and couldn't even sit down. I'm posting this chapter first and will revise it tomorrow.)

"I heard that kid has been training at the martial arts hall for nearly a year, yet he still hasn't even gotten started with the technique. He doesn't have much silver on him either. I'm afraid he'll be driven back in a few days."

"Heh heh... I told you... Learning martial arts isn't that easy!"

The burly farmer's brows immediately relaxed upon hearing this news. He then turned to the others beside him and said,

"That brat's house and land will belong to us from now on. I'll go to the village head later and split up the two fields under his name. When he comes back, we'll finish him off together!"

"Got it, Big Brother!"

The group nodded excitedly. None of them felt there was anything wrong with such behavior, as though they had done this sort of thing—seizing the property of an entire family after its last member died—many times before.

At that moment, in Copper Slope Town roughly twenty li to the north, the youth named Wu Di, whom these men were discussing, was practicing in a martial arts hall courtyard alongside more than fifty other disciples.

He was about fifteen years old, tall and slender, already as tall as an adult. Wearing only a pair of short gray trousers and bare from the waist up, he strained to lift two massive stone locks weighing over a hundred jin each. Sweat streamed down his youthful yet somewhat sturdy body, soaking the hard-packed earth beneath his feet.

"Ninety-eight!"

"Ninety-nine!"

"One hundred!"

"Good! Everyone, rest!"

As the black-clad young man at the front—the hall's instructor and the disciples' senior brother—called out the command, the