"Utterly absurd! Utterly incompetent! Utterly heinous!"
Inside the inn, Huang Shan, Yu Lin, and the other members of the Qingxiao Seven Sons were eating in their rooms. Hearing the impassioned voice outside the window, Yu Lin and a female disciple rose and went to look down from the window.
A wooden platform had been hastily erected in the street. A scholar stood on it, clutching an old book. His face was flushed, and the veins in his neck stood out. He trembled all over with emotion.
"The Fourteen Provinces of the Nine Regions, seven thousand years of history, countless wise rulers and countless foolish ones. Yet, throughout the dynasties, never has there been a monarch as vile as the Son of Heaven today! He murdered his brother to seize the throne, killed his son to vent his anger, and, in his pursuit of the Elixir of Immortality, allowed alchemists to deceive him and corrupt the court, leaving the common people unable to make a living!"
The scholar was so impassioned, and his voice so thunderous, that more and more commoners and merchants drew near.
"The Guzhou tragedy two years ago—how many commoners perished? How many soldiers died without their bodies ever being found? The so-called Demonic Sect is wiped out, only to rise again. Don't you all find that strange?"
"That Demonic Sect is Zhao Zhi's blade! He uses it to seize boys and girls and refine them into pills. Such conduct is utterly depraved and enrages both gods and men! If we people of Great Li don't rise up, disaster will sooner or later befall us, and the realm of Great Li will be in peril!"
The scholar spoke with such emotional force that the eyes of the surrounding commoners reddened.
"This realm belongs to the people, not to