Chen Rong nearly crushed her teeth. "Outrageous! We slay Demons and eradicate evil—was that wrong?"
Bai Xiaowen smiled. "Of course not!"
At that, Bai Xiaowen raised his voice:
"These ignorant fools have no idea why the Ancient Pagoda Tree Demon 'followed the rules.' Wasn't it because he feared us human cultivators?
"If the Ancient Pagoda Tree Demon had committed endless evil, devouring people without restraint and destroying villages and towns, some mighty cultivator would have come for him long ago to settle the score. He would never have lasted until today before being eliminated.
"It is precisely because we human cultivators travel the Divine Land, slaying Demons, that the clever ones fear us and dare not act recklessly. Of course, some dim-witted Demons still devour people without restraint, but they will never amount to anything.
"Today, Demons are everywhere. If not for cultivators like us, the world would have long since become a paradise for Demons, and these ignorant fools would all be livestock raised by Demons, with no dignity whatsoever!"
As Bai Xiaowen spoke, his True Essence Force quivered faintly, creating a powerful sense of contagion that made his words sound highly convincing.
Empathy!
This was a basic technique from the first volume of Taigong's Art of War, and one of the prerequisite techniques for learning the Army Spirit skill. Bai Xiaowen had learned it long ago. Naturally, the higher one's Charm, the more effective Empathy became.
The prerequisite was that one's words had to contain substance and reason, with at least the potential to stir the other party's emotions, for it to take effect. In other words, it subtly changed the other person's attitude; it was entirely different from Mind Control or the Soul-Confounding Art.
Chen Rong and Chen Meng were relatively powerful and were only slightly affected.