"What... did you just say?"
In a tavern in Yining City, capital of the Li Kingdom, two drinkers who had just been eagerly discussing the great currents of All-Under-Heaven were abruptly silenced by a pair of vicious hands crawling with strange patterns.
The upheaval came without warning.
Their two flushed, twisted faces, smeared with vegetables, braised pork, wine, and shattered porcelain, were pressed hard against the table.
Those rugged hands belonged to a man in a bamboo hat.
Before this, he had been drinking alone in a corner, utterly unremarkable.
But now, as he suddenly struck, he froze the steaming atmosphere of the entire tavern solid.
No one knew who he was, but everyone could feel the danger!
He had pressed down with such force that the tabletop had cracked, fissures webbing across it—yet the body of the table remained taut and refused to collapse, firmly supporting the pitiful faces of the two drinkers.
That meant that, at least in terms of strength, this man in the bamboo hat still maintained exquisitely precise control.
The man raised his head slightly, revealing part of an exceptionally ugly face beneath the brim. He repeated viciously, "Say it again!"
"Say... say what, sir?" One of the drinkers pinned to the table had already been cut by shards of porcelain embedded in his face. He begged indistinctly, "Spare us! We didn't say anything bad, did we?"
The other drinker was so terrified that he could not utter a word.
"Let them go! We've already reported this to the authorities!" someone shouted, mustering his courage.
The man in the bamboo hat violently snapped his head around. With a single glance, the person who had spoken was sent flying! He soared high into the air, then crashed heavily to the ground, his fate unknown.
The entire