The Listening Cultivator's voice fell silent.
The room went so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
"Did he crack?"
Wen Ling raised an eyebrow and pressed,
"What exactly did the little-eyed one see?"
The Listening Cultivator cocked his head and listened intently for a moment longer, his expression growing stranger by the second.
"Come on, tell us! What did the little-eyed one see?" Wen Ling couldn't hold back anymore and leaned forward.
The Listening Cultivator rubbed his brow, his expression complicated as he began:
"Everything written up there is Lawrence's weaknesses.
From head to toe,
from his martial arts to his private affairs,
nothing was held back."
"And that's not all. He also found more than a dozen brothel women.
They're standing on the city walls with tin megaphones,
taking turns cursing Lawrence... saying he isn't a real man."
The Listening Cultivator had put it rather delicately.
In reality, the brothel women Lu Jing'an had arranged to bring up last had said things far more foul than he'd let on.
Forget Lawrence, a man who wasn't quite right.
Even a normal man would probably have been so ashamed he'd killed himself.
With all these measures hitting him at once,
it would have been hard for Lawrence not to crack.
As for whether the methods were underhanded,
Lu Jing'an didn't care.
Winning was what mattered.
The people of the Peacekeeping Bureau,
after hearing the Listening Cultivator's account,
looked at one another in dismay. For a long while, no one spoke.
In the end, Wen Ling broke the silence with a sudden giggle:
"This young master Lu is quite something.
He'd even resort to such low-down tricks."
"But then,
if it can make that foreign devil Lawrence crack,
who cares whether it's underhanded or not?"
"That foreign devil caused plenty of trouble when he first came here."
Wen Ling clearly had no good impression of Lawrence.
Truthfully, she had no good impression of any foreign devils.
As a Literary Cultivator,
Wen Ling found these foreign devils, who knew only brute force and nothing of civilization, the most irritating.
Kui Shan furrowed his brow.
He didn't say anything.
But it was clear he thought Lu Jing'an's methods
were a little too dishonorable.
Now that they'd confirmed Lu Jing'an was safe,
Wen Ling saw no need to keep listening. She turned and headed outside.
The embroidered hem of her skirt swept through the air in a crisp arc.
This was the new qipao Lu Jing'an had bought for her.
Near the city gate.
Lawrence had been pushed completely over the edge.
The last faint trace of golden Battle Qi on his body
finally went out like a candle guttering in the wind.
Though his Battle Qi was gone,
his nimble footwork and dodges,
along with the armor beneath his clothes,
still kept the bullets from doing him any real harm.
Lu Jing'an glanced at the sky, slowly brightening outside,
then said to Situ Yiyun and Chen Heqing,
"Would I be so fortunate as to witness the full strength of both of you?"
Situ Yiyun and Chen Heqing exchanged a glance.
Then they clasped their fists and said, "We're at your service, Young Master Lu."
The two of them leaped down from the second floor
and charged straight at Lawrence.
Lu Jing'an had already dealt with the hardest thing to overcome—his Battle Qi.
He had also marked out every one of Lawrence's weaknesses in painstaking detail.
If the two of them still couldn't take Lawrence down, then they wouldn't be worth Lu Jing'an's investment.
When Lawrence saw Situ Yiyun and Chen Heqing,
his eyes instantly turned bloodshot.
"You two despicable bastards were the ones scheming against me from behind! I'll tear you apart!"
Situ Yiyun and Chen Heqing couldn't understand Lawrence's gibberish.
All they knew was that they had to beat him down and prove their worth.
They attacked Lawrence from both sides at once.
One used Ancient Martial Arts; the other used New Martial Arts.
Chen Heqing practiced the Iron Wire Fist of the Ancient Martial Arts school.
Twenty iron rings clashed on his arms,
clanging and clattering,
with a combined weight of more than fifty pounds.
His fist shot out with a howl of wind, powerful enough to pulverize granite.
Situ Yiyun's New Martial Arts style was similar to Lawrence's.
But in his understanding of martial arts, Situ Yiyun was clearly superior.
On top of that, Situ Yiyun had memorized every one of Lawrence's weaknesses.
And with two against one,
Lawrence couldn't defend himself or strike back at all.
Lu Jing'an sat upstairs drinking tea,
watching the three figures collide and intertwine in the street below.
His fingers rubbed against the teacup as he quietly weighed his options.
If he faced Lawrence in his current state, how good would his odds be?
And what price would he have to pay?
After running through the possibilities,
Lu Jing'an figured that, against Lawrence in his current state,
if he used every trick at his disposal
and activated both [Clear as Fire] and [Karma Sound-Tracing],
he could cripple and kill Lawrence, who no longer had any Battle Qi, within ten moves.
"I could win, but there's no need."
Watching the fight in the street, which was almost over, Lu Jing'an murmured.
If he could avoid getting his own hands dirty, Lu Jing'an would rather do that.
"Bang!"
Chen Heqing slammed both fists into Lawrence's chest.
As his fists crashed into him,
every iron ring on his arms, carried by their tremendous momentum,
struck Lawrence in the chest.
That blow
shattered every bone in Lawrence's chest on the spot.
Situ Yiyun followed up with a devastating blow from behind.
He precisely broke Lawrence's fifth, sixth, and seventh lumbar vertebrae,
leaving him completely unable to move.
He collapsed face-down on the ground.
Though Lawrence was sprawled on the ground,
he still wouldn't back down.
"I'm Britain's envoy! You can't kill me!"
"If you dare kill me, it'll be an international incident!"
"Just wait until our Ironclad Warships blast you to pieces!"
Lawrence shouted these words in a language Chen Heqing and Situ Yiyun could understand.
His accent was a little strange,
but the two of them could still make out what he was saying.
Especially with a threat like that hanging over them,
Chen Heqing and Situ Yiyun really didn't dare make a move.
Seeing this, Lu Jing'an knew it was time for him to step in.
"Let's go."
Lu Jing'an rose and came down from the teahouse's second floor.
Lawrence heard the clack of a pair of leather shoes.
He tried to lift his head to look,
but with his spine broken, even that was difficult.
Lawrence lay on the ground and could only see Lu Jing'an's fine leather shoes.
He knew their owner was the mastermind behind everything.
"You're the despicable bastard who ambushed me! I won't let you get away with this."
"I'm Britain's envoy..."
Lawrence didn't finish.
A bloody hole in the back of his head cut off every word that followed.
Lu Jing'an handed the revolver, still smelling of gunpowder, to a servant at his side.
He took out a white handkerchief and slowly wiped his hands.
"Who said an envoy couldn't die?"
Lu Jing'an's voice wasn't loud,
but it rang clearly in everyone's ears.
When it came to foreigners,
Lu Jing'an had none of the fear common among people of this age.
After all, in the era Lu Jing'an had come from,
foreigners weren't even paper tigers anymore.
So fear simply didn't exist for Lu Jing'an.
And as far as he knew, even in this world,
the people at the very top weren't uniformly cowering before foreigners.
History in this world had taken a very different course from the one he remembered.
There had been no century of humiliation.
The reason China had fallen into its present state of divided warlords and rampant foreigners was, quite simply—
bizarre.
So bizarre that even Lu Jing'an could hardly believe it was true.
The reason this world had turned out this way,
according to the Fragmentary Secret Records,
was that a hundred years ago, the last emperor of Great Ming had sought immortality,
He committed an act that defied heaven,
causing the dragon veins to collapse into chaos and the spiritual energy to scatter,
and the world was torn into four,
as forces everywhere seized the opportunity to rise.
The foreigners
were nothing but hyenas sneaking in while the gates were down.
This history was so bizarre that when Lu Jing'an first heard it, he had thought it was just a tale.
But after cross-checking it against various sources, he found clues that matched at every turn.
It was only that the events were so long ago and the historical records so vague that he had never looked into them deeply.
Ordinary people feared foreigners mostly because of their ironclad ships belching black smoke and their deadly firearms.
But those had never been what Lu Jing'an feared.
The instant Lawrence breathed his last, a familiar prompt appeared before Lu Jing'an:
[Refinable/repairable soul detected. Collect it?]
"Collect it."
Lu Jing'an was still rather curious about what he could refine from this foreign devil's soul.
After all, the foreigners' cultivation methods differed markedly from those of Huaxia.
Lu Jing'an had just collected the soul when he saw Chen Xuan walking over from afar.
"Master."
Lu Jing'an bowed with utmost respect.
Chen Xuan glanced at the corpse on the ground, his tone calm. "Did you kill him?"
Lu Jing'an answered truthfully:
"I used a few underhanded methods to break his Battle Qi.
The two masters wounded him badly, and only then did I finish him off with a shot."
Chen Xuan nodded, his gaze returning to Lu Jing'an's face.
"There is no ranking of methods. If it gets the job done, it's a good method."
He said it calmly, but it was an unmistakable show of approval.
His master was not a rigid man.
Lu Jing'an smiled. "I'll remember that, Master."
Then he asked, "What about the Lin Family... Has everything been taken care of?"
Chen Xuan nodded. "It's all been cleared out. They're sweeping the place now."
"Then let's wait at the Lin Family's place."
Lu Jing'an looked toward the end of the long street. The sky was growing bright, but the lanterns on either side were still lit.
Lu Jing'an murmured, "The wedding procession should be arriving soon."
Before you continue