"Run!"
"The sea raiders have entered the city!"
"Go! Go!"
When Cui Sujing opened his eyes, all he saw was a chaotic crowd. He was no longer seated beside a table in the teahouse, and the brush, ink, paper, and inkstone at hand had long since vanished. There was, however, an obvious blot of ink on his sleeve and the hem of his robe, as though an inkstone had been overturned and the spilled ink had stained him.
Yet Cui Sujing had no memory of anything related to this.
He looked around blankly and discovered that he was sitting at a street corner, his clothes covered in dust. Beside him stood several friends with whom he had been talking in the teahouse earlier. Every one of them was drenched in sweat, their clothing disheveled, looking thoroughly bedraggled.
The moment they saw Cui Sujing open his eyes, they impatiently spoke up—
"Brother Cui, you're finally awake. If you hadn't woken up soon, there would have been nothing we could do."
"Exactly. Usually, once we remove the paper you use as a medium, you wake up. But this time, even after we carried you on our backs, there was still no response. You looked as though you had fainted dead away."
Their words left Cui Sujing even more confused, but when he recalled the two terms he had heard earlier, he roughly guessed at what had happened.
"Brother Chen, Brother Zhu, you..." Filled with doubt, he was about to ask when a voice suddenly interrupted him—
"Kid! Don't block the way. If you get trampled to death, don't blame anyone else!"
Along with the voice came an exceptionally burly man. With a fierce face, he glared at Cui Sujing and the others and said harshly, "What are you standing here for? Get