As it turned out, the local gang-no, the guests from abroad-had been far too rude.
So rude that even a fellow guest watching from the sidelines could not stand it.
By the time this "Michael" stepped forward with an air of apparent resignation, his every movement carried an unhurried ease.
A guest should defer to his host.
But as he deliberately slowed his movements to test the waters, the "host" beside him made no move to stop him. That undoubtedly amounted to tacit permission.
Setting his wineglass on the table, the bald man straightened his collar. Beneath his high bow tie, the tattoos now completely concealed by his clothes shimmered with an invisible aura, silently writhing like a mass of living creatures, their colors growing ever more vivid.
Almost no one around him could actually notice that detail.
Except Li Yun.
The bespectacled young man frowned, but otherwise showed little reaction. He simply wanted nothing to do with the faint scent of corpse oil mixed into those tattoos.
Admittedly, compared with natural plant dyes, animal fats could indeed make perfumes, tattoos, and the like more pronounced and longer-lasting-but not everyone could appreciate that particular "aesthetic."
This "Death Mentor" clearly was not picky about what he used.
The two foreign-affairs escorts, on the other hand, remained entirely oblivious and were still speaking in gentle voices.
One man and one woman, both in their thirties or forties, were dressed appropriately and spoke with polished ease. Beneath their respectful manner, however, a trace of barely perceptible impatience was gradually emerging. They probably felt that such a trivial matter really was beneath them.
Neither the guest who had spontaneously taken a fancy to someone else's cat nor the situation they now had to resolve was particularly dignified.
At the end of the day, Dutch