"It's done. The old monk took the matter on himself," Bi Lingkong said with a smile as she reappeared. "As luck would have it, I had barely left when I saw people from the Great Xia royal family rush over to question him. It was almost as if they'd rehearsed it beforehand. The timing was perfect!"
Only then did Pan Long breathe a sigh of relief. A weight had finally lifted from his heart.
When he had saved those people, he hadn't thought much about it. Only after the battle ended and he calmed down did he realize how much attention he had drawn to himself. That was far from good.
He carried a deadly secret. He ought to be hiding his face every day, not stepping into the spotlight like this!
Granted, people with great supernatural powers were generally unwilling to make enemies of someone blessed with Merit. The two Dragon Gods, for instance, had done their best to befriend him. But the world was vast. There were bound to be one or two oddballs whose heads were full of notions like If I kill the panda, I'll be the national treasure. The better a person was, the more they hated them.
Such oddballs generally didn't live long. Before long, they would bring about their own deaths. But any who managed to survive were usually among the most formidable of their kind. To make enemies of the masses and still stand firm—one could imagine how hard their fists were.
Pan Long had no desire to provoke people like that. If his fists were harder than theirs, he might consider acting on Heaven's behalf, stamping out evil, and sending those oddballs where they belonged.
For now, though, he truly couldn't afford to cross them. Keeping himself unknown to them was