Li Chen had witnessed He Ran's clash with those men firsthand; he understood it as clearly as if a lantern had been lit inside his belly.
Looking at the Rogue Cultivators around them, everyone greeted them as though nothing had happened, or stood nearby talking grandly about making a living and getting rich. Yet an inexplicable barrier had already begun to form between them.
So they did not linger there either, and soon left as well.
Once they were outside the tavern, He Ran said helplessly to Li Chen, "It seems we really are going to be squeezed out. But someone most likely set this up deliberately."
Li Chen said, "So what? Did we embark on the Dao Path just to scheme against those people, buzzing like flies and skulking like dogs for scraps of gain?"
He Ran said, "Of course not."
Li Chen said, "Then there's no need to care about this. If we have time, we'd be better off going back to the market while it's still early and seeing whether there are any opportunities."
He Ran said, "That's all we can do."
But when Li Chen and He Ran hurried to the market and revisited the shops where they had previously bought Demon Cores and various spirit materials, they discovered that almost overnight, every place claimed to have run out of stock.
One or two shops doing so might have been a coincidence. All of them doing so made the truth plain.
At this, both men ground their teeth in hatred. "That damned Qian Wanli! He's really leaving us no way out!"
Naturally, only one man could pull off something like this: the city's true local snake, Qian Wanli, president of the Merchants' Association, whose word was reputed to carry the most weight!
As early as three