Anyone who heard that first remark would have thought the young man was challenging Jing Jiu to a fight.
Only after hearing the next remark did people understand what he really meant.
What was this if not deliberate humiliation?
Earlier in the Plum Garden, when Luo Huainan said he would break Jing Jiu's sword, Zhao Layue had wanted to kill him. By the normal course of a story, she would of course have been furious now, raising her ink-dark brows like short swords, a cold sword light flashing in her eyes, uttering that famous saying of the Green Mountain Sect before directing her sword to slash at the young man behind the table.
But she had cultivated for too short a time, after all, and her cultivation realm fell short of her opponent's. She would have fallen into danger, leaving Jing Jiu no choice but to reveal his hidden card and act himself, cutting the young man in two before a scholar, blood flowing all over the street in a scene too ghastly to behold. How could the young man's sect accept such a thing? The Plum Gathering would have been suspended at once, and the two most powerful orthodox sects on the Chaotian Continent would have launched an all-out war. Sea-Breaking Realm experts would have overturned rivers and seas, Heaven-Connecting Realm experts would have wrecked the heavens and shaken the earth, and both sides would have suffered grievous casualties. The Western Sea Sword Sect would have seized the moment to rise, while evil experts from the Never-Old Forest, the Profound Yin Sect, and other factions colluded with fiends from the Netherworld to attack the orthodox alliance. Everywhere, bloody rain and reeking winds would have raged, and blood would have flowed deep enough to float pestles. Then the monsters of