At that moment, Second Young Master Wang, looking at Ji Qingcheng who had simply gone back to eating without a care, let a curious light flicker in his eyes.
He pulled a folding fan from his waist, tapped it on the table, and said, "You surely heard everything we just said. Do you know what you are supposed to do next?"
Ji Qingcheng, however, simply lowered her head.
She pushed the rice and vegetables around in her bowl with devoted concentration, eating with complete focus and not giving Second Young Master Wang even the smallest acknowledgment.
At the sight, Second Young Master Wang furrowed his brow and looked at the people around him, "Is she not right in the head? A dimwit has no fun in her."
At those words, the people around him snickered, and one young gentleman narrowed his eyes and said, "Young master, you have it wrong. We have always played with women who are all there. Playing with a dimwit for a change, would that not have its own kind of appeal?"
He looked at Ji Qingcheng wolfing down her food, swallowed, and said, "And a dimwit this beautiful, just thinking about it is exciting."
Second Young Master Wang's expression shifted, and his brow smoothed out. "Ah, you are right. How did I not think of that? Even a dimwit has her own kind of interest."
With that he broke into a leering smile and made a gesture toward the elderly man beside him.
Right at that moment, Ji Qingcheng finally cleared the last of the rice and vegetables from her bowl, and let out a satisfied belch.
And in the very next instant, to the shock of Second Young Master Wang and everyone watching, Ji Qingcheng, who had been sitting on the bench at the table, simply vanished into thin air.
The elder's reaching hand closed on nothing. His expression changed sharply.
He looked down, and saw only a pair of chopsticks falling from the air, landing neatly beside the empty rice bowl on the table.
The rice bowl sat there, perfectly clean and white, with not a single grain of rice left inside.
"What..."
The elder stood blankly for a moment, then immediately looked in every direction. But there was no trace of Ji Qingcheng anywhere to be found.
At the same time, Second Young Master Wang and the others finally caught up with what had just happened.
"What is this? Where did she go?"
Second Young Master Wang shot to his feet. And right at that moment, Ji Qingcheng's cool, indifferent voice drifted over, floating to the ears of everyone present, "I can see none of you are decent people. If you do not want to die, prepare ten thousand taels of gold and wait for me at the inn tonight."
"If there is no gold, the consequence will be like this bowl..."
With those words, Ji Qingcheng's voice disappeared entirely.
The group looked around with unpleasant expressions. Seeing no further movement anywhere, they turned their gazes to the empty bowl on the table.
And in the next moment, a small piece of the bowl that had been sitting on the table simply vanished, as though it had been erased.
At the sight, Second Young Master Wang and the others all frowned.
The missing piece of the bowl was no bigger than a fingernail, and had she not directed their attention to it, it would have been easy to miss entirely.
"Is that it?" Second Young Master Wang spoke up.
It was supposed to be a threat, yet she had only damaged this tiny sliver of a porcelain bowl. The impact was not particularly intimidating.
At that, the elderly man who had said nothing until now spoke with a grave expression, "This woman can vanish without a sound or a trace. She must possess a remarkably unusual concealment technique."
"By all rights, breaking this bowl should not have been beyond her. Yet she chose not to do so. The most likely reason is that she actually did not want to break it."
As he spoke, the elder bent his head and examined the edge of the broken piece on the bowl very carefully.
At those words, Second Young Master Wang and the others exchanged glances. Then Second Young Master Wang let out a dismissive laugh, "She did not want to break the bowl? What kind of strange reason is that?"
His expression then darkened again as he looked toward the elder, "Old Zhu, can you find her?"
The elder called Old Zhu looked up from the bowl and shook his head, "When she disappeared, not even the faintest trace of true qi moved. I have no way of tracking her."
"And her method of breaking the bowl was extraordinarily precise, leaving no trace at all. I cannot read her technique or her background from it."
At those words, Second Young Master Wang's expression turned ugly, "Then what does Old Zhu make of what she just said?"
It was evident that Ji Qingcheng was no longer looking like a dimwit in his eyes.
After all, no dimwit would have this kind of skill for vanishing into thin air, and no dimwit would know to threaten someone and demand gold.
The only thing that still made her seem a little dim was the fact that when she had tried to intimidate them, all she had done was chip a tiny piece off a bowl. It did feel like someone not quite using their head.
"It is hard to say. To be cautious, we had better report this to the master."
Old Zhu said with a pensive expression.
Yun City was already a gathering place for martial world figures from every direction, and genuine martial artists of formidable ability were not rare among them.
In the past, Second Young Master Wang and his group had mainly preyed on women with no backing and no connections, and had rarely run into serious trouble.
But this time they had stumbled badly. What had looked like a penniless beggar of a woman had turned out to be anything but ordinary.
Though they still could not determine her true background, they could not afford to be careless.
Her ability to vanish without a sound was simply too unsettling. They had no reliable way to guard against it.
At those words, the young man's gaunt, haggard face went through a rapid series of expressions.
Clearly he was not particularly eager to tell his father about this. His father already looked upon his behavior with considerable distaste, and now this on top of everything else would probably earn him another sound beating.
At that point Old Zhu looked at him and said, "I would suggest the young master tell the Lady first, and have her relay the matter to the master. That way there should not be too great a problem."
At those words, Second Young Master Wang's eyes lit up at once. He looked at the others, "I will go back to the house for a bit. We will meet again tomorrow."
Then he looked at the empty bowl on the table once more, and thought privately, "A woman with abilities like that would be quite something to get hold of."
With that thought, Second Young Master Wang licked his lips, then called Old Zhu and left the inn.
The other young gentlemen took their leave with expressions ranging from interested to uneasy, and before long they had all scattered.
...
With the mist-veiled sun sinking toward the west, the faintest smear of a hazy sunset appeared above Yun City.
Ji Qingcheng sat on the roof of the Cloud Arrival Inn, back pack on her back, and waited quietly.
After all her experience robbing bandits and brigands along the road, she had developed a reliable method. The approach with people like these was straightforward: find them and make them pay up.
And she had plenty of uses for the money. She could stay at an inn, get food, and buy sugar-hawthorn skewers and little candy figurines.
And of course there was one larger purpose, which was to use the money to redeem the wrongdoings of these scoundrels, and to give it to the destitute people she came across on the road.
When Ji Qingcheng had been at Falling God Peak, though the grandmaster had never acknowledged her identity within the sect, food and drink had never been a concern.
And so she had spent her days on the mountain in meditation and sleep, nothing more.
Since the death of her master and her first real departure from Falling God Peak to walk the martial world on her own, this was genuinely her first time out on the road.
And yet she had clearly already worked out a unique approach all her own for navigating the martial world.
At that moment, having watched Second Young Master Wang and the others file out of the inn, Ji Qingcheng made no move to follow. Instead her gaze drifted toward the large Cloud Arrival Inn across the way.
"Even after destroying Falling God Peak, the person is actually quite decent. Going out of the way to buy me a meal."
Ji Qingcheng's fine brows furrowed slightly. She rested her chin in her hand, and a look of quiet contemplation settled in those cool, clear eyes.
On the night Falling God Peak fell, she had said she was leaving, and she had. But she had not gone very far.
And so she had watched from a distance as Li Musheng cut down the Falling God Peak grandmaster and all four honored elders.
Even so, she had not lifted a hand to help.
For one thing, her relationship with Falling God Peak and its members was that of sect companions at best, and not a particularly close one.
For another, she had in fact been aware of the grandmaster's practice of consuming divine blood.
She had even tried to advise the grandmaster against it, but the man was never going to listen to her.
"I told them, as one commits more and more wrongs the end comes of itself. They just did not believe me. Now their reputation in the entire martial world is ruined."
Ji Qingcheng shook her head. After Falling God Peak's destruction, beyond the shockwaves the event itself had sent through the entire martial world, the fact that the grandmaster and four honored elders had been cut down by a young prince had naturally become a topic of lively discussion over tea and meals for martial world people everywhere.
Five top martial experts of the martial world, brought down by a young man not yet twenty, their lifetimes of cultivation being tossed around as fodder for mockery.
Of course, it was not that these martial world people did not understand how terrifying Li Musheng's cultivation was. It was simply that when something did not land on your own doorstep, casting judgment from a safe distance came naturally and without any internal conflict.
For Ji Qingcheng personally, there was still some small measure of feeling she held for Falling God Peak.
After all, she had been raised entirely by her master. Her master could not quite be called a good person, but was nothing like the grandmaster, who had killed without mercy or count.
Her master had parted ways with Falling God Peak's leadership many years earlier over a difference in philosophy, and had gone traveling the martial world. It was on those travels that her master had taken her in, and only later had settled into seclusion. It was only a few years ago, when her master's end was drawing near and the wish to return to one's roots had grown strong, that the two of them had finally come back to Falling God Peak. And Ji Qingcheng herself had spent only a few years at the sect.
So there had never been any particularly deep attachment.
"Master, it is not that your disciple did not try to do right by the sect. Your disciple's ability is simply not up to the task."
Ji Qingcheng let out a quiet sigh, and a trace of helplessness showed in those cool eyes.
She had in fact seen Li Musheng earlier, inside the Cloud Arrival Inn, and had been quite close to him.
Though she could not detect the slightest trace of Martial True Qi on Li Musheng at the time, for reasons she could not quite explain, the man gave her an overwhelming sense of terrifying power.