‘Why does it always end up like this…’

“You shitty moon lily bastards are always like this!”

“What are you talking about, it’s your smelly sun lily that is always looking for trouble!”

“We haven’t even started trouble but it seems that you bastards need to be reminded again of your place!”

Zhang Dong was taking in the sights while looking over the restaurant. He wasn’t even able to sample the eastern empire cuisine before people started arguing with each other. It all started with the usual appearance of a young master. From that point, it spiraled out of control and now the group he was with had started fighting.

It was funny how they forgot that he was with them and started mouthing off with the other group. The robes they wore were similar with one thing, in particular, being different. The ones the people he was with had a silver lily pattern close to the heart while the other had a golden one. This was supposedly some kind of distinction between the factions and perhaps it went further than that.

What happened was that the boisterous young master started making moves on Sun Ling. However her bodyguards didn’t take this lightly, some of them were quite young and probably fostered feelings for this beautiful young missus. She had the usual looks that these cultivator types liked to go for. Pale jade skin and jet black hair, coupled with quite the large rear and also front end made the young men do silly things.

Soon enough they were arguing with the young master's entourage which was composed of cultivators from the sect. As he understood it, they were lone warriors brought up by the sect and then taken in by each faction. Even though they had some personal power as core formation masters they were considered lesser without a proper nascent soul elder backing them. Only by aligning themselves to a side faction of a sect did they stand a chance of progressing in this dog-eat-dog world.

‘Well… not like it’s not fun to watch… but this is troublesome, I don’t think my side can actually win if a brawl breaks out…’

Zhang Dong was able to remain calm and assess the situation. Thanks to his spirit sense and also the system that presented him with everyone’s power level, he was sure that they would lose. Sun Ling was just an early-stage core formation cultivator and her guards were composed of late stage experts and a few in the great circle stage.

Some of the stronger combatants had left the group to carry out some orders given by Sun Shi which diminished their numbers. On the other hand, the group that he was looking at was purely composed of great circle core formation experts with the young master being in the middle stage of it.

‘But someone will surely come out and stop them before that happens, right?’

Thanks to being a nascent soul master he could feel the presence of a few grandmasters watching the show. However, even after some of the people from both sides started getting pushy nothing happened. Finally, he realized that whenever a strong faction is involved not even a nascent soul master dared to interfere. They would probably at most keep them from killing each other but this didn’t mean death wasn’t possible.

‘Even a nascent soul master has their limits and I wouldn’t expect them to care about the guards…’

This was a reality in this world, only a few people were considered special. In this case, it was the young lady named Sun Ling and the young lordling that was smirking her way. As long as each of them remained relatively safe the battle might not end. Even if one of the guards gets crippled or died it could continue past it.

‘Will I have to jump in?’

Now that people were getting handsy he was in a pickle. He was supposed to be part of Sun Ling’s group and some people on the other side started looking at him funny. At the moment he was using his disguising skill and looked like a man in his late forties. His face was the most average-looking one that he could come up with and he was mimicking the late core formation stage.

This of course painted him as an easy target for the other side. The older a person looked the more it gave away about their talent. For someone being close to the appearance of a fifty-year-old and being at this stage, it didn’t bode well. It indicated that he was close to reaching his limit and probably reaching the nascent soul level would have been hard. He just wanted to be more realistic with his appearance but it also painted a target on his face.

“Hey you there, you’ve been awfully quiet for this whole time, so a coward like you made it into the moon lily? No wonder no one takes you seriously!”

‘Oh boy, here we go…’

One of the people from the Sun Lily faction looked in his direction. Zhang Dong was trying to not get involved and remained in the back but for this reason, he was singled out. The other guards were feeling each other out but he just remained in place with his hands crossed over one another. It was as if he wasn’t willing to participate which was true but for different reasons.

“The Moon Lily faction allows such unloyal people to become retainers? Hey come over here, this lord will give you a piece of his mind!”

The man approached Zhang Dong which caused the people that he came here to freeze in place. Finally, they realized that they had begun doing such embarrassing things before a hidden expert. All of them had gone through this shouting match many times before so they didn’t make much of it. Now on the other hand one of the Sun Lily guards was walking towards him with a grin on his face.

“No, that person…, you must not…”

“Fairy Ling, I don’t think you should interest yourself with lowly cowards like that, if you join me and the Sun Lily faction I’ll be sure to replace such lowly retainers.”

Sun Ling's eyes almost popped out of her sockets as she turned to see one of the Sun Lily faction men walking towards Zhang Dong. From her perspective the hidden expert wouldn’t really distinguish between the two factions, they were both part of the Heavenly Crane Sect.

If they were rude to him then it could be all over, with one burst of his Qi all of the people that were gathered here could be eradicated from the spot. In her eyes, he was a ticking time bomb that could explode at any moment she was supposed to keep busy until her grandfather’s return.

“What are you too scared to reply? Are you even listening? What’s wrong with you bastard?”

Sun Ling began foaming at the mouth as she saw the random Sun Lily faction guard grab the collar of the hidden expert. The man then started shamelessly shouting profanities as if he was hired by the invaders to stir up trouble. To her dismay, the people she was with were all blocked from helping by the young master and his men.

“Look at me when I’m talking to y…..ughhhhhhhhh”

Suddenly a loud smack echoed through the entire restaurant. People were already looking at the entire commotion so it was easy for them to notice the man flying through the air. It was truly a bizarre sight to behold, they had never seen someone twirling through the air like a propeller blade. The man’s body made a nice arch as he flew for more than a hundred meters and dive bombed into one of the water canals. This caused the water to splash some of the new arrivals as well as some of the restaurant staff.

‘Shit, I made a scene…’

Zhang Dong remained poker-faced throughout the whole incident. At first, he intended to just wait and perhaps push the man away gently. If he mimicked the realm of a great circle core formation expert perhaps the man would have backed away. Before he could do this however the man’s ugly face was before him. He could work with the yanking of his robe but when he got a whiff of the guy’s breath he lost it.

Luckily he had enough restraint in him to not do any long-lasting damage to the man. The smack to the face would leave a red handprint but the man’s neck would still be on his head. If he actually performed a smack with his whole strength behind it then the guard’s head would have exploded instantly.

“Oh my, he went really far… he must have been injured or something, he shouldn’t have been shouting in my ear if he was this tired don’t you think?”

“T-that’s right…”

Sun Ling clearly didn’t know what to say but she along with the guards used this chance to move toward Zhang Dong’s location. That is that they tried but before they could huddle around him and protect others from another smack they heard a booming sound.

“How dare you hit my younger brother, who do you think that you are?”

A strong aura hit the whole place and out of nowhere another person appeared. He looked to be a bit older than the man that Zhang Dong smacked away but somewhat similar looking. By the words that he said he seemed to be the elder brother of this person and he had been sitting in the back watching the entire thing happen.

‘Somewhere around a half-step nascent soul master? Did he fail at ascending?’

Normally being at a half-step realm level wasn’t possible, this mostly was reached by having better-graded cultivation techniques and being a prodigy. The other way of attaining this power was by failing through the transition. They didn’t fully achieve a breakthrough but also didn’t fully fail, it was a realm between realms. The uniqueness of this state was that a person could not progress any further unless they found some kind of miracle medicine their cultivation journey was over.

‘Is it this trope? Did I really walk into something as cliche as this?’

His poker face was almost torn down as he wanted to reveal his true power level. If the scenario continued then after he smacked this person away another hidden expert would show himself. There were some nascent soul masters watching from afar so this was a possibility…

‘Is this some kind of law of this world… whenever I try to disguise myself things tend to go wrong…’

Zhang Dong gave out a sigh which was of course mistaken for an insult by the man there. It seemed that he needed to either continue taking out the small fries or stand his ground but perhaps there was also another way to diffuse this situation.