Daily life of a cultivation judge

Months passing by without hearing from his father drove the young Li Fei desperate, and it only got worse when his mother's state got worse.

Out of desperation he sold everything of value in their home and borrowed, my father was one of those who gave what he could to the venture despite knowing it was a fruitless task, and when Li Fei, couldn't borrow or sell anymore, he took what he had scrounged up to the Green Dragon General Store, in the hopes that on account of his mother's history and long time service with the store, they could work out a deal or even a structured payment plan.

Things didn't work out as Li Fei expected and he was ruthlessly kicked out by the store clerk Ding Xiaoli. Maybe out of fury at being rejected and the pent-up frustration finally blowing up, Li Fei lunged at Ding Xiaoli to attack him.

Ding Xiaoli was a late-stage foundation establishment cultivator while Li Fei was just a peak-stage qi refinement cultivator. You can imagine how things played out for Li Fei after he attempted an attack on him.

Li Fei was beaten within an inch of his life. His legs were crippled so he wouldn't escape, and his cultivation was too, and then Ding Xiaoli slowly tortured him in public so others could see. Shaking the mountain to scare off the tiger, they always like to say.." Wu Mingli said with a sardonic smile.

"Everyone who was there silently stood by as they witnessed the whole thing happen. Not one person said or did anything as Li Fei cried out till his voice turned hoarse.

I was one of those people.." Wu Mingli said with heaviness in his tone.

Li Fei's screams had haunted him for quite some time after the fact, and now as he narrated the whole ordeal, he felt like he had been transported to that very scene.

A cobblestone pathway, an intersection filled with many buildings and people, and at the center of that intersection, a grand pavilion with a statue of a green dragon coiling around the flying eaves of the roof of that pavilion.

In front of that pavilion was a twenty-year-old youth, whose knees were facing different directions crying, bleeding, eyes widened in fear and desperation, and standing above him was a well-dressed demon in garbed with a handsome human skin, a kind smile, and dressed in brocade robes.

If it wasn't for the blood on the sleeves of his robes and hands, and the ruthlessness with which he tore at the twenty-year-old youth, one would have mistaken that fiend for a saint.

Standing witness to that horror were countless people all wearing the same look from the elderly, to the men, to the women and the children, they all had that look of dread, the same look that the twenty-year-old youth being tortured to death had.

An intersection that usually bustled with activity was silent with an oppressive air of fear. Even with the sun high up, there was a suffocating darkness growing within that intersection.

Wu Mingli looked to his right, and there was someone there. A middle-aged man wearing a red-brown robe, a matching coat that had an embroidered image of a red maple tree, and a thin one-meter-long saber at his waist.

"My father was there too.." Wu Mingli softly said with his gaze still on the middle-aged man standing to his right who bore facial features that resembled him.

Yes, his father was there, and just like the others, he too had that same horrified and paralyzed look on his face as he watched what was happening at the intersection.

Wu Mingli, like a son who adored his father, liked to join his father as he did his patrols around the city, and that day wasn't any different. It was how they both ended up there that day, and it was also the first time Wu Mingli had ever seen his father make such a face. It was a look of desperation and fear.

For as long as he knew the man, no matter the situation he was in, he always had a steady and calm presence around him that reassured those around him. It was what made him such a great guard and why many people felt safe to ask him for his assistance, but that day he saw him afraid and most of all looking irresolute. He was shaky.

"What tremendous turmoil you must have been in, back then.." thought Wu Mingli as he cast a sympathetic look at the specter of his father before he turned his gaze to where his father was looking, with his bloodshot eyes.

At that moment as he switched his view, Li Fei who was having his left hand broken turned at just that moment and looked at them and weakly mumbled something, which at the time, Wu Mingli had been too terrified to make out, let alone notice it.

But when he grew bold enough to confront that memory and with his growing cultivation base, he finally noticed those words, and with it some sort of answer on why his father did what he did.

"H...E...L...PM....E....,"

"Li Fei weakly mumbled for help amid all that pain and before I could register it, my father acted. That time I didn't understand why. There was a reason why no one chose to step out.

There were hundreds of core formation experts out there, but none of them stepped forward;

There were noble families there, with some even coming from the founding families, but none of them came forward either.

Why was that?

My father wasn't the only guard there that day, others were present there, some his superiors, but none of them even so much as uttered a single word of defense for Li Fei.

Why did everyone present remain unmoved?

It is simple, we were all afraid, not of the horror happening before us, but of the person and the massive overarching pavilion behind him.

If it had been a different store clerk maybe someone could have said something at most, but Ding Xiaoli was different, he was Shao Ren's nephew, which in no simple terms meant he was pavilion royalty where the Green Dragon General Store was concerned.

Acting against him was no different than acting against Shao Ren, the store owner. It was why everyone was afraid, my father included.

He knew what fate awaited those who dared act out of a place where Xiaoli was concerned. It was why he had that look on him back then. The look of someone who had the desperation of death on them, but he acted anyway.

I don't whether it was because Li Fei reminded him of how he was in a similar circumstance back then and the wandering cultivator stepped in, or the guilt of what could have happened back then spurring him on, or because I was there, and he didn't want his son to see him differently.

Whatever the reason was, it was strong enough to compel my father to act against the better judgment of all who were present and intervene on Li Fei's behalf.

Even though he knew it wouldn't work, my father tried a soft approach. He tried to appeal to Ding Xiaoli's humanity to spare Li Fei.

An ambitious but foolhardy approach. If Ding Xiaoli had any humanity in him, he would not have done what he did to Li Fei, and he would not have done with such a gleeful look to him.

We all knew fiend cultivators could be considered saintly monks if compared to him. He was the incarnate of vileness clothed in human skin.

He was infamous around the city and with good reason. He only looked alive when he was tormenting someone. And if there was one thing he cared about in his life more than tormenting people, was his face, and my father's act of intervention had robbed him of both.

And for that, he retaliated in the only way he knew how to, through unbridled violence. I don't know whether it was because of how tense the whole situation was and its effect on him,but my father retaliated in kind, with an unhinged savageness to him.

One side was a pampered young man who things always went his way without struggle even from those whose lives he took, and the other was a middle-aged man who had to fight several times over for every single thing he ever got in his life.

Even though his path to the higher realms had been cut short due to his flawed foundations in the early stages, he shored up and perfected all he could within his realm. That fight ended as soon as it started with my father ferociously punching Ding Xiaoli in the gut, crippling his cultivation and knocking him out, all in one swift motion.

No one saw it coming, and no one believed it even as Ding Xiaoli barreled like a broken kite toward the pillar of the pavilion and slumped over.

A millisecond was all it took. In just a millisecond a life was saved, a life was ruined, a life was ended.."