"This is why I am now here. With the means at my disposal, I can't afford any of the three options the Blue River Cauldron offered.
I am sure I got the pill poisoning from the Golden Duck Platter Restaurant. I'm not looking for a payout or anything, If there were any other options, I would rather choose them than escalate the matter to this point, but there isn't.."
One could hear the desperation and turmoil in her voice, and the distress the whole ordeal had caused her.
"My plea to the court is for a fair judgment so I can have my pill poisoning treated. That is all. Thank you for the opportunity..." Li Shu cupped her fist and stepped back.
"Thank you Miss Li Shu for your apt explanation. Owner Bai Zhou, the floor is now yours," said Yang Qing as he motioned for the middle-aged man with short hair and white robes and an emblem of a roasted golden duck sown on his robes.
"Thank you for the opportunity, Judge Yang Qing. I would like to be upfront in declaring our innocence in this matter. I find it hard to believe that my restaurant had anything to do with Miss Li Shu's plight.
Our restaurant isn't big and we only have three branches around the continent. The main branch that I mostly take care of is in my hometown in Cinnabar kingdom, as for the other two, one is the one in Silent Willow County and the other is in Green Bridge province of the Gold Finch Empire.
Both these branches are headed by my personal disciples who have been with me for over a thousand years and know how much cooking matters to me and the reputation of the Golden Duck Restaurant Platter.
There is no way they would do anything to jeopardize that, and the branch in Silent Willow County has been operational for almost 500 years, and in that time not once has there been an incident of pill poisoning.."
His tone was gentle and soft-spoken but one could detect the staunch firmness and unshakeable will from it.
Li Shu was a bit taken aback by Bai Zou's demeanor and the accompanying pressure that made it hard for her to breathe.
Even though his outward look was calm and collected, he was very much impassioned, and that led him to inadvertently leak out a bit of his pressure as a second-stage palace realm expert.
The leaked spiritual pressure made Li Shu feel as if a mountain had been dropped on her body and the air had been thinned out.
Even though Bai Zou may not have purposefully targeted her with his pressure and whatever bits caught her were purely the remnants, it was still more than what a sixth-stage core formation cultivator with pill poisoning could handle.
A healthy prime late-stage core formation expert would have the same struggle much less her who was weaker, ill, and also nervous for filing a case against a palace realm cultivator.
Her nervousness was understood since other than Bai Zou being a palace realm expert, there were rumors surrounding him, that most residents of the Silent Willow County had heard about.
One of those rumors was how he had single-handedly decimated a beast tide that numbered five thousand strong in the Cinnabar Kingdom.
The kingdom was a rank 4 kingdom that was filled with numerous forests and rivers and lakes, and in terms of resources, it was rather rich. With all these going on for it, one would expect the kingdom to be strong.
However, before Bai Zou's rise to prominence, it could be considered average at best when compared to other rank 4 nations and organizations.
The reason for that was while it was blessed with resources, a third of its territory was home to some of the most ferocious spirit beasts that the royal family and other residents of the kingdom just couldn't handle.
Their territories were loosely scattered and different areas of their kingdom were constantly being attacked by those spirit beasts which gave them little opportunity to grow or develop. While the constant attacks did help them improve their combat ability, they were restricted in the areas they had access to, and the spirit beasts were wise and calculated in how they performed their attacks.
They prevented the kingdom from mobilizing their attacks by sporadically attacking different territories, which always kept the different powers in those territories on guard.
The death toll on the normal population was also high which meant that their total population continuously dwindled.
Had Bai Zou not appeared, the Cinnabar kingdom would have likely been completely overrun by the spirit beasts, eventually.
From what Li Shu heard about him from the gossip around, his father had been a butcher for the army of the kingdom and he was stationed at the borders of the kingdom.
His job was to process the body of the carcasses of the spirit beasts that fell in battle. With the kingdom constantly fighting against the spirit beasts and having no room for anything else, they could only use those same spirit beasts to help them grow their strength.
They therefore slowly studied them, especially the more common ones, in the hopes of discovering not only their weaknesses but how to use every part of their bodies to strengthen themselves, and this was where the occupation of a military butcher was born.
This job was assigned to those who didn't have a great aptitude for fighting and cultivation. With how many spirit beasts attacked them, and how high the frequency was, the kingdom trained a lot of its citizens to be butchers.
Their jobs would be to quickly process the killed spirit beasts before other spirit beasts devoured them, or some precious ingredients from their bodies got ruined due to the passage of time.
The job was highly dangerous since it involved sending those who didn't have the greatest strength into the most dangerous of places.
However, it wasn't without its benefits, such as gaining merit points with the royal family, and with those merit points, they could redeem them for treasures from the royal vault or gain aristocratic titles. In addition, there were also accidental benefits brought by butchers who had been on the job for a long time.
Due to constant contact with the bodies of the spirit beasts, their own bodies got strengthened and in certain instances even mutated from having their bodies continuously soak up the blood of those spirit beasts as they dissected them.
The mutation would sometimes be beneficial and end up elevating their strength and even natural aptitude, and in other instances, it was no different than poison which resulted in the gruesome death of the butcher.
Bai Zou's father had been one of those butchers. There was nothing noteworthy about him, and the only reason he was mentioned was because he had taught his skills to his son, who inherited his post when he died.
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