By midnight, the winter wind howling through Yanjing carried something far stranger than snow.
Every hidden martial forum, private chat group, and dark-web trading ring across the ancient capital was buzzing like a kicked hornet nest.
Short videos filmed outside Taichu Benevolence Pavilion had spread like wildfire.
The footage showed twenty meteoric-iron staffs sliced into tiny metal cylinders in half a second. It showed a little girl throwing a thousand golden talismans that smelled like dried lotus blossoms. Most terrifying of all, it showed Elder Yin of the Spirit-Merchant Guild riding away inside a green city garbage truck.
Beneath the videos, a red pinned message was reposted three hundred thousand times:
Chairman Lin Mo holds over fifty million spirit stones. Taichu sells Rank 4 healing pills at ninety percent discount! But the Spirit-Mirror scans your soul at the door. If your Goodness score is below eighty, you pay ten times the price! If your Goodness is below thirty, you get kicked into the street!
The northern martial world read those words and lost its collective mind.
In the southern cities of Jiangcheng and Jiangnan, people already knew about this madness. They called it the Forced Morality Wave.
