"Kid, don't just read books and take them at face value. If you only study the Swindling Scripture, you won't learn a thing. Let me teach you—on our Sitting Oblivion Path, we don't just lie to people."
Sitting in the teahouse, Li Huowang sipped his tea while watching Liuwan drop this bombshell.
"Directly deceiving people is the lowest form of the art. If you want to swindle someone, you have to make them fool themselves," the shifty-eyed man with the walrus mustache explained to the youth before him. "As long as you can get them to trick themselves, they will believe even the most outrageous lies."
Just then, an exceptionally haggard old woman, carrying a vegetable basket, walked past the teahouse.
"Take a look at that woman from the Liu Clan. Her husband was conscripted as a grunt over ten years ago and still hasn't returned. Anyone with half a brain knows he isn't coming back, but she refuses to believe it. She still thinks her husband will return one day."
