Yet the strangest thing was that the seal stamped upon it was not the national seal of Zhesha, but rather the private seal of Huo Ran.
Should they go?
The two exchanged glances, finding the exact same answer in each other’s eyes.
Of course they must go.
Huo Ran, the Empress of Zhesha, had reigned for quite some time and enjoyed a resounding reputation. Her troops were exceptional at warfare, and the vast expanse of territory she ruled had been personally conquered by her alongside her soldiers in her early years. She never resorted to subduing the enemy without fighting, meaning there was bound to be a hidden motive behind this.
There was also another reason: Qin Yihui, the Empress of Mo Sen, had likewise dispatched a letter to them. This letter had arrived somewhat earlier, delivered half a day prior.
The letter began with an apology to Ji Mian, offering compensation for the assassination attempt carried out by the Mo Sen Shadow Guards against her. Knowing that Ji Mian was searching for the whereabouts of the Lisheng Xu, Qin Yihui stated that if the Demonic Cult were willing to lend a hand, they would owe a favor, and Qin Yihui would be willing to gift them the intelligence regarding the Lisheng Xu.
Since it involved the Lisheng Xu, Ji Mian naturally agreed.
Packing their provisions, Ji Mian and her entourage set out before noon. Just as the carriages were about to depart, Lin Qingye lifted Ji Mian’s carriage curtain and climbed in. Sitting side by side, the two of them found the atmosphere somewhat awkward.
Ji Mian did not have the habit of running a fever, getting sick, and then suffering from memory blackouts; she remembered everything that happened last night crystal clear, which made her feel rather embarrassed right now.
To think she had almost cried in front of Lin Qingye!
The journey was long, and the terrain of Zhesha was rugged and mountainous. Ji Mian felt rather miserable from the bumping, her face turning pale and ashen, as if she might vomit at the next jolt.
Keeping her eyes tightly shut, she suddenly caught a pungent, stimulating scent at the tip of her nose.
Lin Qingye was holding a sachet, placing it right in front of Ji Mian’s nose.
“We have traveled quite a distance. Would you like to rest for a while?”
Ji Mian readily went along with the suggestion, and the group halted to rest at an inn along the road.
Disguising themselves as a passing caravan, they rented over twenty guest rooms.
Ji Mian had remained listless throughout the entire journey, and coupled with the fact that her body had not fully recovered, she wanted to head upstairs to rest not long after finishing her meal.
Lin Qingye sat downstairs for a while before deciding to bring her some medicine.
Both tacitly avoided mentioning what had happened over the past few days, but that didn’t mean nothing had occurred. Feeling that she couldn’t quite keep her composure, Ji Mian purposefully avoided Lin Qingye.
Just as Lin Qingye turned to leave, Ji Mian called out to her. With half her body leaning out of the room, her hand brushed against something icy cold upon turning back.
Lowering her gaze to check, Lin Qingye discovered that Ji Mian was handing a mask into her palm.
It was a white jade mask, covering everything from the forehead down to the bridge of the nose, with the sides extending downward to the cheekbones. It was adorned with a few pale-blue frost flowers, and some relief cloud patterns were carved along the brow ridge.
“That other mask was of too poor quality and didn’t suit you.”
Lin Qingye rubbed her knuckles over it, feeling the uneven texture of the surface, before finally lifting her eyes a moment later. Giving Ji Mian’s eyes a brief, casual sweep, she curved her lips into an effortless, breezy smile.
“Thank you.”
Until Lin Qingye pulled the door shut behind her, Ji Mian remained in a daze. The arc of Lin Qingye’s curving lips seemed carved into her heart, refusing to fade away for a long time.
It was her fault for smiling so gorgeously that she always managed to captivate her soul for no reason.
The Midnight Ambush
Tonight, Ji Mian did not dare to sleep soundly. Sure enough, amidst her drowsiness, she caught a faint, wispy trace of foreign fragrance. Remaining calm and composed, she held her breath, covered her nose and mouth with the quilt, and before long, heard the sound of someone tampering with the room’s door lock.
Fumbling for a short dagger hidden on her person, she placed it beside her, gripping it tightly with one hand while tensing her body, ready to counterattack at any second.
The moment the door was pushed open, a dark shadow flashed inside, rushing straight toward the bed with a raised blade.
In the flash of a flint, the window behind her burst open with tremendous force. Lin Qingye agilely dove in through the small window, striking the assassin flying with a single slash of her sword.
At that moment, Ji Mian felt as though the roof above her head was about to be completely blown off. Her clothes billowed wildly in the fierce gale, and sword qi crisscrossed the air. From every direction, emerging from every unobserved shadow, darted one dark figure after another.
Ji Mian’s heart hammered frantically against her ribs, yet she did not summon Heidan.
Heidan’s appearance was far too distinctive and would easily give away their identities, which would undermine the purpose of masking their mission.
Lin Qingye still stood unflinchingly before her, remaining completely motionless except for her exposed lower face, which was taut with tension, and her thin lips, which were pressed tightly together. Frostbite in her hand emitted a faint, clear radiance.
Several candleholders had been knocked over by the sword qi, leaving only a single candle burning in the room, casting flickering shadows where it was impossible to tell tree branches from human figures. Yet the thick, heavy murderous aura hanging in the air made Ji Mian shudder with a chill.
Amidst the dim, shifting light, Ji Mian caught Lin Qingye’s lips moving slightly.
“You go first.”
Lin Qingye squeezed Ji Mian’s hand, her fingers tracing a few deft strokes across her palm. Ji Mian felt a slight tickle, but given the tense situation before her, she knew she could no longer stay, lest she end up dragging Lin Qingye down.
Therefore, diving through the small opening Lin Qingye had blasted open, she rolled out of the window, landed in the inn’s stable on the ground floor, randomly snatched a horse, and galloped like her life depended on it toward the rendezvous point she and Lin Qingye had agreed upon. Only after traveling a long distance did she finally draw rein and pause, breathing heavily.
Cold sweat poured from every pore of Ji Mian’s body. The strands of hair at her temples were plastered flat by sweat, and as she panted for breath, she tried her best to conceal her traces in the silent night.
The one supposed to keep this appointment should have been Jiang Xiyan, and these assassins were undoubtedly targeting her. Yet here she was, wearing the exact same clothes and mask as Jiang Xiyan, hiding behind a haystack while feeling utterly exhausted in both body and mind.
The surrounding chorus of insect chirps suddenly fell into absolute silence.
Hiding her head, she had just barely steadied her breathing when a sudden motion tore through the air, whipping up a violent gust of wind.
Heidan perceived the danger ahead of time and automatically shielded her front.
The masked figure standing before her moved with mechanical precision, appearing as though they had suffered severe injuries.
Ji Mian tried swinging Heidan, but her moves and stances lacked any cohesive method, getting batted aside time and time again.
Her hands felt weak and boneless, barely able to keep a grip on her ritual sword. Heidan seemed unruly and uncooperative, as if harboring a mind of its own.
Blocked and parried by her opponent’s continuous assaults, her hand holding Heidan was jarred completely numb. Unable to maintain her grip, Heidan was batted out of her hand and sent flying.
The moment she lost her sword, Ji Mian retreated a few steps, exposing a fatal opening. Naturally, the assassin would not let slip such an opportunity and lunged forward instantly. The cold gleam of the blade was right before her eyes; Ji Mian didn’t even have time to close her eyes, expecting the sound of flesh being pierced to ring out in her ears the next second.
Yet it never came.
A beam of blue light streaked across the horizon, as if cleaving the sky in two. The pitch-black night sky mirrored the stars, and this radiance made everything else pale in comparison.
Visible to the naked eye, beneath this blue light were layer upon layer of intensive sword qi. As they swept through the air, they seemed to crystallize into a layer of biting frost, bringing an instantaneous, bone-chilling cold. It felt as if a glacier capable of freezing all creation had manifested from the extreme northern lands right into this mortal realm.
Yet Ji Mian felt no murderous intent directed at herself. The sword qi seemed endowed with spiritual intelligence, purposefully bypassing her to plunge the assassin standing before her straight into the dirt.
Buried deep beneath the ground, the assassin appeared to have lost all breath, only to suddenly leap back up from the deep pit a moment later, stirring up a gale-force wind. The mask on Lin Qingye’s face was shaken loose and was about to fall right off.
Lin Qingye’s face was already widely known to the public, and under no circumstances could anyone be allowed to see it right now.
Though her right hand was still trembling, Ji Mian switched to wielding her sword with her left hand, hooked the falling mask off the ground with the tip of her blade, flashed in front of Lin Qingye, and pressed it firmly back onto her face.
Lin Qingye stared straight at her, finally halting her blade.
Ji Mian looked back over her shoulder.
The shadows behind them were completely gone. Who knows when that assassin had managed to slip away?
Stopping beside her, Lin Qingye breathed heavily, a fine, dense layer of sweat coating her brow. She had sustained minor injuries; a few bloody trails stained her light-colored robes, and her hair was somewhat disheveled.
A trace of amusement rippled through her deep-blue pupils.
“Well, aren’t you going to let go?”
Only then did Ji Mian scramble away in a hurried panic.
“Be more careful. If anyone finds out you and I are traveling together, ten mouths won’t be enough to clear your name.”
“I’ll pay attention next time.”
Scanning Ji Mian up and down, Lin Qingye still couldn’t resist a bit of banter.
“Look at you, your martial arts are a far cry from what they were during that battle back then. Not much time has passed, so how on earth did you regress to this extent?”
“Were you peeking at me?”
“I was merely studying a few moves. After all, you are the Sword Saint, aren’t you? Is the great Sword Saint really so petty?”
“Naturally, I was waiting for you to play the hero and save the damsel in distress. Are my skills something anyone can just pick up by watching?”
“Besides, those people weren’t even worth me exerting myself.”
Looking thoroughly self-righteous, Ji Mian crossed her arms, while Lin Qingye swept her gaze over, inadvertently catching sight of Ji Mian’s hand still trembling as she held Heidan.
She swallowed her retort back down.
Fine, she wouldn’t pick a verbal fight right now.
“Let’s go. With those pursuers hounding us this tightly, the situation over in Liuxia probably isn’t looking too good either.”
After resting for a moment to slowly regulate her breathing, Lin Qingye accelerated the healing of her external wounds. Having fought multiple opponents single-handedly just now, she had inevitably been caught in the fallout.
“Be careful next time.”
As soon as Ji Mian finished speaking, Lin Qingye felt another surge of energy flow into her. Before she had time to stop it, theoretically speaking, the internal energies of the two of them should have clashed, this current of power proved unexpectedly harmonious.
Ji Mian acted as if she had known this all along, her expression remaining entirely normal.
How could that be?
Only sources sharing the same origin could blend together so smoothly. Did Ji Mian share the exact same origin as her?
How was that even possible?
Arrival in Liuxia
The main capital city of Zhesha was named Liuxia.
Traveling ahead of the rest, the two of them proceeded without a caravan to provide cover, making the entry procedures somewhat troublesome. Fortunately, Lin Qingye was full of resourcefulness. Perhaps benefiting from her extensive travels across various regions in her early years, she happened to have an old friend inside Liuxia City.
Sending a message ahead, her friend arrived shortly after to negotiate with the city guards, and after waiting a brief moment, the two of them were waved through.
The people of Zhesha adored the color red, painting even their houses and simple ornaments in vibrant shades of crimson. Walking inside felt like stepping into a sea of red, reminiscent of the Demonic Cult celebrating the New Year.
Looking around in all directions, Ji Mian found the sight quite novel, and the exhaustion accumulated from days of long-distance travel instantly vanished.
Lin Qingye asked her,
“The caravan hasn’t entered the city yet, and Huo Ran’s news shouldn’t arrive quite that fast. Would you like to stroll around? There is a tavern in the city known for serving exceptional food and wine.”
“We can gather some intelligence along the way as well.”
As expected, Lin Qingye understood her completely, knowing precisely what occupied her mind.
Guided by Lin Qingye, she made her way into the tavern and selected an outer-facing table on the second floor, where they could easily catch the voice of the storyteller down below.
Ordering two pots of wine and a few plates of specialty side dishes, they began filling their stomachs while probing for news.
“Hey, did you know something happened in the imperial court recently?”
“What happened? Tell me about it.”