“Go to the Jin Prince Manor? Have you gone mad?!”
Bai Liuli shot to her feet with a whoosh, her mouth hanging open.
“The Prince of Jin is Soul Transformation! A Soul Transformation not yet 500 years old!”
“Think thrice, think thrice! Right now we would barely manage against a Nascent Soul. I am not yet 100 years old and do not want to die an early death in my prime.”
Facing Bai Liuli’s exaggerated performance, He Shu rolled her eyes.
“Stop wailing like ghosts and wolves. At your age you could already be a great-grandmother among mortals.”
“Hmph. Even so I am still a young little girl.”
Bai Liuli sat back down.
She knew He Shu was impossible not to go to the Jin Prince Manor now.
Her tone calmed.
“Do you have certainty? Our purpose is to support Hu Chi, not Hu Liu.”
“I know. I am going to the Jin Prince Manor in order to spread rumors and provoke opposition between Hu Chi and Hu Liu.”
Bai Liuli stroked her chin, pondered for a long while, and shook her head.
“We are people of the Southwind Immortal Kingdom. Helping the Prince of Jin cause Jade Water and Azure Parasol to grow even closer is a hundred harms and not a single benefit to us. There is no reason or pretext whatsoever that can persuade the Prince of Jin to believe us.”
A shallow smile hooked at the corner of He Shu’s mouth.
Bai Liuli, in the end, had not understood her meaning.
“What if we do not need the Prince of Jin’s trust at all?”
Bai Liuli was puzzled.
“Do not need the Prince of Jin’s trust?”
“Mm.”
He Shu nodded.
“Once the seed of suspicion is planted, it cannot be waved away. The Prince of Jin is a smart person, but smart people often think a great many things.”
“The clever are mistaken by their own cleverness?”
Seeing that Bai Liuli had understood a little, He Shu nodded.
“Yes. If Hu Liu wishes to take the high seat, he must have the monarch change the crown prince. Thinking from his angle, if Hu Chi wishes to keep the crown prince’s seat he will either preserve himself with wisdom or make a move against the Prince of Jin.”
Sweat beaded on Bai Liuli’s forehead.
She thoroughly understood He Shu’s plan and could not help giving rise to admiration.
“Truly worthy of those who play politics…… their hearts are really damn black.”
He Shu paid no mind to what Bai Liuli thought and continued speaking.
“After Hu Chi takes the high seat, if he wishes to stabilize imperial power he also cannot step over the Prince of Jin as this threshold. But as I said before, he does not dare bear the crime of plotting against his flesh-and-blood brothers.”
“So there is only one final choice.”
He Shu and Bai Liuli looked at each other and spoke that answer with one voice.
“Reduce the feudatories!”
……
At the third watch of midnight, overcast clouds hung heavy over the immortal city, and the moonlight was extremely faint.
The defenses around the Jin Prince Manor were strict, and the patrolling officers and soldiers numbered a full hundred.
He Shu and Bai Liuli hid in the undergrowth, observing the surrounding situation.
“The hundred-household officer has already gone far. It is indeed just as you said in the restaurant. The Jin Prince Manor looks strictly defended, yet in truth it is riddled with holes.”
The patrolling officers and soldiers were all absentminded.
Several of them were even yawning.
If this had been ordinary times, they would long since have been chopped for neglect of duty.
“Without the Prince of Jin’s decree, these officers and soldiers would absolutely not dare be so unbridled. Watch. In at most half a double-hour, a dead corner without guards will appear.”
It was not even half a double-hour.
After merely two quarter-hours, there was already one place with no officers or soldiers patrolling at all.
“A good chance. We go!”
The two of them wore night-traveling clothes and bamboo hats, nimbly jumped over the courtyard wall, and flipped into the inner court.
Bai Liuli slipped behind an officer and soldier, formed her five fingers into a knife, and fiercely knocked unconscious one who was patrolling inside the courtyard.
“See. There is not the slightest obstruction at all.”
The two of them had not employed any spells.
Although the Prince of Jin had arranged this deliberately, he still wanted face.
“Mm.”
“Go. That direction.”
The direction He Shu’s finger pointed was precisely the detached courtyard where the Prince of Jin was.
They circled past the garden, the artificial lake, and the rockery, and while they were at it knocked unconscious several more servants of the manor, then came to the back of the detached courtyard’s rooms.
The room’s window had been shut, yet it was not locked.
He Shu took out a bamboo sliver, poked a hole in the window paper, and observed the situation inside the room.
Inside the room there was only the Prince of Jin alone, lying on his side upon the bed with eyes tightly shut, his breathing steady.
“The Prince of Jin is asleep.”
He Shu lowered her voice and said softly to Bai Liuli.
They cautiously opened the window, flipped inside, and did not make any sound.
Coming before the Prince of Jin’s bed, they drew aside the half-lowered gauze curtain.
He Shu looked at the soundly sleeping Prince of Jin.
“He looks rather proper.”
The Prince of Jin’s outward appearance was no more than the year of standing firm.
Sword-like brows and starry eyes, yet his looks could only be called ordinary.
The imposing aura that radiated from inside to outside, however, was something ordinary people could not match.
He Shu twisted her head to look at Bai Liuli, signaling her to prepare to act, yet saw Bai Liuli lightly stroking the bed’s upright posts.
“Truly ruinous spending. These are all Golden Empyrean redwood. Just the raw materials of this bed alone would have a market price of 200,000 top-grade spirit stones, would they not?”
He Shu had an impulse to hit someone, yet she endured it.
“Proper business is important. I am going to wake the Prince of Jin. If she wakes and finds you like this, I fear she will chop us as assassins.”
Bai Liuli tch’d.
“We are not much different from assassins anyway.”
“Hurry and shut your mouth.”
Her fists had hardened, yet considering that the overall situation was more important, He Shu could only vent all her anger upon the Prince of Jin.
One hand pinched the Prince of Jin’s nose, and one hand covered the Prince of Jin’s mouth.
Matched with He Shu’s full set of night-traveling clothes, there truly was a kind of assassin’s bearing.
Seeing this, Bai Liuli tightly covered her own mouth, holding back so as not to laugh aloud.
After a good while, she finally recovered.
The words she spoke were still asking for a beating.
“Do not say it. If we really smother the Prince of Jin to death, does our mission count as a success?”
If the Prince of Jin died, the Azure Parasol Immortal Kingdom was bound to fall into great chaos.
At that time everyone would suspect it was Hu Chi who had made the move.
How did this not count as completing the mission in a disguised form?
He Shu did not speak and only wrinkled her brows.
“He sleeps too dead as well. His face has already been smothered into Lord Guan’s and he still will not wake.”
She drew in a deep breath and made a choice of extremely great risk.
She raised her hand, confirmed the force, and brought it down.
Smack—
A crisp slap echoed through the room.
Hearing this sound, Bai Liuli suddenly could no longer laugh.
“My life is over……!”
Bai Liuli was simply about to be frightened stupid.
She had never, ever expected He Shu to be so bold.
The heart that had been hanging finally died.
She closed her eyes and gave up all resistance, looking as if she had accepted her fate.
After a good while, the pain she had envisioned did not arrive.
Bai Liuli tentatively opened her eyes, only to discover that she was actually still alive and had not even lost an arm or a leg.
“Stop looking as if you are hovering between life and death. Hurry and come with me to wake him, hey!”
He Shu was truly speechless as well.
How could there be someone in this world who took a great slap in the face and still did not wake?
A small, red palm print had appeared on the Prince of Jin’s right cheek, extremely obvious.
Yet he himself was like a person with nothing the matter and even rolled over to continue sleeping.
“Looking like this, I fear that if he were truly assassinated someday he would not even know.”