"Son-in-law, we're in trouble!"
That day, Ye Xiangming urgently summoned Wang Chen, who had been resting at home, to the county office. His expression was exceedingly grave.
It turned out that just last month, martial arts experts dispatched by the prefectural city had joined forces with masters from the Imperial Court's Divine Prohibition Bureau to encircle and suppress the Drought Demon, only to suffer more losses and return in defeat.
This Drought Demon had ravaged Changyi Prefecture for over a year. It was the chief culprit behind the drought, leaving countless commoners displaced and reduced to refugees.
The Imperial Court and the prefectural city had launched several campaigns against it, yet none had managed to capture this cunning and powerful Drought Demon.
Instead, quite a few masters and experts had perished.
Originally, this failure had little to do with Qing'an County. But Ye Xiangming had received reliable intelligence that the Baiyun Temple mages had used a special method during the campaign to drive the Drought Demon toward Qing'an County.
If they could not kill it, they would drive it away—and they had even resorted to the poisonous scheme of diverting disaster eastward!
At its root, this could not be separated from the earlier killing of the inspector the prefectural city had sent to Qing'an County.
In a year of great disaster, royal power did not extend below the county and township. The prefectural city truly had no way to deal with Qing'an County. After all, Ye Xiangming's methods of squeezing the wealthy households were perfectly ordinary practices in other counties.
But the lords of the prefectural city could not possibly swallow this insult so easily. Taking advantage of the campaign against the Drought Demon to meddle behind the scenes and throw this enormous trouble onto Qing'an County was entirely within