"Saintess?" Silver Armor Thousand Armies asked in surprise. "Could it be that she deduced that man isn't dead?"
"No." A trace of helplessness surfaced on the scholar's face as he focused on his brush tip. "The Saintess refused to calculate that man's fate. It wasn't my place to force her... Don't you find it strange? If that man were dead, why would she refuse to divine him? The realm the Saintess returned from was precisely the realm where that man was. Perhaps the Saintess had long since known what was in her heart about him..."
The pavilion immediately fell silent. When it came to the Saintess, Silver Armor Thousand Armies could not say much, though his expression grew solemn. He too felt that something was amiss. The scholar seemed to have entered the state of painting. He repeatedly dipped his brush in ink, his strokes flowing like drifting clouds and running water, and the scene in the painting grew ever more vivid and unrestrained. Yet just as his brushwork was gathering momentum in one bold surge, the scholar suddenly froze, his brush tip hanging suspended for a long while without falling.
Silver Armor Thousand Armies had been watching the twists and turns of the brush tip in contemplation. The instant it paused, he snapped back to himself and looked at the scholar. The scholar held his brush undecidedly, his brows faintly furrowed as if he had sensed something. Silver Armor Thousand Armies could not help asking, "What is it?"
The brush was pinched between slender, pale fingers and set upside down on the brush rack. The white-robed scholar, noble and refined in bearing, slowly raised his head. His deep gaze, as though it could see through all things, fixed directly beyond the window, passed through the You wood forest, and