Chen Ping'an said he was going out. He would visit Feng Yi at the Fire God Temple and ask her to summon the old coachman so he could put three questions to him. He might also stop by the Ministry of Revenue Office to see a friend. Ning Yao nodded, took out several tales devoted to feuds in the martial world, chose one, and opened it to a folded page. She really could read them with relish. Chen Ping'an glanced at the page. Near the bottom, the hero was being hunted by his enemies on a stormy night and had stumbled into a mountain temple, where he found a man seated in the main hall, dressed in green, with a magnificent beard and phoenix eyes, reading the Spring and Autumn Annals by lamplight... Chen Ping'an smiled. "All right, I'll bet another miraculous encounter is coming. If even one of those pursuers walks out of that temple in one piece, I lose." Ning Yao shot him a sidelong look and rewarded him with two words: "Shut up."
Chen Ping'an went to the inn counter, but even the old innkeeper, born and raised in Great Li Capital City, could not give him the Fire God Temple's exact location, only a rough direction. The innkeeper found it odd. Why would an outsider from the martial world come to the capital and seek out a Fire God Temple instead of one of its more famous Daoist temples or Buddhist monasteries? Within Great Li Capital City, the Song clan's Imperial Ancestral Temple, the Temple of Literature honoring Confucian worthies, and the Temple of Emperors commemorating rulers of past dynasties were recognized as its three great temples. Ordinary people could not enter them, but the temple fairs at the Capital City God Temple and the capital's