Middle Three at the Birthday Banquet

What could make an oddity seem less conspicuous under everyone's watchful eyes?

There might have been many answers, but the appearance of even more oddities was certainly one of them.

After Sun Shaozong had been summoned alone and returned entirely unharmed, some of the more opportunistic officials at the banquet had already begun considering how to establish ties with this young talent—after all, their deliberate neglect of Sun Shaozong earlier had partly stemmed from fear of being implicated.

Thus, when an even stranger presence appeared at the birthday banquet, he was immediately regarded by the assembled "gentlemen" as an ally united against a common enemy.

And these so-called even stranger presences were, in fact, a group of Daoists and alchemists.

Even before the Emperor began favoring alchemists, quite a few monks and Daoists had already frequented the palace and become honored guests of the Retired Emperor.

But for alchemists to appear so openly on such a formal occasion, even ranking above high ministers and dukes, was difficult for the civil and military officials to accept.

This was especially unbearable for certain moral gentlemen who had risen from the ranks of the censors. At the sight, some could not help muttering, "How pitiful, that at midnight the Emperor draws his mat forward..."

Tsk.

Today was Emperor Guangde's fifty-fifth birthday. If someone put on a performance of "rebuking the sovereign to his face," that would be quite a spectacle.

Entertaining such gleeful thoughts, Sun Shaozong echoed a few of the denunciations and concerns voiced by his surrounding colleagues, then studied those Daoists and alchemists with interest.

There really were two familiar faces among them.

They were both masters whom Rongguo Mansion had invited to "subdue demons and banish evil" when Jia Baoyu had been poisoned and driven mad.

Compared with three years