Gu Ding was too far away to hear what Eddard said clearly, but when he saw Jon walking toward the Scholar's Tower, he immediately understood that Jon was probably planning to take him away.
Before Jon could reach the Scholar's Tower, Gu Ding leaped down from the other side of the tower. With his arms spread wide, he glided nearly a thousand meters before landing on a rooftop.
With everyone else's view blocked by the tower, no one saw Gu Ding's astonishing move.
Just as Jon began climbing the tower, Gu Ding jumped down from the rooftop and slipped into an alley.
When Jon reached the top of the tower, there was no sign of anyone. His expression visibly froze.
The top floor of the Scholar's Tower was nothing more than an open space of around ten square meters, with only a waist-high wall around its edges. There was no cover whatsoever, not even a potted plant.
The only way to climb to the top of the Scholar's Tower was an external ladder. It was impossible to reach the rooftop from inside the Scholar's Tower, and likewise impossible to enter the tower from the rooftop. Anyone on the roof had only one way down: the ladder.
The ladder was positioned beside the main entrance, while Jon had approached from the front. If anyone had come down the ladder, he would have seen them clearly from the side. Although it was already getting dark, Jon trusted that his eyes had not deceived him.
Yet there was no one up there. That was a fact.
Jon found this deeply strange. He even wondered whether the child he had seen earlier had been an illusion, but immediately dismissed that thought. It was not just him who had seen the child—his father and the