In the darkness of night, apart from the two torches crackling as they burned at Jingyan Palace's main gate, there was not another light to be seen.
After Sikong Zhaixing firmly declared that he would enter War God's Hall, Jiang Dali handed over the hostage Chida in exchange. The tens of thousands of Mongol soldiers guarding Jingyan Palace's inner perimeter also withdrew from the palace like a receding tide, leaving only over a thousand elite troops to guard its front and rear gates, as well as its various key passages.
At the same time, Simongba honored his promise and used telepathy to tell Sikong Zhaixing the mechanism for opening the secret passage into War God's Hall.
It turned out that the mechanism that opened the secret passage was located in the center of the Left Wild Goose Wing Hall, while the entrance to the passage itself was in the Right Wild Goose Wing Hall.
The mechanism corresponded above to the Three Enclosures and Twenty-Eight Mansions of the heavens, and below to the five elements of the earth.
It was rather similar to the mechanism in Dragon Soaring Land within Jiang Dali's Black Wind Stronghold.
However, Dragon Soaring Land's mechanism relied on judging the intensity of Tai Bai Star's light, whereas War God's Hall's secret-passage mechanism used the positions of the Twenty-Eight Mansions in the sky at that particular time for its calculations.
Because the heavenly constellations were constantly moving, the activation sequence differed at different times. The slightest error would reset the mechanism.
Though Sikong Zhaixing understood astrology, if he had to puzzle it out and study it alone, he might not have been able to open the mechanism in a short time.
Now that Simongba had directly given him the answer, it was equivalent to receiving the key to