In the city lord's office, Blazing Fire, whose sharp tongue had always made Xu Nan wary, fell into a long silence under Senior Jiang's novel and tricky questions.
However, Anonymous City's chief Grand Mage had no intention of letting the poor little Ship Spirit off so easily. She fired off several even trickier questions in succession, plunging Blazing Fire into a near-crash predicament.
In the end, Xu Nan could not bear to watch any longer and found an excuse to let Blazing Fire slip away.
Although Xu Nan was secretly delighted to see Blazing Fire get shut down like that—after all, even though he was the owner of the Cloud Ascending Ship, there seemed to be very few people in all of Anonymous City who could put the Ship Spirit in her place. Apart from the mysteriously elusive A Tang Jie, the only one seemed to be Jiang Yuanchi.
Xu Nan knew a little about the minor conflict between Senior Jiang and Blazing Fire, but he had always been puzzled. Ever since Jiang Yuanchi had joined Anonymous City's management on Stephenson's behalf, Blazing Fire's attitude toward her had remained neither warm nor cold. On the surface, she was very respectful—after all, the Chief Magician was nominally Anonymous City's second-in-command beneath Lord City Lord. Yet Xu Nan always felt that Blazing Fire's attitude toward Jiang Yuanchi was strangely ambiguous, even carrying the faintest trace of hostility.
On the other hand, the little Ship Spirit got along much better with Qin Lele.
That made absolutely no sense!
In theory, Jiang Yuanchi was Ms. Ansu Li of Stephenson's disciple, a proper heir of the Arcane Empire; Qin Lele, meanwhile, spent every day hanging around with people from the Celestial God Kingdom, copying books for Fernando and selling treasure chests to McKen...
Of course,