This man had quite a few tricks up his sleeve. After waiting a while, Meng Zhao was led to a small courtyard in the manor to wait.
There was nothing particularly special about the courtyard. It was maintained in a quiet, elegant manner, with pots upon pots of fragrant Sea Dragon Flowers whose scent refreshed the heart and cleared the mind.
The walls had also been coated with broad swathes of blue clay. Once dried, they shimmered beneath the sunlight like rippling water, exquisitely beautiful.
It was only that far too many people came and went, spoiling the courtyard's distinctive elegance.
Most of them were finely dressed, carrying paper ledgers and account books of one kind or another. Their temperaments also largely resembled Xie Wen's—shrewd, with a trace of mercantile worldliness.
More importantly, about half of them were women, and most of those women were not particularly attractive, not even reaching the level of average looks.
Meng Zhao knew that women did not hold particularly high status on the Divine Continent either. Aside from those born into better families, ordinary women mostly served their husbands and raised their children, rarely showing their faces in public. Female wanderers of the martial world were an exception.
Lifeng Trading Company was a rather unusual exception. Because of Widow Xie, it also preferred using women as assistants to conduct business, so it was hardly strange that half its visitors were women.
Beyond that, there was the faint yet formidable pressure drifting from the main room of the small courtyard.
This powerful, domineering, razor-sharp aura did not surprise Meng Zhao. With Widow Xie's wealth and status, if no powerful expert protected her side, she would long since have been treated as a fat morsel and swallowed in one bite.
He simply could not determine what