"Emperor Bloodline?"
"Him?"
"No, wait. Hadn't every trace of the Emperor's existence already been erased?"
Han Su's first reaction was that he couldn't understand anything Xue Zhi had said. "The current Emperor has nothing but an empty title. There aren't even any records related to him. So how could a bloodline like this suddenly appear in this little city of Azure Harbor?"
"How could an ill-behaved guy like Xu Ji possibly be a descendant of the Emperor?"
"..."
A thousand impulses surged through him, urging him to instinctively refute it.
But when the words reached his lips, he hesitated. He suddenly remembered how, on Bai La Mountain, when he'd faced the consciousness of Mother of Machinery that Anwei had downloaded, he'd heard a vague voice.
It had seemed to be Miss Ai, the woman he knew so well. She had crossed countless layers of historical dust to deliver a message to him. At the time, she had said solemnly:
"The Emperor exists!"
Back then, he hadn't known why she'd chosen to tell him that.
Now, there was a strange sense of symmetry to it all.
Could Miss Ai have been referring to Xu Ji, too?
If Xu Ji really was a descendant of the Emperor, then wouldn't that prove, by working backward, that the Emperor existed?
His thoughts were a tangled mess. Han Su reined them in, then looked up at Xue Zhi. "How did you reach that conclusion?"
"It's complicated."
Xue Zhi began slowly. "At first, it was because I realized Azure Harbor had so many unreasonable people and families. I believed there had to be a reason behind all these irregularities."
"Of course, there might be hidden reasons beyond my reach. But there are always some clues on the surface that can satisfy my curiosity."
"Thanks to Secretary