An envoy from the Northeastern Kingdoms?
Shen Tang's brows drew together slightly.
"What have they come for?"
Qin Li presented her with a memorial that was hardly a memorial at all.
Caught completely unprepared, Shen Tang opened it and spent a full quarter of an hour reading.
For that entire quarter hour, she truly experienced what it meant to sit on pins and needles.
Who could understand her suffering?
Shen Tang rubbed her temples and tossed aside the ornate memorial, written in parallel prose. They'd used a thousand words to say what a few could have made clear. If it had only been wordy, she could have endured it. What she couldn't stand was that ninety-nine percent of the characters were obscure, and ninety-nine percent of the allusions were things she couldn't understand. A quick mental tally revealed that ninety-nine percent of those allusions concerned people and events from their own countries. Shen Tang stared at it, utterly baffled. "I haven't gone looking for them. Why are they deliberately coming to annoy me?"
What were they thinking, coming here to get on her nerves?
Qin Li tried hard to keep his composure, but the slight upward curve of his mouth still betrayed his mood. The envoy from the Northeastern Kingdoms had arrived at the newly demarcated border a month ago and submitted this memorial. But their sovereign had been busy and hadn't had a chance to respond, so the envoy had sent a few reminders.
The officials in charge of hosting them had also quietly complained.
The region was still in a state of utter disrepair, and there simply weren't enough people to keep an eye on the hundreds of visitors, let alone cover the considerable expense of feeding them. The matter had been reported up the chain until it