The farce finally came to an end with Liao Jia beaten into a swollen pig's head, forced to drink three barrels of wine, made to pay Shen Tang compensation for emotional damages, and then picking up the tab for a meal to calm his colleagues' nerves. He hissed through his teeth. "Compensating our lord is only right. She's worked hard and rendered great service. But what's with the rest of you?"
Calm your nerves?
All they'd done was watch the show.
They had nothing to do with it.
He was the one who needed calming down. This Supreme Ascension ceremony had scared him witless. For a while, he couldn't even bear to hear the word "gamble"; at its worst, the stress had left him short of breath with his heart pounding. He couldn't even imagine what he'd have faced if he'd lost that wager...
He'd probably have had to draw his sword and kill himself to atone.
His heart was still thumping wildly.
"What do you mean, 'what's with us'? You had us all worried sick, too. Liao Shao Mei, dare you say you bear not the slightest responsibility?"
They'd nearly been scared to death.
Liao Jia: "..."
Knowing he was in the wrong, Liao Jia could only shut up and pay his way out of trouble.
The others didn't dare disturb Shen Tang. They felt a little guilty and ill at ease, too, and didn't dare ask whether their lord remembered the decades she'd spent in the scenes, or whether she'd formed attachments to the people over there that she couldn't bear to let go of. They were even less willing to ask whether everything she'd experienced was real or false.
If everything she'd experienced had been real...
That meant, to her, her time in Kang had already become