At dawn the next day, between the hours of Yin and Mao, at a dock outside Jiangyin Prefecture.
The riverboat carrying Annie and Yue Lingshan had finally reached the same harbor where the Huashan Sect had been ambushed at night. It pulled in at an empty pier, and the captain and crew immediately went ashore to buy supplies. They wouldn't be back to set sail again for at least an hour.
Jiangyin was only about a day's sail from Hangzhou. By the latest, they would arrive there around dawn the following day.
Yue Lingshan was in a hurry and would have loved to set sail at once, but in the end, she didn't press them too hard.
She wasn't unreasonable. She knew that the crew, Annie, and she herself all needed to eat. It wasn't as if she could force the crew to keep sailing south after the food aboard had run out.
If she did, she didn't know whether she and Annie would starve, but the crew would certainly get so hungry they'd go cross-eyed and collapse on the boat!
And then no one would be left to sail them anywhere.
So, with nothing to do while they waited for the captain and crew to return from their shopping, she took out the copy of the Purple Mist Divine Art that Annie had optimized for the Huashan Sect and began reading.
That's right!
Her father, Yue Buqun, had asked Annie to help improve the Purple Mist manual. He had even given the book directly to her, asking her to work on it when she had time and return it once it was finished.
Annie hadn't had the time, and she hadn't been in any hurry to do it. But after spending the past few days aboard the boat with