Following the broad corridor paved with golden bricks, Lin Qi arrived before the doors of the council hall and suddenly sensed several unusual gazes fixed on him. He frowned, then casually pushed open the hall's main doors.
A waist token that allowed free passage through the imperial palace hung from Lin Qi's belt, a practice borrowed from the Blood Qin Empire. With this token, Lin Qi could pass freely through any corner of the palace. Even if he wanted to break into Alda's bedchamber in the middle of the night, no one would stop him.
The guards along the way merely glanced at Lin Qi before ignoring him. Only among the palace guards near the hall were there several unfamiliar faces. Unlike the rule-abiding imperial guards of the Dragon Mountain Empire, these men brazenly scrutinized Lin Qi.
The imperial guards of the Dragon Mountain Empire were all carefully selected Heaven-rank warriors, and each had signed a soul contract. Under the training of Long Yan and the other fiends, they had become as rigid and unyielding as granite. Even if a wasp stung one of them right on the eyeball while he stood guard, he would not twitch in the slightest.
These men, standing crookedly and staring wide-eyed at Lin Qi without pause, were clearly outsiders who had infiltrated the palace through some means. Their strength was also roughly comparable to those people Lin Qi had sensed on the Black Spirit Continent: the soul auras of lower-tier, lower-rank gods. Their physical strength, however, was relatively frail, and at most they could wield sixty or seventy percent of a true lower-tier, lower-rank god's power.
A cold smile curled across his lips. Lin Qi pushed open the heavy doors of the imperial council hall and strode inside at an unhurried pace.
The hall