Making a Show

Feng Baiyu was kind and warm toward Lin Qi, and Lin Qi was exceptionally close and affectionate with Feng Baiyu as well.

After formally paying his respects to Feng Baiyu with the grand rites due an elder, the delighted Feng Baiyu immediately laid out a family banquet. At the feast, Lin Qi and Sha Xinyue sat to Feng Baiyu's left and right, while Hu Tu, Hu Ye, and Hu Xinzhu—the three pillars of the Sand Family—sat below with "manly men" written all over their miserable faces. Not a single one of them looked normal.

The food and wine at the family banquet naturally needed no introduction: delicacies from land and water were all present, while the wines were all aged vintages over a hundred years old, and all tribute wines from the Blood Qin Empire. As one of Ying Zheng's most favored young close ministers, Hu Xinzhu often received all manner of rewards from Ying Zheng, among which fine wines were naturally indispensable.

During the banquet, Feng Baiyu spoke to Lin Qi with immense nostalgia about the days when she had traveled the Western Continent.

Lin Qi's grandfather, Lin Meng—Blackbeard's father—was, in Feng Baiyu's telling, an upright man full of passion, warmth, and hot blood. When Feng Baiyu had traveled the Western Continent, Lin Meng had joined forces with her on several glorious exploits that were still listed among the "Western Continent's Hundred Greatest Unsolved Cases of the Millennium."

Without question, Feng Baiyu and Lin Meng had secretly developed feelings for one another. There had been that kind of affection between them.

But because of a certain ill-behaved Donkey, Feng Baiyu, who had only just begun to nurture that hazy affection for Lin Meng, was frightened into fleeing back to the Eastern Continent. Thus, that slender thread of fate between