Jade Flower Banquet

His talk with Puyu had cost Lin Qi little. He had merely offered a cup of clear tea, while Puyu had casually lit a burner of incense.

Who knew what materials Puyu had used to blend that incense? A lump no bigger than a thumb, once lit, filled the entire room with a cool, austere fragrance. Even Lin Qi's clothes and bedding were steeped in that faint, chilly, yet lingering scent.

What surprised Lin Qi even more was that the incense could refresh the mind and sharpen the senses. And this sharpening was not in the ordinary sense—it had genuinely raised his spiritual power by the tiniest fraction.

Lin Qi stared at the little incense burner, and his heart could not help but tremble. Incense capable of enhancing one's spiritual cultivation—if word of this got out, every mage in the world would go mad. A mage's spiritual power was directly tied to their strength. This incense was simply too heaven-defying.

By the time the cup of tea was finished, the incense had burned out as well. Puyu and Lin Qi discussed quite a few matters in low voices, then, just as he had arrived, Puyu vanished without a sound. He still had many things to do—for instance, dealing with certain envoys dispatched by the Heavenly Temple to Twin Sun Red Dragon City. When Dragon City had been demoted, those Heavenly Temple envoys stationed in the Blood Qin Empire had not made a single sound. In Puyu's eyes, that was an unforgivable crime.

The Heavenly Temple had its own laws. Since Puyu had defined their conduct as the grave crime of "betraying the faith," their fate was easy enough to imagine.

Lin Qi stood before the window, carefully pondering his conversation with Puyu. It seemed Puyu intended to stir up a