Watching Li Xingke leave, some sharp-eyed soldiers wore slightly strange expressions. If they had seen correctly, one of Lord Xingke's hands seemed to be gleaming with grease... and carried the aroma of roast chicken.
Being seasoned old hands, they tacitly chose to ignore that detail.
Arriving at the place written on the wad of paper, Li Xingke still wore an expression of conflicted confusion. After all, the location described on that paper was simply too... elementary-schoolish!
Did it think he wasn't familiar with the Vermilion Forbidden City? He could walk through every corner of this place with his eyes closed!
"Go five hundred meters right, then turn left for two hundred meters"—what was this, a game?
The originally rather solemn atmosphere had been utterly wrecked by this elementary-school-style description of the location.
When he arrived, he found a green-haired young girl who looked somewhat flustered. The panic on her face was not an act.
"You really do love running around." Just as Li Xingke was about to speak, his eyes abruptly widened. Beside the green-haired girl, a black fissure over two meters long split open. Once it opened, a young man stepped out, holding a little black cat with its head hanging down in one hand. "Careful you don't get snatched away and turned into a lab rat."
The young man tapped the little black cat on the head, wiped the grease from around its mouth, then placed it in the green-haired girl's arms. "Good evening, little brother." Jiu Ming smiled as he greeted the black-haired man.
"...A monster?" After a moment of silence, he regained his composure and asked in a low voice, one hand already resting on the sword he never parted with.
"Huh? Why not ask if I'm an immortal?"
"If you were an immortal, would you