Thirty-seven years had passed since Wither-Bloom Monastery was razed to the ground.
It seemed to have been erased from people's memories, as though it had never existed.
The ruins of Wither-Bloom Monastery were still there, left desolate for thirty-seven years. Long designated a forbidden ground in Linzi, they permitted no one to go seeking hidden sights. As time passed, no one mentioned them anymore.
Hardly any monks could be seen anywhere in Linzi.
Yet word had spread this year that the master craftsmen of the Works Institute had begun drafting plans and selecting materials—supposedly because the current Son of Heaven intended to build a Sea-Viewing Terrace, to flaunt Qi State's martial achievement in subduing the East Sea, standing opposite the existing Star-Gazing Tower. The chosen site was the ruins of Wither-Bloom Monastery.
Bao Weihong was skeptical of this claim.
It was not the site of the Sea-Viewing Terrace that he doubted, but the claim that it was meant to "flaunt martial achievement."
As the son of Bao Heng, Earl of Valor, and the one universally acknowledged within the Earl of Valor's estate as the most talented, he had his own understanding of the current state of affairs.
The current Son of Heaven had reigned for sixty-six years. His civil governance and martial achievements eclipsed all previous ages, yet there was little to say of extravagance and indulgence. All these years, the only thing people could point to was "Till death entwined in tenderness, riches enduring long"—but the Gao Family had been sea merchants for generations, and the contributions of the Jinghai Gao Clan to the Qi people's expansion across the seas went unseen by those people.
If this grand construction of the Sea-Viewing Terrace today was purely for flaunting and indulgence, it did not look like the current Son of