Everyone took their seats. After three rounds of wine and five courses of food, dancers performed to the sound of strings and bamboo flutes. Those at the table were Wu Pifu and his two companions, Prince Kang, and Imperial Princess Zhao Fobao.
Wu Pifu now knew the little girl's name: Zhao Fobao. It stirred a sense of some connection in him.
Not anything romantic—he had no such thoughts about a girl so young. Rather, her name made him think of Little Mute.
Little Mute had been taken in by a nunnery. He didn't know the details of her background. Either all the adults in her family had died, leaving her an orphan to be taken in by the Closed-Door Nunnery, or her parents couldn't afford to raise her and had left her at the nunnery's gate when she was little. Either way, she had a connection to Buddhism.
And Imperial Princess Yongfu happened to be called Zhao Fobao.
Just then, with the faintest trace of wine in his veins, Zhao Gou began talking about immortals and strange tales. He brought up the immortal mountains overseas and, casually, mentioned Penglai, one of the three immortal isles.
Immortals, longevity, freedom...
Even in the twenty-first century, people's longing for immortals had never disappeared. How much more so in an age of ancient superstition?
And the emperor, his ministers, and the princes, who knew nothing of the truth, had witnessed with their own eyes the grand display Chu Minghao had put on. If Wu Pifu hadn't known the truth, even he would have thought he'd met a sword immortal.
So Zhao Gou truly believed in it. He swore by the fifty-meter-wide, three-hundred-meter-deep pit in the imperial palace's parade ground that he believed immortals and Penglai were real.
Wu Pifu naturally understood why Zhao Gou