After surviving that brush with death, the four household servants were too ashamed to show their faces. They had set out to escort and protect their young master, yet in the end, he had been the one looking after them. Never mind anything else-if their young master had not been so alert tonight, they would probably have been tossed over the cliff to feed the wolves.
Hu Xiaotian acted as though nothing had happened, and he did not reprimand the servants over the night's events. What was done was done, and he could not be bothered wasting his breath. There was only one word for these four servants: failures! These fellows could not be entrusted with anything important. They might swagger around the Capital City, but out on the road, when faced with a genuine test of life and death, each fled faster than the last. Once they reached Azure Cloud, he would send them packing immediately. They were not merely useless-they were all dead weight.
After Shao Yijiao and Li Jinhao recovered their strength, they went into the temple and pulled down several old, disused door panels. They chopped them up with their blades and built a fire in the side hall.
Murong Feiyan had actually been cautious enough. She had even tested the food beforehand with a silver needle. She simply had not expected the monks to be so sinister as to poison the charcoal they brought them. As it burned, poisonous fumes had spread unnoticed through the air. After breathing them in, they had collapsed unconscious one after another. Hu Xiaotian, however, had not eaten and had happened to step outside just as the fumes began spreading, thus escaping the disaster. There was one thing Murong Feiyan could not understand, no matter how she thought about it: