"Ah-!"
It was an irrepressible scream from Qiao'er, the maidservant at the official residence, and it stood out even through the rain.
It left Liu Shi tossing restlessly in another room. Still, the physical discomfort she had mentioned was not merely an excuse; she really did feel unwell.
There was also something unusual about that scream, and it made the White-Haired Old Man narrow his eyes as he stood beneath a doorway in a nearby lane.
Hui Mian poked his head out too, looking uneasy.
In fact, the White-Haired Old Man and Hui Mian had not been sheltering from the rain here for very long-only a little over a quarter of an hour. They could not possibly know every detail of what was happening inside the County Office; they had merely sensed something and deduced a little from it.
But now the White-Haired Old Man understood.
"What a fine North Sea Dragon Lord. Does he not find such methods beneath him?"
Whatever had happened to the Dragonkind of the North Sea, and whatever they wished to conceal, these dragon scales were the cause of it all. In the White-Haired Old Man's eyes, what the North Sea Dragon Lord had done was a peculiar form of "contamination."
Rather than removing them outright, he had used his powers to contaminate the dragon scales, setting every reversal in motion from its very starting point, intent on settling the matter once and for all.
Clearly, then, if these dragon scales really had belonged to the former Dragon Son Ya Ci, this so-called Dragon Lord father was not on his son's side.
As for County Magistrate Guan Xinrui's excitement inside the County Office tonight, on the surface, one could only say he had been affected incidentally by the spilling dragon qi.
These words were murmured