The affair at the Ancestral Temple had caused a tremendous stir among the nobles. If even the nobles of Chaoge were affected, those elsewhere were affected all the more.
Those nobles already served under the feudal lords, and serving together at court brought greater conflicts of interest. With the Ancestral Temple affair further inflaming those tensions, an uproar soon erupted.
Even those who wanted to ignore the matter could not. Whenever a family head disregarded the Ancestral Temple in Chaoge, the ancestral tablets enshrined in his home would inexplicably topple without so much as a breeze. The sharp crack gave quite a few people a fright.
Meanwhile, news of the military demobilization swiftly reached the garrisons everywhere. After all, a reduction in Chaoge's forces meant that local armies had to train harder and stand ready for battle.
Several days later, at the residence of the Marquis of Jizhou.
Su Hu gazed through the window toward Chaoge in the southwest. Drawing his gaze back, he looked around, and once he was certain nobody was there, he took a book with neither a title nor a cover out of his robes.
The first thing that met his eyes was an illustration: seven women bathing in a pool, spitting silk at one another.
Though the picture was enough to make anyone blush, all the women depicted were monsters.
Su Hu began reading intently and let out a faint sigh. How could he not understand King Zhou's intentions?
Perhaps King Zhou had already entertained the idea years ago, when he debated Yun Zhongzi at court over those clad in fur and crowned with horns.
Humans and monsters living in harmony and benefiting one another-that was the work his own father had left unfinished. In fact, he had barely made a beginning before the world's