"Mm, all right. I completely understood your thoughts, reasoning, and feelings now, so I would arrange for you to enter the royal court with me as soon as possible."
"I vaguely understood what you wanted to do now. I knew you might want a fabricated identity, so how about this? I would say you were my personal guard."
"Although I had been out of court for several years, and I had always been someone who stayed out of worldly disputes, they had long grown used to that. So if I suddenly proposed returning to work in the palace, they would be very surprised."
"So I needed to find a suitable, convincing reason. Otherwise, they would think there was definitely something suspicious about this and investigate it thoroughly. Corrupt officials like those nowadays would stop at nothing to uncover the truth whenever their own interests were involved."
The old man's thoughts on these matters were actually very clear. His mind was sharp, as Uchiha Hikaru could plainly see, and Hikaru greatly admired him for that.
Uchiha Hikaru also felt that he had become increasingly accurate at judging people. When he had first seen the old man pushing a cart, he had known that the old man was no ordinary person. Sure enough, it was exactly as he had imagined.
Since they now had a relatively clear line of thought and knew what they needed to do, all they had to do was devise specific ways to work toward that goal.
"How about you swallow your pride? I guessed that when you left the court back then, you must have clashed with the sovereign, right? The sovereign saw that you were a high-ranking court official and did not dare say much, so he let you go."
"So I thought that if you