"Seriously? Surrounded by three people before he'd even made it through the door?"
At the edge of the banquet hall, an aisle away from Zheng Qing, Balash Sasan stood beside a long dining table with a white porcelain teacup in hand. She studied the reflection on the still surface of the tea, then laughed in surprise.
As the head of the School Newspaper Editorial Department's Ethics Review Committee, Balash possessed an unusually keen nose for news, especially any story from Shanglin Garden that was "somewhat ethically questionable."
"What do you mean, surrounded by three people?"
Balash's dance partner, Louise Coty, the current director of the university Student Union's Foreign Affairs Committee, asked absentmindedly. She looked worriedly at the "plain fare" on the table, sighed, and muttered, "Bitter Vegetable Soup again?"
Before coming to Shanglin Garden, she had never imagined the food at the spring hunt would be so meager.
"Zheng Qing... surrounded by three witches." Balash ignored her partner's muttering and emphasized every word, her tone brimming with interest.
"Zheng Qing?"
Louise Coty instantly forgot about the Bitter Vegetable Soup before her—young witches who came to Shanglin Garden needed to be this sensitive to gossip. She instinctively grabbed a lock of hair hanging over her chest and wound its ends around her fingers a few times. "Councilwoman Su's rumored husband? Does he really not care about Qingqiu's reaction? And who are the other two?"
The incident on the Performance Stage had left a profound impression on the young wizards by Crescent Lake, so Louise Coty guessed the identity of one of those "three people" in an instant.
The Zhongshan Jiang Clan was a giant capable of rivaling the Qingqiu Family, so she was very interested in the identities of the other two warriors bold enough to involve themselves in a