A shooting star bore light; when seen, it bore a tail. In the land toward which it traveled, there would be battle and bloodshed. To behold it was inauspicious. Within no more than three months, disaster would come to pass.
This was the verse Zheng Qing had heard from the elders of the Uteya Centaur Tribe on the night of the Qingming Festival—more precisely, it was a divination text written in the style of a verse.
At that moment, the divination text Zheng Qing had copied onto parchment lay quietly on a long table. The Merfolk Old Priest, who worshiped "Agnegn," had opened its cloudy blue-gray eyes and was carefully examining every word on the parchment.
The dense smoke in the tent slowly dispersed with the old priest's long breaths. Zheng Qing sat properly before the table, silently awaiting the old priest's interpretation. Jiang Yu and the Great Fox sat to either side of him. Just as during their last visit to the tent, Xiao Xiao, the Fat Wizard, and the elder were earnestly admiring the various "artworks" hanging from the surrounding walls: a scorched yellow Fire Dragon Spine, a Mammoth Skull with tusks, a whip braided from ox tails, and so on.
Since no ritual was required, the row of little merfolk in the choir seemed quite relaxed. They did not exactly whisper among themselves, but neither did they sit obediently on their stools. Instead, they stared curiously at the guests in the tent with their beautiful large eyes, especially the two cats that had come along with them.
Compared with the somewhat intimidating Great Fox and the drab, rather unattractive Doggy, the Black Gemstone Cat and White Jade Cat were particularly eye-catching.
But the two cats were, after all, incarnations of adult wizards. They retained a measure of