Jing Yuan's feelings were incredibly complicated.
After the hot pot knocked them unconscious and they woke up again, all five had been badly shaken. Jingliu, in particular, took only a brief rest before asking Dan Feng for some people and going to find the other victim, Xianyu.
At first, aside from Dan Feng, who had gone to confront the Dragon Preceptors, they all assumed it was some kind of food poisoning. The three of them sat at the table where they had eaten hot pot, going over what had happened again and again.
Completely ignoring Dan Feng's position as Cauldron Master of the Alchemy Commission, the three held their Jade Abacuses and kept searching for incompatible food combinations, but simply could not find the culprit that had knocked them all out.
Baiheng looked utterly miserable. Hugging her tail, she wailed:
"I feel like even my tail's gotten ugly... its fur isn't shiny anymore! What on earth happened?!"
Jing Yuan had a suspicion that they had been caught up in an internal Vidyadhara conflict.
He did not voice that suspicion.
They had Dan Feng, after all. The High Elder would sort it out.
Jing Yuan took a deep breath, then slumped over the stone table in defeat and said offhandedly:
"Could the Thousand-Year Ginseng have been too nourishing? Did it nourish us straight into poisoning?"
Yingxing looked calm, but in truth, he was panicking like mad. He muttered to himself:
"That shouldn't be possible. Surely it wasn't that pot of ginseng water I boiled?"
The three exchanged a glance and raced to the kitchen where the ginseng had been boiled, only to find Dan Feng there with an icy expression, ordering attendants to search through the ginseng and root fibers left in the pot.
The attendants neatly picked up the root