The imposing Heavenly Pavilion towered within the Palace of Blessings and Longevity. A handful of female guards processed intelligence on the ground floor. With the sudden disturbance in Chengze County, Empress Dowager Guo, her deputy Hongdou, and the others had all rushed over, leaving the top floor dark and deserted for once.
Jiang Xian entered the Heavenly Pavilion alone with a file in hand and found the female official on duty. After a brief handover, she took a token granting unrestricted access and went to the third-floor archives under the pretext of consulting records.
The archives housed all manner of records dating back to Northern Zhou's founding, along with precise accounts of the sects throughout the land. They counted as confidential documents, though not top secret.
But Jiang Xian had gone to considerable trouble to earn their trust and infiltrate the Heavenly Pavilion, and these clearly were not what she wanted to investigate. After pretending to browse the files for a while, she looked up at the ceiling, glanced behind her, then sneaked toward the corridor.
As for what exactly she was looking for, Jiang Xian herself did not actually know. She only remembered waking up on a ship bound for Yanjing, with her past a complete blank. Aside from the ancestral saber of the Jiang Family Fort in the Eastern Sea, all she had with her was a Xian'er Diary.
The diary recorded her past and her plans for the future, such as traveling to the Capital City and joining the Phoenix Etiquette Bureau.
Jiang Xian had been utterly bewildered then. Feeling as though her strength had been sealed, she first tried breaking the seal herself, only to wake up in bed as though nothing had happened.
After several attempts all ended in failure, a bold conjecture arose in