Listening Fragrance Waterside Pavilion.
The desk in front of Shangguan Shenhao had been overturned, the fine red sandalwood table worth a thousand gold crushed to splinters by an immense force.
Several of Shangguan Shenhao's embroidery pieces had been pulverized along with it.
The servants attending inside the pavilion all held their breath, prostrate on the floor, not daring to breathe loudly.
Large patches of dead fish and shrimp floated in the pond outside the pavilion.
Within a radius of a hundred feet, everything was deathly still; a falling pin could have been heard.
All of this had stemmed from a Message Talisman personally sent back by Yan Guo, Commandant of the West Mountain Commandery Army.
The news that Wen Family Fort had fallen and the West Mountain Commandery Army had subsequently scattered had sent the master of this place into a towering rage.
Long Heng's face was likewise pale and ashen. Alongside shock and fury, his eyes held a measure of disbelief.
He had personally arranged the vast majority of the preparations at Wen Family Fort.
He had considered everything meticulously, accounting for every angle. He had assembled five times their strength to crush and encircle the enemy from all directions.
Long Heng had believed this plan should have been foolproof.
The problem was that Wen Family Fort, which he had imagined impregnable, had vanished at a single poke.
It was like a game of Go: Long Heng had only just placed what he imagined was the crucial stone that would drive his opponent into a corner, only to have an entire great dragon captured.
West Mountain Hall's formidable strength had turned all their arrangements into a joke.
Shangguan Shenhao had gradually calmed down.
But only when his younger cousin Shangguan Shenyuan hurried into the pavilion did Shangguan Shenhao ask