Hou Niao sighed. He knew he could not refuse!
True freedom lay not in the right to possess, but in the right to refuse. Unfortunately, he was still far, far from that point.
Daoist Wang patted his shoulder. "Junior Brother Hou, you really don't need to put yourself under so much pressure. The Commandant Prefecture hasn't actually assigned you any concrete task. Just do what lies within your ability, without exposing yourself.
"If you discover something, all the better. If not, it doesn't matter. Here in the Great Wind Plains, our responsibility is at most to cooperate, not to take the lead. So what are you worrying about?"
Hou Niao gave him a long look. "I was overthinking it!"
Daoist Wang left, thoroughly satisfied, leaving Hou Niao with a forehead full of black lines. Of course he understood that this task could be great or small, light or weighty, depending entirely on how the person carrying it out handled it. But that was not what worried him.
If this really was purely a surveillance assignment with no practical objective, why had Daoist Wang explained all the causes and consequences so clearly? There was simply no need!
With the Commandant Prefecture's authority, it need not explain anything at all. A simple order would suffice: monitor Yan Xisheng and report anything unusual.
Yet Daoist Wang had gone against his usual manner and explained the entire story thoroughly. What his words implied was that he wanted to drag Hou Niao into this deep pit. Or rather, the Commandant Prefecture intended to develop him into an operative. That was what truly worried him.
He himself had a troublemaking disposition, could not tolerate a grain of sand in his eye, and had a very unusual status besides. Becoming entangled with the Commandant Prefecture had its