The Azure Mountain

Chapter 136: Black Jade

In the dim room, Chen Ji slowly opened his eyes.

The doors and windows in the gloomy room were shut tight. The moon could only cast hazy shadows through the white paper windows.

He heard the soft footsteps outside the door gradually fade away, ultimately heading downstairs.

Lying flat on the communal bed, Chen Ji slowly slipped the Short Blade back into his sleeve and breathed a tiny sigh of relief. At the very least, those armed guests weren't here to assassinate them.

No wonder an 'old hand of The Jianghu' like Prince Jing hadn't noticed the issue with this inn.

No wonder Prince Jing had insisted on traveling in disguise even while sick.

So it turned out that everything was for tonight's meeting.

But Chen Ji's heart suddenly leapt into his throat again. Who was Prince Jing meeting? What exactly were they going to discuss?

Treason.

Besides that, Chen Ji couldn't think of any other matter that would require a regional prince with actual military authority to conceal his identity, travel to a small county town, and hide a meeting so intensely.He sighed softly in his heart. treason, huh.

Once they were swept up in something like this, he feared that the life and death of everyone in the princely estate would become entirely unpredictable.

Taking the history of the Ning Dynasty as an example, a civil official who defied the Emperor might still have a way out, but a regional prince had absolutely zero chance of survival.

There were princes who had been thrown into steamers and boiled alive, and princes who had been sealed in their rooms and left to starve to death.

The methods of execution were endlessly bizarre and exceptionally cruel.

If the plot failed, the Prince Heir, Bai Li...

However, what Chen Ji was even more curious about right now was—just who exactly was Prince Jing meeting?

Liu Gun, Elder Liu?

Or perhaps, the Department Head of the Jing Dynasty Military Intelligence Division...

He let out a long breath of stale air and slowly sat up, carefully examining all the other tenants in the room.

Exhausted from the journey, Mr. Wang, the Prince Heir, and the others had fallen asleep early.

The rest of the guests were sleeping even more heavily, their snores loud enough to shake the heavens.

Sitting on the communal bed, Chen Ji hesitated for a moment before finally getting up quietly. Tiptoeing to the window, he cracked it open just a sliver to peek outside.

He didn't dare open the gap any wider, so he could only shift his angle to scan the courtyard through the crack.

Outside the window was the backyard. Parked within it were a horse carriage, several ox carts, and crates upon crates of goods loaded onto the ox carts.

Several men in black were scattered throughout the yard, faintly guarding something in the center.

Chen Ji looked off to the side, only to see a figure draped in a black robe standing quietly beneath the thatched Eaves of the stable. The person waited calmly, without any signs of impatience.

Was this the person Prince Jing wanted to meet?

Chen Ji shifted his angle, wanting to get a clear look at the other party's face.

But the person's upper body was blocked by the eaves of the thatched shed. He couldn't see their face at all, leaving him unable to determine their age.

Right then, a faint gleam of light reflected off the black-robed figure's waist. It was a Jade Pendant.

The ancients said, "A gentleman does not remove his jade from his person without good reason."

Ordinary scholars, officials, and nobles all wore jade ornaments at their waists. But the jade worn by most people was either white or cyan.

However, the one worn by this person was actually a piece of black jade.

The saying "a gentleman is like jade" had always been used to describe a gentleman's noble and unblemished character.

Just what kind of person would wear a piece of black jade?

While he was pondering this, Prince Jing followed a man in black out of the inn, stopping before the stable.

Prince Jing stood tall and straight, and the person beneath the stable was neither humble nor arrogant, showing not the slightest intention of bowing or saluting.

The two spoke in extremely hushed voices, making it utterly impossible for Chen Ji to hear a single word from the second floor.

Down in the courtyard, one of the men in black casually swept his gaze across the second-floor windows.

Chen Ji jumped in shock, leaning his body back slightly to avoid being spotted.

Through the gap, he saw that the man in black didn't react at all after his gaze swept past. He simply continued patrolling other areas of the courtyard as if nothing had happened.

Chen Ji breathed a tiny sigh of relief.

However, a moment later, he realized something wasn't right... There was one less man in black in the courtyard.

Without Hesitation, Chen Ji rapidly backed away, lying flat on his spot on the bed and pretending to be sound asleep.

A mere few breaths later, he heard the wooden door of the communal room creak as it was slowly pushed open.

A man in black, gripping a long blade, surveyed the room with a solemn expression.

Seeing that everyone was asleep, he actually crouched down, using the hazy moonlight to inspect every single person's eyelids.

If someone wasn't truly asleep, their eyelids would involuntarily twitch. It was absolutely impossible to fake.

Chen Ji never expected the followers brought by the black-robed person downstairs to be so vigilant.

They managed to notice an abnormality just from a window being cracked open the tiniest sliver.

Not only that, but after noticing the anomaly, they hadn't raised any alarm. Instead, they had calmly and quietly signaled someone to come upstairs and investigate.

Chen Ji didn't even know when the man had passed the message to his colleague.

The man in black hovered his long blade right over Chen Wenzong's neck, leaning in to stare silently at his eyelids.

At the slightest sign of trouble, that blade would undoubtedly slice open Chen Wenzong's artery in an instant.

Dozens of breaths later, the man in black slowly stood up, shifted a step to the right, and leaned over Chen Wenxiao, repeating the exact same process.

He was incredibly thorough and focused, seemingly unwilling to let a single suspicious person slip by his intense scrutiny.

Time ticked by drop by drop. Seeing that there were only two or three people left before the man reached him, Chen Ji immediately commanded the Ice Flow inside his body to spread out from his dantian, pulling his consciousness into the dark Sea of Clouds atop Green Mountain.

A moment later, the man in black leaned over to inspect Chen Ji. The blade, radiating a chilling aura, hovered right at Chen Ji's neck, looking as though it were about to fall at any second.

However, Chen Ji's eyelids remained perfectly still. There was absolutely nothing abnormal about them.

Another few dozen breaths later, the man in black felt reassured and moved on to inspect the Prince Heir next to him.

There were over a dozen people sleeping in the room, and the man didn't skip a single one.

Only after he had checked everyone did the man in black, still gripping his blade, silently back out of the room.

He whispered to his colleague waiting outside the door, "They are all asleep. Did you see wrong earlier?"

The other man looked puzzled. "I clearly remember that the second-floor windows were originally shut completely tight. But just now, one of those windows was cracked open. Furthermore, in the dead of winter, who sleeps with the window open?"

"Fair point."

The man in black who had conducted the inspection whispered, "Should we just kill them all? Word of His Highness Prince Jing meeting with the master tonight absolutely cannot be leaked."

The other man narrowed his eyes slightly. "This isn't something I have the authority to decide. You stay here and keep watch. I'll go ask Prince Jing. No, I can't ask Prince Jing. I have to ask the master directly."