The scent of freshly brewed jasmine drifted through the old teahouse in the back alley of the Xuan'an Bureau.
Pi Yanlin leaned his bamboo chair back against the wall, half of his face buried in the collar of his faded blue cloth shirt, leaving only his eyes—half-closed, half-open—fixed on the storyteller under the tea shed.
"Last time, we left off with Zhao Dechang leading the Holy Monarch Cult to storm the Imperial Ancestral Temple, only to be trussed up like a zongzi by nine chains," the storyteller clapped his gavel, spraying spittle into a teacup. "Do you know what was carved on those chains, my friends?"
Chapter 165