Xiaocui's shoe heel crushed the moss between the blue stone slabs, nearly causing her to stumble. Her hand trembled as she gripped the blood-stained token fragment, and the red stain on the edge of the broken fabric smeared across her palm like a burning coal. "Young master!" she panted, her words breaking, "at the tea stall in the West Market, I heard... I heard two porters gossiping that the City Lord's Mansion is hiring 'estate guards' door-to-door, offering three times the usual silver—"
Ye Fan took the fragment. The engraving of the character "Zhao" on the bronze shard was deep and sharp, and the edge was still stained with half a piece of the black embroidery unique to the secret guards. His thumb rubbed against the bloodstain, and the chill crept from his fingertips into his bone marrow. In his past life, when he was ambushed, it had been the exact same smell of blood and rust—coming from a traitor's blade.
"Zhao Batian has been at the Qi Condensation into Gang stage for ten years; he should have broken through to the Void Breaking Realm long ago." He lowered his gaze to the fragment, his voice sounding as though it were soaked in ice. "Yet instead of going into seclusion, he is scattering silver to recruit martial arts vagrants... The dark iron Zhaoyue mentioned, coupled with these people..."
Chapter 16