Chapter 69

As a single stroke of a wooden club knocked him out, Ye Fan finally relaxed the hand pressed against the back of the assassin's neck. Dampness seeped through the stone walls of the dungeon, and a final, muffled groan escaped the throat of the assassin whose sleep acupoint he had just struck. Qín Wǎnshuāng stood beside the candlelight, holding half a page of a blood-stained secret letter between her fingertips. The candle wick crackled, and a stray spark spat onto the moon-white cuff of her sleeve, yet she seemed entirely unaware of it, her eyes lowered solely to the broken final strokes of the character "Zhao" on the letter. "Eldest Princess." Ye Fan tapped his knuckles against the stone table. Resting upon it was the token from the Zhao Estate that they had searched from the assassin's bosom, its bronze beast-head pattern gleaming with a cold light beneath the candlelight. "This is the private seal of the Zhao old thief's third son." In his past life when he was in the Inquiry Realm, he had witnessed the methods of the Zhao Clan head; the hidden patterns on this token were unequivocally the hallmark of the death squads raised by the Zhao Clan.