Who said the eldest daughter is crazy? She's clearly a woman of high rank and influence in the

Helian Jing looked down at her. Moonlight streamed in through the skylight at the end of the stone corridor, illuminating her face and making the phoenix pattern on her brow, which was already faintly visible, clear.

He looked at her for three breaths, then spoke in a voice neither too loud nor too soft: "Go ahead."

"Before dawn tomorrow, the people of the Tian Shu Division will seal off all the passages from the central palace to the outer court—not openly, but secretly, to replace the people."

"The imperial guards on duty have been replaced by people from the Tian Shu Division, the eunuchs who deliver messages have been replaced by people from the Dark Pavilion, and even the locks on the side gate through which food is delivered to the inner palace kitchen have been changed."

She paused, her gaze lingering on his face for a moment. "The Queen has no more useful leads outside the palace. The sorcerer family will be completely wiped out. She will find out about this tomorrow. Once she realizes that her last card has been played, she will run away."

"She will definitely try to escape from the palace. So what Your Highness needs to do is block all her escape routes before sunrise and place something in her palace."

"Put what in?"

Xi Yueli took out a thin roll of paper from her sleeve, unfolded it, and revealed a hand-drawn topographical map of the central palace.

Three locations were marked on the drawing with vermilion ink: the west wall of the rear hall, the hidden compartment in the floor tiles of the warm pavilion, and the mezzanine under the phoenix chair. She drew a circle at the mezzanine under the phoenix chair and looked up at him.

"Here is a handwritten note from the late Empress before she gave birth. It took me half a year to find the original of this note. It says that before giving birth, the late Empress wrote a letter to her former acquaintance outside the palace. The Empress intercepted that letter, but I retrieved it."

"Okay," he said.

Xi Yueli stood in front of him. In the past, she would go through the judgments provided by each fragment in her mind before she spoke each word. But now, all those things were stacked together. There was no need to retrieve them separately. They were all operating on the same underlying layer.

She felt the lightness that came with that wholeness.

She looked down at her outstretched palm, then looked up to meet Helian Jing's gaze, a slight smile playing on her lips.

"Your Highness—" she began, but before she could finish, Helian Jing reached out and tucked the stray hairs that had been blown by the night wind behind her ear. His fingertips slid down the curve of her earlobe and stopped at the edge of the phoenix pattern on the side of her neck.

After confirming, he withdrew his hand without asking or saying anything more. He simply took a half step back, turned his body to the side, and tilted his head slightly towards the exit of the stone corridor.

"Go back to the manor. You should rest now. I will have everything taken care of by dawn tomorrow." He walked ahead, the moonlight filtering in from the end of the stone corridor and falling on his shoulder line, outlining his dark blue outfit as a sharp silhouette.

He slowed his pace slightly as he walked, as if waiting for her to walk beside him, side by side. The night wind blew in from the entrance to the underground chamber, carrying the sound of their footsteps together, echoing repeatedly between the stone walls.

News of the Empress's illness and vomiting blood reached the Prince Chen's residence, followed by news that a person was still alive in the dungeon of the sorcerer's mansion outside the city.

That person holds the ultimate evidence of her conspiracy with Bei Shuo. If it falls into the hands of an outsider, the Empress will be doomed.

The message landed precisely on the route that both the Tian Shu Division and the Dark Pavilion could intercept simultaneously. Helian Jing led his men to rush towards the south of the city, while Liu San Niang's men split into two groups to block the old road to Ci En Temple.

Within half an hour, the attention of the Tian Shu Division and the Dark Pavilion was divided into three directions, and this was the moment the Empress's people had been waiting for.

At this moment, the corridor lights in the main courtyard of Prince Chen's mansion had just been turned off. Xi Yueli leaned against the couch with her eyes closed, her fingertips resting on her wrist, counting her heartbeats. She had only fallen asleep for a short while, and the phoenix pattern between her brows glowed with a very faint warm light in the darkness.

The first sound she heard was the sound of tiles being crushed outside the east wall, not just one, but more than a dozen tiles breaking at the same time.

When she opened her eyes, the first knife had already been passed in through the crack in the window. The blade was gleaming with a dark blue light, and in the moonlight, it looked like the tongue of a venomous snake, aimed straight for her throat.

She tilted her head slightly, and the knife grazed past her ear and embedded itself in the wooden board beside her pillow. She raised her hand, her five fingers gripping the wrist that held the knife, the force precisely locking onto the pulsating vein on the inside of the wrist bone.

The Nightfall technique requires minimal effort, targeting only the most vital joints.

With a twist of her wrist, the man's wrist bone made a dull thud, and the knife slipped from his hand. She caught the knife, flipped off the bed, and as her boots touched the ground, a second knife cleaved in through the window.

Her body moved faster than her own mind; she turned sideways, spun around, and the blade shot out from behind her like a thread carried by the wind, precisely piercing the gap between the second person's shoulder blade and collarbone.

When she stood up straight, the main courtyard gate had already been smashed open.

Moonlight streamed in from the courtyard gate, casting the shadowy figures climbing over the wall and landing in the courtyard as a row of moving dark silhouettes.

She glanced down at the knife in her hand. The blade was narrow and thin, a style commonly used by the Dark Pavilion's Nightfall. Nightfall's techniques were like a boat with its moorings loosened within her, carried by the current to its rightful place.

She stepped out of the room.

There were more men in black in the courtyard than she had expected, about a dozen, who poured in simultaneously from the rooftop, the wall, and the gate. She didn't count them, because there was no need to.

Ye Lan's cultivation technique operates like a clock that has been recalibrated, with each movement precisely hitting the mark it should on, based on a complete spiritual foundation.

He sidestepped the first blade, shifted the weight of the second man with his knee, smashed his elbow into the wrist of the third man, and severed the Achilles tendon of the fourth man with the blade.

Her body hardly needed to pause between those movements, like a sequence that had been practiced hundreds of times, with each node seamlessly connected to the next.

She moved through the carnage, her blade leaving no sound in its wake.

The moonlight fell on her face, making the phoenix pattern between her brows shine even brighter in the darkness, like a branding mark that had been rekindled.

The Nine Heavens Hairpin in her hair shone with a warm luster from within, flowing down the hairpin, across her forehead, the corners of her eyes, and her chin, coating her entire face with a thin layer of warm gold, making her look like a god who had stepped out of an ancient array when she stood among the corpses.

When she put away the last knife, the courtyard was quiet. A dozen figures lay across the blue brick ground, and the moonlight spread the dark red liquid into an irregular pattern.

She stood there, looking down at the hand that held the knife. A few drops of blood splattered from the base of her thumb, slowly trickling down her palm to her fingertips, hanging there like a piece of cinnabar about to fall.

Just then, there was another sound from the direction of the courtyard gate. This time, the footsteps were hurried and chaotic, and the rhythm of the boot soles hitting the blue bricks carried a kind of panting that was being pushed to the limit.

When Helian Jing rushed in through the courtyard gate, the corners of his robes were still covered in dust stirred up by the night wind. There was no one behind him; the guards who were supposed to clear the way for him had been left outside the moon gate.

He stopped inside the courtyard gate, his gaze shifting from the shadows lying across the blue brick ground to the figure standing in the center of the courtyard.

She stood there, her knuckles gripping the knife hilt slightly white, blood dripping from the base of her thumb, yet her face showed no trace of panic or weakness, but was eerily calm.

Helian Jing took three steps at a time and walked up to her.

He reached out and gently supported the elbow of the hand holding the knife, carefully pulling the knife from between her fingers and placing it on the stone table beside her. Then he squatted down, took her hand, and slowly wiped away the mostly dried blood from the web of her hand.

Xi Yueli looked down at him as he knelt in front of her to wipe her hands. "The Empress's people used a feint, diverting the attention of the Tian Shu Division and the Dark Pavilion. As for you—"