Chapter 331 — The Letter of Investiture
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 3
At the sight of Rebecca in this skittish state, Gaoyang's first instinct was to snatch his hand back from the tabletop, because he still remembered what this girl's reaction had been the last time his sudden awakening startled her—the feel of that "Ancestor, Rest in Peace" staff technique coming down was still fresh in his memory...
Only then did he realize something was off. He looked up at Rebecca, then glanced at Amber beside her, who was shrinking her neck and trying hard to pretend she had already entered shadow stealth: "What are you two doing?"
Amber was just about to hastily cobble together an excuse to gloss things over, but the thick-headed and bluntly honest Rebecca spoke up first: "Amber said she was going to draw a few circles on your face to see if you'd wake up. I said you wouldn't, because you looked like you were sleeping very deeply."
"Amber!"
Gaoyang had barely shouted the name when the half-elf girl instantly dissolved into a streak of black light and shot toward the nearest window—but this time she failed to make her escape. Gaoyang had long since learned this one's few emergency escape habits. Before she could reach the windowsill, he had already reached out with practiced ease and grabbed her by the ankle, hauling her back: "I asked you to keep watch for me, and this is how you keep watch? Tell me—have you ever before..."
"No, no, absolutely not!" Amber managed to balance herself midair in a posture so precarious it bordered on acrobatics, then hopped on one leg, trying to pull her ankle free of Gaoyang's grip. "This is absolutely the first time I've ever had such a bold idea..."
But before she could finish, Rebecca bluntly blew her cover again: "She said she thinks about it every time—she just never dared actually do it..."
"If you can't talk, then don't talk!" Amber glared at Rebecca. "I never should have talked to you so much! Haven't you been beaten your whole life for that wretched mouth of yours?!"
This time, before Rebecca could answer, Gaoyang supplied the answer for her: "Saying that is insulting her. I've heard Hedy say that she's taken more beatings in her life than you've stolen wallets..."
With that, Gaoyang finally released Amber's ankle, letting the half-elf hop and skip her way to safety. Then he turned to Rebecca: "You didn't come here just to learn from Amber how to court death, did you?"
Only then did Rebecca seem to remember she had proper business to attend to. She smacked herself on the head: "Ah, right! A letter was delivered to the territory—by a griffin messenger... er, no, a messenger riding a griffin. He bore the king's seal..."
"A messenger from Saint Frost Perch City?" Gaoyang's brow lifted. "And he came riding a griffin?"
A griffin messenger was hardly a common "letter-carrier." In an age when communications technology was severely limited and road transport in a sorry state, a griffin messenger capable of crossing national borders within days was arguably the swiftest means of transmitting information any nation could command. Usually only kings, princes, dukes, and a small handful of exceptionally wealthy or specially positioned nobles and organizations could afford to keep such costly "couriers"—and they employed them only to deliver urgent messages or ones of particular significance.
So it took Gaoyang almost no time at all to guess what information that messenger had carried.
He nodded. "The messenger should have gone back by now, I take it?"
"How did you know, Ancestor? The messenger did hurry off right after delivering the letter. I was hoping to call a few more people over to watch the excitement—a griffin, you know! I've only seen one a few times..."