Positioning

Cui Zilu worked hard to steady her breathing in the shortest time possible.

She knew this was no time to panic. The more urgent the situation, the more important it was to remain calm.

But knowing that was one thing. When faced with the terrible news that something might have happened to Gu Chengyin, she found that her heart was still beating so hard it felt ready to leap out of her throat.

At last, she managed to calm down. Cui Zilu did not dare waste another moment and quickly recounted, word for word, the message that had come from the Imperial Household Department.

The circumstances were not complicated, yet every detail carried an eerie undertone.

After parting from the Cui residence, Gu Chengyin’s movements had entered a period of complete blankness.

As a matter of routine, the Imperial Household Department monitored its targets at several fixed points. Thus, three covert sentries had been stationed along the routes Gu Chengyin would have to take after leaving the Cui residence.

One was positioned at the main entrance, another at the back entrance, and two mobile sentries patrolled the streets and alleys along the way.

The positions of these sentries had been calculated with precision, forming a complete surveillance net among them.

In theory, so long as Gu Chengyin remained in Shendu, it was impossible for him to evade every monitoring point.

In reality, however, after leaving the Cui residence, Gu Chengyin had vanished as if he had simply evaporated from the face of the earth.

He had not appeared within the field of vision of a single covert sentry.

At first, the female official responsible for the assignment had not thought much of it.

After all, the person they were following was Gu Chengyin, the Junior Tutor to the Crown Prince—not some frail scholar incapable of defending himself.

The reason the female officials of the Imperial Household Department had been able to follow him all this time and submit detailed reports of his whereabouts was entirely because Gu Chengyin had deliberately been giving them leeway.

Several times during the pursuit, Gu Chengyin had intentionally slowed his pace to let them catch up.

Sometimes, when passing through complicated streets and alleys, he would even deliberately pause for a while in conspicuous locations.

This tacit understanding had continued for quite some time.

The female officials of the Imperial Household Department had grown accustomed to this half-cooperative manner of surveillance.

After all, when all was said and done, these so-called reports of his whereabouts existed merely to satisfy His Highness’s morbid private desires. Besides, Lord Jingzhe had to read them as well.

Both sides understood perfectly well that if Gu Chengyin wanted to shake off the Imperial Household Department’s surveillance, he could do so at any time.

Since that was the case, it was only natural that the Junior Tutor might occasionally attend to matters he did not wish others to know about.

It was not as though this had never happened before. Gu Chengyin would disappear briefly, then reappear at some predetermined point.

As a result, the female officials of the Imperial Household Department had developed a standard procedure for dealing with such situations:

After discovering that Gu Chengyin had vanished, they would wait for a while. Before long, he would show up on his own.

So this time, when Gu Chengyin left the Cui residence and failed to appear within the sight of any covert sentry, the female official in charge did not immediately report it. Instead, she chose to wait as usual.

She assumed that Gu Chengyin had gone to take care of some matter and would reappear at a monitoring point once he was finished, just as he always did.

But as time passed, minute by minute, the female official gradually realized that something was wrong.

Gu Chengyin had been gone far too long this time.

She immediately began contacting the various locations. The first response came from the Crown Prince’s Palace.

Gu Chengyin had not returned. The female official stationed there confirmed it.

Next, they checked several places he frequented, dispatching people to investigate each one. But none of them had seen the Junior Tutor.

That meant Gu Chengyin was missing.

Only then did the female official responsible for tracking his movements lose her composure. She sprinted all the way to the Celestial Master’s Residence to find the newly appointed Chief Female Official, Cui Zilu.

After hearing the report, Cui Zilu immediately came to deliver the news.

After listening to the entire account, Luo Zhao felt her vision go black and her body sway.

Fortunately, the desk was within reach. She seized the edge of it, her knuckles turning bluish-white from the force of her grip, and only then managed to steady herself without collapsing.

If something had happened to Gu Chengyin, it would be no different from the sky falling down upon her.

From their initial mutual probing to fighting side by side, from their outward relationship as sovereign and subject to their secret relationship as master and pet, this man had unknowingly become embedded in every corner of her life.

He had helped her secure her position as Crown Prince and helped her resolve countless crises in court.

Without Gu Chengyin, Luo Zhao did not even dare imagine what her current situation would be.

And now, Gu Chengyin was missing.

The realization made her chest feel as though an invisible hand had seized her heart and was squeezing it tight, so tightly that she could scarcely breathe.

It took everything she had to calm herself. Then Luo Zhao abruptly turned toward Lin Qingyan beside her.

Her voice was filled with unconcealed urgency and a tremor bordering on desperation.

“Aunt!”

Unlike the flustered Luo Zhao, Lin Qingyan was unusually calm.

Her exquisitely beautiful, cool features showed not the slightest trace of panic. She had not even knitted her brows.

After spending so much time with Gu Chengyin, Lin Qingyan had learned many things from him.

If nothing else, she had certainly picked up his ability to remain unmoved even when Mount Lu collapsed before him.

Gu Chengyin was best at maintaining a cool head in the most perilous moments.

No matter what kind of situation he faced, he always appeared calm and unhurried.

It was as though every change had been anticipated and every crisis were simply another move that had long since been placed upon the chessboard.

At this moment, faced with Luo Zhao’s anxiety, Lin Qingyan merely raised a hand and said calmly, “Zhao’er, stay calm.”

Then Lin Qingyan closed her eyes.

The instant her eyes shut, the air inside the hall seemed to stop flowing.

No one saw the extremely fine strand of divine sense quietly emerging from the space between Lin Qingyan’s brows.

Like a spider’s thread, it spread silently in every direction.

It made no sound and left no trace. Even a Golden Core cultivator of the same realm would be unable to detect its existence.

As Fairy Jingzhe, invincible among Golden Core cultivators, Lin Qingyan actually knew an astonishing number of spells—far more than the outside world was aware of.

The world knew only that her mastery of thunder arts was formidable. They did not know that this was far from the extent of her abilities.

Throughout her long years of cultivation, she had studied countless arcane arts.

Although she had ultimately chosen to prove the Dao through thunder, she was no amateur in the other fields either.

And among those spells, quite a few had been used on Gu Chengyin.

After all, if something happened to Gu Chengyin, it would be the collapse of the heavens for Luo Zhao—and for her, too.

The only difference was that Gu Chengyin himself knew nothing about it.

The most important of these spells was a tracking technique.

It was a concealed mark placed upon Gu Chengyin, founded upon a strand of her innate thunder intent.

The mark caused no harm and placed no restrictions on his freedom. It merely pried into the tiniest sliver of his privacy.

That was because the tracking mark’s function was to sense his distance, direction, and state of life at any time.

Lin Qingyan had secretly cast it on one occasion while he was tearfully begging for mercy, and she had never told Gu Chengyin about it.

Lin Qingyan knew that, given Gu Chengyin’s personality, he would probably not be pleased if he discovered she was tracking his location in real time.

So she had deliberately added several layers of concealment, all to ensure that Gu Chengyin would not detect it.