93: Chapter 93 That bastard ancestor has caused a lot of trouble.

Xie Feng followed the Third Princess across the gravel path on the west side of the imperial garden, walked for about the time it takes to brew half a cup of tea, and turned into a narrow alleyway.

The palace walls on both sides were very old, covered in overgrown vines whose leaves gleamed with a dark green luster in the afternoon sunlight.

This alleyway was obviously not meant for the nobles of the palace; moss grew in the gaps between the stone slabs on the ground, and the air carried a faint musty smell mixed with the scent of old paper and ink.

It was probably the direction leading to the library.

"Your Highness." Xie Feng spoke as he walked, "Do you have any idea how many times you handed me tea on the flying boat? Six pots. The eunuch refilled my cup six times, and the root cause was you! Every time you came to chat with me, you casually poured me a cup, watched me drink it, and then refilled it once I finished."

The Third Princess walked in front: "This princess doesn't know how much you drank. The tea was prepared by the Centurion, and the pastries on the table were also arranged by him. Your eating frequency, water-drinking intervals, and the number of times you went to the restroom are all fully documented by him."

"Why would the Centurion keep track of how many times I go to the restroom? A penchant for Longyang?"

"You are a dangerous individual, and this princess is taking you to see His Majesty. How could we not make thorough preparations?" The Third Princess turned around, walked backwards for two steps, and looked up at him.

The expression on her baby face was extremely serious, but the corners of her mouth were slightly upturned.

It was the kind of expression where she clearly felt she was completely justified, yet also knew the other person would definitely blow their top.

"To be honest with you, if you had gotten physical with His Majesty in the imperial garden just now, the Imperial Guards lurking behind the rockery, atop the waterside pavilion, and at the bottom of the lake would have all moved at the same time. At least eight executioners above the Fifth Realm would have chopped you finely into minced meat."

She clasped her hands behind her back, turned around, and continued walking forward.

"However, His Majesty dismissed them all. He said you are quite interesting to chat with and don't look like an assassin. Who knows how he figured that out."

The spring-breeze-like aura about this Mortal emperor was honed over decades in such an environment.

The Third Princess pushed open an iron door at the end of the alleyway, behind which lay a flight of stone steps leading downward.

Several spiritual energy lamps were embedded in the walls on both sides of the stone steps. Their flickering light caused the steps beneath their feet to grow dim and bright by turns. The musty smell and the scent of old paper in the air grew stronger and stronger.

Upon reaching the end, the view suddenly opened up.

This was an underground secret chamber. All four walls were lined with bookshelves stretching from the floor all the way to the vaulted ceiling, densely packed with all kinds of scrolls, silk books, bamboo slips, and paper manuscripts.

Some had runes branded on their covers, some were tied with red strings, and others were locked inside agarwood boxes carved with Seal runes.

The Third Princess walked to the deepest part of the secret chamber and took down a flat agarwood box from the innermost row of shelves on the north wall.

A spiritual Seal was placed on the surface of the box, but a corner of it had already been peeled back. The royal court's venerated masters had probably attempted to decipher the contents of the journal decades ago.

The Seal had been pasted back on, but not very carefully; a small corner was curled up, indicating someone had flipped through it, found it incomprehensible, and shoved it back in.

She placed the wooden box into Xie Feng's hands.

"No one can understand the journal inside. The royal court's venerated masters flipped through it for decades and barely recognized that some of the characters resembled variants of certain ancient classics, but the grammatical structure was completely shattered and made no sense at all. The oldest among the masters said this is probably not a genuine written record, but rather some kind of memory fragment that requires special means to decipher."

Xie Feng opened the wooden box. The cover of the journal was very old, with frayed edges.

Flipping to the first page, his fingertips hovered above the paper. The first line of characters floated up from his fingertips' sensation: regular script, horizontal layout, with not a single punctuation mark missing.

These aren't Jiuzhou characters! And why do they look so familiar, hey!

This... What the... Aren't these Chinese characters?!

Xie Feng almost threw the book away.

The Imperial Expeditionary Force's records, from beginning to start date, team member roster, daily itinerary, to the detailed process of encountering the Outer Gods' kin, were all written in Chinese—Simplified Chinese where every single character was recognizable, strung together without any ambiguity, and even the particles of, land, and have to were clearly distinguished.

The Third Princess stood nearby, still continuing to explain: "The venerated masters said this book might cause a certain degree of mental damage, which is why they asked this princess to watch you from afar. Whatever you read, just tell this princess..."

Xie Feng's fingers slowly brushed across a line of tiny annotations at the bottom right corner of the page. This handwriting was identical to the line on the inner back cover of cultes des goules: "When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you, but if you jump in, the abyss will make you fly!"

It was this exact handwriting! Not only did this bastard ancestor go to the Dreamlands, why did he also go to Hyperborea?!

"This f***ing thing was written by my ancestor." Xie Feng's voice was lowered to the extreme.

The Third Princess frowned. "What did you say? You understood it? What is written in this journal?"

Xie Feng did not answer.

He continued flipping forward, turning to the third page of the main text. The ancestor had written in neat regular script: "The following is my daily record as Liu Yanqing, conscripted by the royal family and entering the Dreamlands in the capacity of a recorder accompanying the expeditionary force."

So this bastard ancestor was someone who underwent Transmigration?!

Aren't your surname Liu? Aren't you surnamed Xie? Why are you running around under an assumed name following someone else's royal expeditionary force?!

"F*** your mother, you dead Transmigration-goer! What on earth did you do?" After cursing this sentence out, Xie Feng continued flipping forward.

The Third Princess stood nearby for a long while before finally failing to hold back. She took a step forward, poked her head out from beside his shoulder, and looked down at the page-by-page horizontally arranged Chinese characters, completely unable to recognize what these words meant.

But Xie Feng was flipping through them quickly, clearly not just identifying symbols, but genuinely reading them.

This journal wasn't written in some lost ancient phantasmagoric script, but came from the "hometown" in Xie Feng's own words.

"Really or fake?! This ancestor even saw Noph-Keh?!"