The King's Mate - Part 2: Yaoshi

Chapter 19

This is kind of a slow one, but let's just say it's the calm before the storm ^-^

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After Hua Cheng had spent some time getting rid of the evidence of the deed he had performed not too long ago, he proceeded to shift into the appearance of the man he had killed; of course he did so in front of a bronze mirror, to make sure that he wouldn't get any details of his skin wrong. It took him quite a bit longer than he had expected to get himself to look like an exact copy of the man. But eventually he was indeed satisfied with his work and began to concentrate on the next important steps of his plan.

First of all he needed to dress the part. Thus he went upstairs and into the room he was going to inhabit for the time being. Once there, he searched through the man's wardrobe for another set of his working uniform. Luckily he found a number of identical sets almost immediately and proceeded to put on one of them. Hua Cheng noticed that the material was of rather high quality which was only befitting for a worker's uniform of the Royal Dwelling. The robes were easy enough to put on, however the mask posed to be a bit of a challenge. It took Hua Cheng quite a while to figure out the mechanics but once he did, it was easy enough.

Since his butterflies had not found anybody on the estate for the whole evening and night, Hua Cheng came to the conclusion that there was indeed nobody else but him on the property, at least for now. However, what also struck him as curious was the fact that his butterflies did not record any movement on any of the surrounding estates either. This was the reason why he eventually decided after some pondering that it was safer to go ahead and make a clone of himself.

Extracting his spiritual energy and forming it into a mass that resembled the figure of Sha HuaLing was easy enough. Creating the details like the eyes, the nose, the hair and the mouth posed a bit more of a challenge. Usually Hua Cheng did not have any trouble creating new details on himself. However working on himself gave him the basis of a body he could work on by simply changing shapes and sizes. Creating a body from scratch was certainly on a different skill level. In fact, it took Hua Cheng the better part of the night to create an exact double of Sha HuaLing, which, in truth, he was rather proud of.

The Sha HuaLing Hua Cheng had created was easier to control than he had expected. It was his first time to control not only the form he himself shifted into but also to control the clone at the same time. Truthfully, he had fully expected for it to pose a certain difficulty to control two human- or well, two demonic forms simultaneously, which was why it was a rather nice surprise to realise that his brain was fully prepared to deal with this ability. Hua Cheng wasn't quite sure how to define this ability but it was similar to how his butterflies worked, which made sense since it worked on the same principle. The only difference was that he had to channel more energy to keep a fully grown, detailed puppet of sorts working like any other person would.

Luckily It wasn't nearly enough for Hua Cheng to feel any sort of strain or even exhaustion.

Since it had taken so much time for the puppet to be finished, Hua Cheng had to move quickly if he wanted to get to work in time, so he put his mask on and swiftly made his way towards the entrance of the Royal Dwelling.

Before Hua Cheng approached the gate he kept himself hidden a great distance away from it in order to observe how to enter properly. He was rather lucky to see several of his colleagues going through the procedure within a short period of time. The procedure was rather simple. The guards that were stationed at the entrance gates only checked the name on the uniform and asked the person wanting to enter to remove the mask in order to see their face. It made sense that there wouldn't be any additional measures in place since normal demons didn't have the ability to shapeshift.