Hua Cheng had been working in the Royal Dwelling for several days at this point, and by now he was convinced that the chances of anything happening while he was guarding the library were pretty much zero. The only thing that happened several times throughout the day was his partner excusing himself to use the toilet. But apart from that, Hua Cheng was doing nothing but wasting time standing around.
As usual by now, a part of his spiritual energy had stayed back in the mansion as Sha HuaLing. He had her walk around the markets of Edge Town every other day with whatever friend of hers happened to call on her, but nobody had picked up on any changes in the woman since Hua Cheng had killed her and posed as her.
Today, she was going to stay inside the mansion and do some chores, since there still hadn't been any staff showing up in the meantime. He figured they needed to be called to work in some way, but since he didn't know how and who to approach in the first place, he was forced to simply accept the risk of the now unofficially unemployed staff noticing that something was up.
Which left Hua Cheng to fully focus on his own body.
He waited patiently until his partner excused himself to go to the toilet for the first time that day. The moment the guard was out of sight, Hua Cheng split off some small amount of his translucent, silvery spiritual energy, and formed it into several spiders. Then, he sent all of those spiders crawling through the extremely tiny gap underneath the door to the library. And once all of them were in there, he reformed these spiders into one single mass, creating a rather tiny mouse.
Having part of him formed into a mouse gave him the freedom to roam around the library without having to fear any consequences should he be seen or, as unlikely as it was, captured. Still, Hua Cheng was relieved to find several holes on the bottom of the walls that indicated he wasn't the first mouse to visit this room. Just to make sure, he did some quick inspections of those holes whenever he saw one, and eventually thought it would be wise to spend some time exploring these tunnels. Maybe he could find something interesting there.
Since there was only one other door in this library, which, given the sheer amount of dust on its handle, didn't seem to be used often, Hua Cheng deemed it safe to create another bunch of spiders to send into the library during his partner's next toilet break. Once all of them were inside and close enough to the mouse, Hua Cheng formed them into the form of his human self, albeit a rather small version, not bigger than a five-year-old would be.
In this form, Hua Cheng began browsing through the books and scrolls this library was housing, and was elated to find a scroll containing the plans for this palace. He laid it out on the floor and studied it carefully, though there was nothing extraordinary about this place. The only thing that was strange to him was the fact that there was only one single building housing all the necessary rooms for a palace, unlike Hua Cheng's own palace, which was a complex of many buildings. But this was an anomaly that Hua Cheng had already noticed while standing on the plaza on his first day.
After memorising all the floorplans of this palace, Hua Cheng continued his search for useful reading material and found himself once again successful when he came across the list of previous emperors.
As YanLi had said, The Red Emperor was indeed the very first entry on the list, though the truly useful part was that, underneath his title, there was a list of his achievements, which told Hua Cheng pretty accurately what exactly the abilities of this Red Emperor were, as well as the fact that even though he had been killed by the following emperor, that second one had held a certain amount of respect for him. Otherwise he wouldn't have bothered to honour The Red Emperor with such an amount of detail.
Hua Cheng made sure to memorise the listed abilities, and see if he could manage to replicate any of them. After all, if he was truly blood-related to this guy, it shouldn't be too farfetched to give it a try.
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The King's Mate - Part 2: Yaoshi
Fanfiction--- Arc 2/3 --- Hua Cheng had just left Guishi behind and was on the journey back home to his palace in Banyue. He'd already been excited to finally see his gege and their two children again, after having been separated for a few weeks because of hi...
