Chapter 158: Rising Suspicions
"A saboteur?" Nie Jing narrowed his eyes.
"Or..." Elder Yu Xuan tilted his head, "an idiot who mixed things without reading the labels."
Nie Jing grunted. "This couldn’t have been a normal prank. Even some of the elders were affected! I spent half the day trying to stop Elder Qin from conducting a symphony with kitchen utensils."
Yu Xuan nodded solemnly. "He said the soup ladle was his ’final instrument.’"
The two fell into a moment of grim silence.
Then Nie Jing’s eyes narrowed further. "We need to find out who was near the pavilion before the explosion. Surely someone saw something."
Elsewhere, in a quiet corner of the Outer Sect, Han Yu sneezed.
He sat on a wooden bench, casually carving a peach with a small knife.
"Hmm. Someone must be talking about me," he muttered, smugly admiring the spiraling fruit skin. "Hopefully not about the duck."
His courtyard remained untouched, serene, and entirely devoid of pink smoke. No one had seen him near the Alchemy Pavilion—after all, who would suspect a recently resurrected ex-servant at the Qi Refining Realm of launching the sect’s greatest giggle-inducing disaster?
He even had a built-in alibi: "recuperating in isolation" with some of the pills that Li Mei had gifted him. He had waved that excuse around several times already and was rapidly building a reputation as a "quiet but promising returnee."