The door closed.
Bai Shuangshuang stood in the council hall, and when she heard the click behind her, her heart leaped.
It wasn’t fear—she had suddenly realized something.
The words she had said that morning at the National Academy had been recorded and placed on this prince’s desk, and that prince was now sitting right in front of her, looking her up and down.
Thinking back to Zhao Qingyue’s threatening words just now, she suddenly felt a little regret.
‘Why did I have to show off?’
‘It was just a policy essay class—I could have babbled something to get by. Did I really need to flaunt my past life’s knowledge?’
‘Now look what happened—I’ve stirred up trouble.’
‘I really don’t want to get involved in mortal affairs. I just want to quickly recover my cultivation and go find my senior sister.’
Bai Shuangshuang swallowed quietly, twisting her fingers inside her sleeves.
“Sit down,” Zhao Qingchuan said, pointing to the chair across from him.
Bai Shuangshuang obediently sat down, hands on her knees, back straight as a board, like a student called on by the master to recite.
The chair was a bit too high; her feet couldn’t reach the ground, dangling over the edge.
She gave a little swing, then immediately stopped, as if she felt it wasn’t dignified or serious enough.
But after a while her feet grew sore, so she began to swing them gently and quietly, pretending nothing was happening.
Zhao Qingchuan flipped through a few pages of paper on the table and glanced at her.
“I’ve read your essay debate record.”
Bai Shuangshuang nodded, lips pressed together, not daring to respond.
“I won’t comment on the ‘Mortal and Immortal Share the Same Origin’ or ‘Hierarchy is Not the Way of Heaven’ for now.”
Zhao Qingchuan set the paper down, his gaze landing on her face.
“What I’m interested in is the line after that—’Use immortal divine power to restrain the great clans, and use the great clans’ surplus wealth to support the immortals.'”
Bai Shuangshuang curled her fingers on her knees, her mind racing, thinking about the possible questions she might face next.
“How did a little girl like you come up with that?”
‘Here it comes.’
Bai Shuangshuang’s heart skipped a beat.
‘I can’t exactly say, “In my past life I was the senior brother of the Qingyun Sword Sect—I thought about these things whenever I had free time,” can I?’
She thought for a moment, then lowered her eyes.
Her voice was soft, even a little weak.
“I read it… in a book once.”
“What book?”
“We had a miscellany at home, written by a wandering Taoist. He traveled many places and saw many things. He recorded the local customs, the stories of officials and great clans. Also… some matters concerning the immortal sects.”
It was all made up on the spot, so she stumbled a little, but overall it came out fairly smoothly.
“When I was little, I used to read that book whenever I had nothing to do. I read it many times.”
Zhao Qingchuan glanced at her but didn’t press further.
It wasn’t exactly unbelievable.
“Then I’ll ask you another question on the same subject.”
His tone was more casual now, as if testing an interesting junior.
“Suppose the spirit fields and spirit mines in the Southern Region are being colluded over by the local government and the great clans. The accounts they submit don’t match reality. I don’t have exact numbers, and I can’t investigate. What would you do?”
Zhao Qingchuan wasn’t telling the whole truth; he had simply thrown out the explanation he planned to give the imperial court.
That all the local authorities had skimmed off the top—it wasn’t that the prince’s mansion had overspent.
Bai Shuangshuang opened her mouth, her first reaction being, “What does this have to do with me?”
But she swallowed the words.
‘Oh well, I’ve managed to secure a foothold thanks to the Jingnan Prince Manor. I might as well give something back.’
She hesitated for a moment, then spoke softly.
“The people the Prince sent to investigate… they’re mortals, right?”
Zhao Qingchuan said nothing, which was as good as confirmation.
“Then… what if you sent cultivators down instead?”
She said tentatively, her tone uncertain.
“Cultivators can observe qi, calculate spirit field yields. Standing on the ridge, a single sweep of the eye would tell them roughly how much that field actually produces. No matter how deep the great clans hide, they can conceal gold and silver, but they can’t hide the fluctuations of spiritual qi in the fields.”
After saying that, she sneaked a look at Zhao Qingchuan, then quickly dropped her eyes.
Actually, with Young Hero Bai’s former personality, she wouldn’t have been so cautious.
But now, she seemed to be increasingly fitting into the role of “maid of the Prince’s Mansion.”
Zhao Qingchuan didn’t immediately refute.
He pondered for a couple of breaths, then shook his head.
“The imperial court explicitly forbids vassal princes from having private dealings with immortal sects. Those cultivators also don’t want to get involved in mortal karma—they can’t be summoned.”
Bai Shuangshuang felt a little more at ease after hearing that, because she had already considered this problem in class.
She sat up a bit straighter, but the chair was too big, so sitting straight made her feet dangle even farther off the ground.
She had to shrink back, her toes lightly tapping beneath the chair.
“Has the Prince… ever considered that instead of going to invite them, you could build a platform and let them come to you?”
Zhao Qingchuan looked up at her.
Bai Shuangshuang grew nervous under his gaze, and her speech slowed a little.
“That is… set up a dedicated bureau to interface with immortal sects—call it the Flying Immortal Platform, for instance. Publicly recruit cultivators, give them a title, like ‘Survey Envoy’ or something… Officially, say it’s to ‘regulate the immortal-mortal order and prevent spiritual field pests’—just find a good-sounding excuse…”
As she spoke, her voice trailed off, feeling that her idea might be too frivolous.
Zhao Qingchuan didn’t interrupt her.
His expression was calm, impossible to tell if he found it absurd or reasonable.
“Why would cultivators be willing to come?” he asked again.
Bai Shuangshuang breathed a sigh of relief; it seemed he thought she had a point.
“The recovered concealed spirit fields can be split proportionally between the Prince’s Mansion and the sects!”
This time she spoke more smoothly, because while courtly power struggles were a bit above her head, anything related to the cultivation world was her comfort zone.
“Spirit rice and spirit stones are hard currency in the cultivation world, and small sects especially are starved for resources. Pay them and they’ll work—they’ll come running faster than anyone!”
“Plus, this identity is granted by the Prince’s Mansion, backed by the Prince’s authority. Once cultivators have this status to investigate spirit fields, it’s no longer a private action—it’s following the Mandate of Heaven. The karma they incur would be much lighter.”
Zhao Qingchuan tapped his fingers on the table twice and said nothing.
He didn’t practice cultivation and had very little contact with immortal sects, so he really didn’t understand these intricacies—he hadn’t realized that having the Prince’s Mansion’s backing could alleviate the cultivators’ worries.
Bai Shuangshuang thought he was still worried about the imperial court, so she added another point, her tone even lighter, as if mentioning something unimportant.
“For the imperial court… you could say that some immortal cultivators also collude with the great clans and local authorities to conceal output, so this is a necessary ‘governing immortals with immortals’—a temporary measure out of expediency, not an intentional overreach.”
“If it works, the people of the Southern Region benefit, the court gets more tax revenue, and on the surface, the Prince is only having these cultivators check crop fields—he’s not recruiting them as a private army. They have no reason to stop you.”
She paused, swinging her feet under the chair, and lowered her voice even more.
“Besides… it’s not like your relationship with the court is that good anyway. Why care?”
After saying that, she started having second thoughts: ‘Was that too direct?’
She sneaked a peek at Zhao Qingchuan’s expression.
Zhao Qingchuan wasn’t angry; he even smiled a little—a brief smile that was hard to see if you weren’t paying attention.
He didn’t ask any more questions.
He leaned back in his chair, his gaze sweeping over Bai Shuangshuang, as if reassessing this little girl who was curled up in the chair, her feet not even reaching the floor.
When she talked, she would unconsciously twist her cuffs.
When she was nervous, her eyes would drift upward.
When she felt she had a point, she couldn’t help straightening her back—but then her feet couldn’t touch the ground, so she could only swing them back and forth.
These were clearly all the little mannerisms of a young girl, completely at odds with the words she had just spoken, every one of them hitting the nail on the head.
He had originally thought that this girl had just said a few astonishing things in class and gotten lucky enough to have them copied and sent to him.
Perhaps she had some literary talent and sharp opinions, but more likely it was all empty talk, useless for practical matters.
Now he realized he had misjudged her.
She had even thought up the rhetoric of “governing immortals with immortals” for him, and had anticipated the imperial court’s reaction.
Zhao Qingchuan stood up and paced back and forth in the room.
Bai Shuangshuang didn’t know what he was thinking; she obediently sat in the chair and waited, her feet starting to swing lightly again.
Her eyes followed Zhao Qingchuan’s figure for half a turn, then fell back to her own knees.
“Your name is Bai Shuangshuang?”
“Mm.”
“The Bai Shuangshuang from the Bai family of Lingxi County?”
He paused.
“I thought… she was an idiot—”
He swallowed the last word.
Bai Shuangshuang didn’t mind; she nodded.
“That’s me. I was pretty stupid before, but then… I woke up.”
Zhao Qingchuan looked at her but didn’t press further.
Everyone has things they don’t want to talk about.
He suddenly called out toward the door.
“Someone go and invite Hengyang Xiansheng!”
The attendant outside responded and left.
Bai Shuangshuang blinked, not knowing why he had suddenly called for someone, but she still sat obediently, hands on her knees, her toes lightly tapping the ground.
Once, twice…
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