The banquet had started. Unlike regular banquets, the guests were served fresh fruits, light dishes, and sweet fruit wine. Everything was meant to be mild-tasting.

A maid presented a small tube filled with many polished bamboo sticks. The sticks were beautiful because of their careful engravings of all sorts of flowers.

It went without saying that the tube of bamboo sticks was taken to Ning Xueyan first. The maid knelt respectfully in front of her, held the tube ...