90 Back at the Base

Sitting back on his perch in the kitchen, Xiao Ying closed his eyes and led back.

He had seen Ming Cheng glance towards his direction when he had walked through the door, quickly turning back to his own tasks soon enough.

From the looks of the tables that Xiao Ying saw in front of him, there was a great number of vegetables being washed, peeled and sliced up by the children, before all the different chunks were deposited into several different large pots.

Wang Yuan washed the vegetables, his tiny fingers able to find their way into the tiny nooks and crannies of the folds of the carrots and the raddishes, while Qi Tao and Ming Cheng peeled the vegetables, setting aside the waste into large buckets that were undoubtedly going to be used to produce fertiliser for the gardens of the Imperial Palace and probably Concubine Jing's various poison labs.

Qi Qing sat at the end of the table, chopping the vegetables up on a board and sorting them all out, her fingers quick and accurate with not a single second or movement wasted as if she had been doing these tasks for years.

Xiao Ying leaned backwards and spied Lan Chang outside fetching water from the well, carrying several buckets at once by attaching them to a long cut of bamboo back towards the kitchen for, what only Xiao Ying could guess was, boiling the vegetables that the children had been preparing.

He closed his eyes again, leaning further back so his head hit the wall behind him.

There was no pain.

Xiao Ying cast his mind forwards to the unfolding events of the story.

First of all, Ming Cheng would be going off to school and would develop a love of learning that would lead him to spending nights inside of the palace libraries studying up on all sorts of other topics that were not taught to him at the temple, including history, politics, and warfare, giving him the eventual reputation of a learned and studious prince.

And secondly, the ambassador's trip which was one, long, annoying can of worms that made Xiao Ying feel sick with nerves.

He opted to deal and confront the first and most imminent plot point first, before finding as best a way to guide Ming Cheng through dealing with the ambassador, assassin, shouty bureaucrat, and... others.

Xiao Ying's only saving grace was the fact that Concubine Jing didn't particularly assert any of her dominance here, and was mostly delegated to ordering around the guards as the whole debacle occurred.

Considering that he had some free time, Xiao Ying supposed that he could be able to make his way to the library and familiarise himself with the exact texts that Ming Cheng was going to become enamoured with.

It had been a while since he had been to a high school history class himself, dropping the subject and picking up more scientific subjects in the place of his humanities.

All done to make his mother proud...