Chapter 6

Chapter 6: The State Seal, Word-Spirit

Shen Tang steadied her nerves and met the young man’s gaze head-on.

“Do you have a grudge against Madam Gong, sir?”

To her surprise, he answered without hesitation. “No grudge.”

Shen Tang: “…”

No grudge, and you still jumped in?

You see a so-called male heir and your first instinct is to kill him?

Maybe her face said too much, because his expression cooled.

“What kind of look is that?”

The kind you give a man who belongs in a padded room, Shen Tang thought.

Out loud, she kept it polite. “If you have no grudge, then why so much malice, sir?”

He gave a short, humorless laugh. “If you’re Madam Gong’s descendant, how could you not know?”

Shen Tang exhaled hard.

“First, I’m not Madam Gong’s descendant,” she said, forcing her voice steady. “Second, I genuinely don’t know where your malice comes from. Third—” she clenched her jaw “—I’m not Madam Gong’s male heir either.”

She didn’t look like a boy. Even if she was half-starved, her features were clear enough.

The young man studied her again, eyes narrowed as if weighing truth by sight. After a long stretch, he nodded.

“I’ll believe that, little young lord.”

Shen Tang’s eyelid twitched.

Believe my ass.

He was still calling her “young lord.”

She didn’t have the energy to fight that battle right now.

He glanced at her once more, then flicked his gaze to her right hand. “Your skills aren’t bad. But the way you flailed around and burned through your Literary Heart… you don’t look like someone who had a proper education.”

No proper scholar would slam headfirst into a warrior.

And since the prisoners sent into exile weren’t only Madam Gong’s descendants, he guessed this little young lord might be from an outside branch—lucky enough to look feminine and get sorted among womenfolk, which spared his Dan Palace from being crippled.

Shen Tang caught one word and latched onto it.

“Literary Heart?” she repeated. “I have a Literary Heart?”

A spark lit in her chest.

So she wasn’t completely cheated. She’d finally gotten the kind of perk a transmigrator was supposed to have.

“You didn’t know?” he said, genuinely surprised.

Shen Tang shook her head. “I’ve been here less than a day. No memories, no clues, and everything around me is trying to kill me. How would I know?”

He stared at her, then asked sharply, “Then what was that word-spirit just now?”

“Word-spirit?” Shen Tang frowned. “What’s that?”

He said, “That line—’a kind mother holds a sword, cleaving her wandering child.’ That was your Literary Heart word-spirit.”

His expression turned strange as he said it, like the words tasted wrong.

A kind mother chopping her child with a sword didn’t exactly sound… respectable. But the world was big, and people were weird. Maybe he just hadn’t seen enough.

Shen Tang rubbed at her temple. “I was thinking of a way to survive, and it just… appeared in my head.”

He went quiet.

That silence screamed absurd.

Shen Tang dragged the conversation back where she wanted it. “You still haven’t said why you hate Madam Gong so much.”

Not getting an answer was like biting into gossip and never reaching the end. It itched.

He looked at her with a flat face. “No personal grudge. Just the hatred of a lost country.”

That killed her curiosity immediately.

That wasn’t casual talk. Get it wrong, and someone would try to carve you open.

She had to remind herself: in this era of the Hundred States, countries rose and fell like weeds. Live long enough, and you could swap nationalities more than once.

He had feelings for his old country. Just not to the point of madness.

“What about word-spirit?” Shen Tang asked, deciding to treat him like a free tutorial NPC. If he’d already stepped in once, she might as well squeeze information out of him.

He hesitated, then sighed like he’d accepted his fate.

“Word-spirit… started with Thief Star fragments,” he said.

An artisan carved one such fragment into a seal and presented it to a sovereign.

The moment the sovereign took it, purple light burst out. Strange characters floated from the seal like smoke. Some fused into the Dan Palace of an official.

That was when they realized: certain characters, paired with the right Literary Heart or Martial Gall, could unleash unbelievable power.

Those characters became known as word-spirit.

He lifted his chin slightly. “The phrase I used earlier—’The teeth are hard and fall first; the tongue is soft and lasts. Softness overcomes hardness; weakness defeats strength’—that’s a word-spirit. It can restore and reinforce one side in a clash. The same word-spirit can have different effects in different hands.”

After that, Thief Star fragments became standard in every nation’s State Seal.

The word-spirit within a State Seal directly affected a country’s strength. If a sovereign activated the State Seal, it could even become a national heavy weapon, guarding the borders of the national fortune.

He paused, watching Shen Tang out of the corner of his eye, then said lightly, “When Chong Tai’s capital fell and the State Seal was lost, rumors said Madam Gong hid it and swallowed it for herself. But after Madam Gong’s household was confiscated… the State Seal still wasn’t found.”

Shen Tang barely heard the last part. One name had snagged her.

“Chong Tai?”

His expression turned complicated.

“It used to be Xin State,” he said. “There’s talk it will be renamed Chong Tai.”

Shen Tang frowned. “They conquer a country and then rename it? Why?”

“To humiliate.”

“Humiliate?”

He said, “Anyone who serves a servant is commonly called chong tai. To the remnant subjects of Xin State, it’s a disgrace beyond shame.”

Servants of servants. The lowest of the low.

No wonder the name cut like a knife.

And as one of the supposed culprits behind the fallen nation, how could Madam Gong not be hated?

As long as the State Seal stayed missing, the storm wouldn’t end.

Shen Tang listened, but it felt distant. None of it fixed her immediate problem. What she cared about was herself.

Her Literary Heart.

“What does my Literary Heart look like?” she asked. “How do I know what grade it is?”

He considered her for a beat, then said, “We can test it.”

“Literary Hearts have nine grades. If you don’t know which one you have, you won’t know what word-spirit suits you.”

Shen Tang swallowed. “How do we test it?”