The ancestral temple caught fire, and Emperor Youning hurried back to the capital without having time to make any arrangements, leaving behind a large army ready to go. The emperor left and took several princes with him. Xiao Huayong, as the crown prince, was weak and unable to walk fast, so he left an oral order that the crown prince should be put first in everything.
Even if Emperor Youning left Liu Sanzhi behind, he did not dare to make the decision without the permission of Xiao Huayong.
"Your Highness, Prince Bu has disappeared." Liu Sanzhi was a little anxious. He felt that if he didn't send someone to "find" Bu Shulin, His Majesty's plan would fail.
"Crack, crack, crack..." Xiao Huayong coughed weakly for a while. He seemed to be very uncomfortable. Tian Yuan handed him some throat-moistening tea. After he drank it, he vomited it out after a while.
Tian Yuan was so nervous that his face turned pale. He immediately summoned the imperial physician, who came hurriedly. He felt the prince's pulse and asked what he had eaten since yesterday. Tian Yuan's answers did not make sense, so he asked some other questions.
It took more than half an hour to come to the conclusion that the prince might have caught a cold.
Liu Sanzhi waited for a long while, and finally waited for the imperial physician to come out. Before he could reenter the room, Tianyuan also came out. He closed the door and said to Liu Sanzhi, "Eunuch, His Highness has been feeling unwell recently and finally rested. If there is nothing important, please let His Highness rest well."
"Guard Cao, Prince Bu is missing. Your Highness, please give orders to search for him." Liu San pointed.
"Master Bu is missing?" Tian Yuan was startled, and turned around and pointed at a young eunuch, "Go find Master Bu's guards to question him."
Jinshan arrived soon and insisted that his prince was just hiding out of mischief and was not missing at all.
Liu Sanzhi was unable to hold on any longer, and thought to himself that the emperor's plan to finish him off might not work, so he just hoped that the people he sent would succeed.
Did the people sent by Emperor Youning succeed
Of course not. Bu Shulin felt very guilty that Shen Xihe was caused by Princess Changling and fell off her horse and disappeared. It was she who brought Shen Xihe out but did not take good care of her, so she searched for her day and night.
Xiao Huayong wanted to make use of this incident to make a fuss. Naturally, the whereabouts of Shen Xihe should be known by as few people as possible. He would definitely not inform Bu Shulin and Xue Jinqiao, and let them look for her outside so as not to arouse suspicion. He even sent people to pretend to look for Shen Xihe.
No one expected that Emperor Youning would want to kill Bu Shulin at this time.
The emperor had just endured the pain of losing his daughter, and there was still an unknown hidden danger of a giant snake ahead, but he was still thinking about it. He was worthy of being the man who had sat on the throne for twenty years.
Bu Shulin came back in the morning and learned that Shen Xihe had not returned yet, so she went to look for him despite her tiredness. She didn't believe that Shen Xihe would die so easily in the snake's belly. Maybe Shen Xihe didn't fall from that place at all, so she wanted to look for him farther away.
As soon as she entered the woods, her horse became a little uneasy. At first she thought it had encountered a ferocious beast, but it was not until a sharp arrow passed by her ear that she realized she had been ambushed.
She was already tired, and the warriors sent by His Majesty this time were all top-notch masters. If it weren't for the intelligence of her horse and her perfect cooperation, she would have been doomed. Even so, she only killed one person. In the end, she was forced to jump off a cliff on horseback like Shen Xihe to gamble on whether she could escape.
Shen Xihe jumped off the hillside and onto a cliff. Although she used the mechanism on her wrist to make the flying iron spike shoot into the stone wall, which cut through the stone wall for a distance before hanging her on the edge of the cliff, and the thin and uniquely hammered iron wire also hung her, she was seriously injured and the wounds on her body were bleeding profusely.