Chapter 3

After reading the empress' letter, the emperor thought about what the concubine had requested. He didn't trust her that much, so he ordered his personal guard to take people to rob the Ning family's mansion. He tried not to kill too many people. Otherwise, he would definitely not be able to compensate the Ning family. The Ning family had no idea that something terrible would happen. They were only imperial craftsmen, so there was no one to protect them in the mansion. As a result, the guards who went in to steal the blueprints had to kill the people who saw what happened. Otherwise, the emperor would definitely be suspected. As for Ning Xuanyuan, the family leader, he could only tell his personal guard to go and inform the officials that they were being robbed and killed in the mansion right now. In less than two ke, the soldiers came to suppress the robbers, but they were unable to catch a single culprit. Because their skills were far inferior to those of the robbers, they wondered how such a robbery had never happened in a hundred days or a thousand years before, how could it suddenly happen to the Ning family, whom the emperor trusted? Ning Xuanyuan could only inspect the damage and found that his two sons and daughters-in-law had been killed. Now, he only had two grandsons left, who were the children of his two sons. It was a pity that now, the only people left in his manor were him, his wife, and his grandchildren. Ning Xuanyuan sadly asked for leave from the emperor to hold a funeral for his children. He also asked to resign from official duties to return to his hometown in the eastern border city by the sea. The emperor did not approve of his resignation. The emperor had already ordered him not to kill too many people, but his guards had killed two of his imperial craftsmen. Moreover, the most talented one, Ning Xuanyuan, wanted to resign. He could only be angry at the concubine who asked him for the blueprints. In fact, Ning Xuanyuan was going to give him the blueprints anyway. He had said that he was still writing them and would present them to him before the actual construction process began. The emperor, who had miscalculated, could only express his condolences to Ning Xuanyuan, but did not mention letting him resign. Before the funeral was over, the emperor had only sent someone to express his condolences and gave the Ning family a lot of treasures as an apology. Ning Xuanyuan did not care about these treasures at all. He seemed to have aged ten years after the incident of the white-haired man sending off the black-haired man. Right now, he just wanted to live a normal life so that his grandchildren could survive safely. As for the blueprint of the Ning family that the emperor promised to give to the concubine, he had someone copy it incompletely and gave it to her. The emperor could only consult the empress about the matter, saying that his guards had gone too far. The empress sympathized with the Ning family who had lost two pillars at once, so she begged the emperor to allow Ning Xuanyuan to resign from the official position. Right now, he probably didn’t have the mood to help the imperial court, except to raise his grandchildren to grow up. The emperor thought as the empress said, and it was true. However, he still stalled for time to test Ning Xuanyuan to see if he really wanted to resign from the official position. After burying all the family members, Ning Xuanyuan wrote a petition to resign in order to travel to his hometown while he still had enough strength to travel. Otherwise, if he let it go for several more years, he definitely wouldn’t be able to travel far. The emperor saw that Ning Xuanyuan really did not change her mind, so he allowed her to resign as Ning Xuanyuan wished. In addition, the emperor gave Ning Xuanyuan a lot of assets to use in her later years. Ning Xuanyuan thanked the emperor for still caring for her kindness, so he gave them more assets. In fact, they had quite a lot of money that they had accumulated since their ancestors, but they had not told anyone. What about the shops that his two daughters-in-law were taking care of? Right now, he could only ask the housekeeper to inform the relatives of his two daughters-in-law about everything. As for what they were going to do with these shops, he would not interfere. After all, this was the original assets that his daughters-in-law had brought with them. His daughters-in-law’s family came to Ning Xuanyuan the next day after they had arranged the funeral together. They told him to leave the original assets for his two grandchildren. As for taking care of the shop, they would take care of it themselves before the two of them reached the age to take care of their own shops. Because they had already heard that Ning Xuanyuan was going to take his grandchildren to the border city to raise instead of living in the pain in the capital. After settling on the assets, they also gave each of their grandchildren a jade slip so that they could receive the assets when Ning Jing and Ning Zheng grew up. Ning Xuanyuan did not object to this. He even apologized for not taking good care of his daughter-in-law, which led to these incidents. Their family did not blame Ning Xuanyuan, they only blamed those bandits. They went so far as to kill people like vegetables over a single blueprint. On top of that, Ning Xuanyuan wanted to punish himself for not keeping the blueprint by resigning from the officialdom. Their family, which consisted of only small officials, could not persuade him to stay. Ning Jing, who was older than Ning Zheng, knew everything very well. He heard his father say before he died that these people were the emperor's shadow guards. But why did they do this when his family had worked so hard for the imperial court? Ning Jing could only think to himself that he would wait until he grew up. He would come back and get revenge for the emperor killing his parents and cousins. However, he would not tell his grandfather about this yet. Because right now, his grandfather was still grieving over his parents' death. Ning Jing himself did not know whether his trip to the Eastern Border would go smoothly or not. Because since he was born, he had never traveled outside the capital even once.