The burly bronze lion swept across the sky, easily large enough to hold a hundred men.

Shen Yi sat cross-legged on its head, leafing through the register Li Qingfeng had put in order.

The three Chen clan elders, and all the Qinghai Prefecture men, stood quietly behind him in Nanyang steward's robes.

Only Jing Jingsong, the highest in cultivation among them, seemed to have remembered something, and looked uneasy.

Uh-oh… he had gotten so excited just now that he had clean forgotten the other business.

He edged up behind Shen Yi. "Jingsong has a matter he would trouble the exalted immortal with."

"My surname is Shen."

Shen Yi did not much care for this exalted immortal business, and glanced back. "Speak."

Now that the man had returned to the Nanyang Sect, so long as he was not borrowing anything, everything else was easy enough.

"Senior Shen, it isn't really any great trouble. Through all these years while the Nanyang high sect lay quiet, we Nanyang dependencies have kept fairly close ties among ourselves, on the strength of our ancestors' connections."

Jing Jingsong smiled sheepishly. "So we have all along been doing work for the Water-Moon Merchant Alliance. They run consignments between the great sects, and we take on the guarding and delivery of some of the more valuable goods. I forgot about it just now — I would ask the Nanyang immortal sect to send word and let them know. The Qinghai Prefecture will return the deposit as fast as it possibly can."

In truth the business needed nothing like so much fuss.

The Qinghai Prefecture was tied up because it was doing the Nanyang Sect's work, not breaking a contract for no reason; and the Water-Moon Merchant Alliance was itself a Nanyang dependency, so there was no need to give notice at all, nor even to return the deposit.

But Jing Jingsong did not want to leave anyone with the impression that he went back on his word. It made him squirm, and so he wanted Shen Yi to stand witness.

Seeing Shen Yi think it over a moment.