The Emperor's Dream - Chapter Seventeen
“Have you found anything?” Wanyi asked. He rubbed his tired eyes.
**Chapter One**
**Welcome to chapter seventeen of The Emperor’s Dream, an epic fantasy novella from the wider world of The Mhong Chronicles. I’ll be publishing chapters each week, but remember, these are some of the very first drafts, which means you’re in on this at the very beginning. Thank you for being here, friend. I hope you enjoy it.**
12 Days Until the Vote
“Have you found anything?” Wanyi asked. He rubbed his tired eyes.
“Not in this one,” Yishan answered as he slid the book he had been flipping through back into its place on the shelf before continuing to run his finger along the spines of other volumes, reading the titles softly to himself as he went.
“Well, I’m off to bed,” Chengroh said. He rose from the padded leather armchair he had been lounging in for most of the evening and stretched languidly. “You two stay as long as you like,” he said, as he shuffled out he door.
The man’s looking grayer by the day, Wanyi thought as he watched Chengroh exit. The old man’s footsteps were loud on the stairs until they they finally softened to dull thuds coming from the floor above.
After overhearing Jinhua and Tukharen’s plans, Wanyi, Yishan, and Meisun had taken to scouring all of Shanshia for every scrap of information about Yushagai they could find. Wanyi and Yishan had already ransacked the library at the Council Hall and visited nearly every bookseller in the city, but hadn’t been able to find much. Meisun and her Band had gone to the streets to find civilians who had claimed to have seen the sky dragon at one point or another, but those mostly repeated the little that Wanyi and Yishan had been able to find.
That had eventually led them to Chengroh’s manor, where he kept a small, but surprisingly well-provisioned library in his study. Wanyi hadn’t pinned the old Bear chief as a reader, but Chengroh had surprised him. His volumes were the best they had found so far. Wanyi had been working his way through some scholar named Liumen’s Religious Practices and Beliefs of the Hukan Peoples for over two hours. It was their most promising lead yet.