Ironically, no matter how celebrated the story was outside, how high the praise soared, within the Xuanqing Guard, there wasn't a single whisper about any "reward."
Anyone familiar with the inside details of the case admitted the Black Banner Battalion had nailed another big one, but so what? In the end, it was just some old unresolved cases—so what if there was a faint connection to Evil Cultivators, after all, nobody was actually caught. Want a reward? Dream on, you're free to imagine anything there.
Because of this, Tang Qingyuan and Chen Yiyun had some complaints toward Shen Hao; not capturing the Evil Cultivator meant their "gains" were cut off by half, and compared to the pressure they'd endured earlier, it hardly seemed worth it. What they didn't know was that, in fact, Shen Hao hadn't written the most crucial part of the case into the official record.
