Ai took her time to restore her breath and examine her environment. She wanted to make sure that nobody had succeeded in tailing her. Despite her attentive eyes, she failed to notice the shadow guard that was sent out to spy her. Her skills, though impressive, weren't still up to par with the imperial shadow guard of a nation. Besides, he had astutely concealed his presence deeply. Only an expert would have been able to fish him out and still may not have been to pinpoint his location.
Ai, unaware that a target had already been put on her, decided to go back to her master. She had been gone for already a long time, didn't know if her Master had been worried about her. She ran back to her ancestral hall. This entrance to her ancestral hall was built in the city. It was different than the one she used to exit earlier. It was as secretive and well suited to use when one wanted to return but definitely dangerous to exit as it was located in one of the busiest area of the city. One misstep and the entrance could be revealed. She had discovered it recently upon furthering her exploration of the ancestral hall.
Now the entrance was concelead in the core of a large tree that was shading a corner of the public market, in front of the trees were multiple stalls and behind the tree was an alley where multiple shops had their backdoors or secondary entrances on. It was easy to disappear and mislead people into thinking that she had used the alley to go into ones of the shops. The alley was normally very quiet with few people going through that's why it made perfectly sense to enter through the door.
However, it was hard to exit as one could not predict if there would be people in the alley once she came out.
Still she couldn't just enter like that. She had to make sure people's would be distracted, their attention focused on something else. Only then, would she feel safe using this entrance. Ai went to the opposite side of the market, leisurely stopping here and there. Her grand tour finally stopped in front of one of the busiest stall. While inquiring about the price of the goods, she left a small pouch on the table, apologized to the stall owner in her head and then swiftly kicked down one of the pole that supported the stall. With so many people around her, there was no way to find out who the culprit would be. The table with the goods fell down in a big noise scaring people away from the stall. Taking advantage of the incident, Ai ran away quickly among the crowd and finally entered the secret entrance. She did feel a bit apologetic for what she did. After all, so many goods were wasted because of her, but still she hoped what she left would be sufficient enough to cover the cost of it. Even though Ai knew she had to manage her resources well in order to succeed in her revenge scheme, she felt she had to compensate the stall owner.
Once it calmed down, the stall owner was quite disheartened to see the disaster that befell on him. Luckily, not everything was lost or he wouldn't be able to survive this month. As he was cleaning up his stall, he came across the small leather pouch. Opening it, his eyes lighted up. "The Gods has not forsaken me! I'll be able to continue my business!".
Since the secret guard arrived at the market, he had made sure to keep his eyes on her the whole time. He had noticed all her movements as well as the incident. Contrarily to stall owner, he did not think it was a simple accident. But by the time he figured, he had lost her. She seemed to have disappeared into nothingness. He circled the market multiple times, trying to find clues and there. He even inquired about her discreetly but to no avail, nobody had seen her.
'This girl is really not simple. She managed to escape my monitoring! This is the first time.'
Left with no choice, the secret guard went back to report on it.
Meanwhile, Ai was slowly walking back to her master not knowing a big surprise would await her.