Chương 77: Chapter 75 Interlude 14

Lianhua stopped at the entrance to the cemetery with a small cloth-wrapped bundle in her hands. The place was not imposing. It had neither the carved gates nor the white stone walls of the cemeteries reserved for the great families of the court.

It was simply a common cemetery, one of those that existed on the margins of the city, where the graves were crowded together following no order other than the availability of space, and where grass grew between the headstones with the freedom afforded by the fact that only a handful of regulars bothered to clear it away. At her back, the two Nei Wei who had escorted her there remained in silence until Lianhua told them without turning "Wait for me here."

The two women nodded in unison, a brief, precise gesture that needed no words, and Lianhua crossed the cemetery entrance without stopping and without a moment's hesitation. Her steps carried her without needing to think too much about the route, as though her feet knew the way from having walked it so many times that it had become automatic.

As she walked she passed headstones of various sizes and states of preservation, some with inscriptions still legible, others on which time had erased the names until they were nothing but empty grooves, until at last she made her way into one of the more modest sections of the cemetery, where the graves were smaller and the headstones humbler. She finally stopped before a small headstone of gray stone that barely reached her knees. There were no ornaments on it, no elaborate inscriptions.

Only the name Yichen, a pair of dates, and the weeds that had grown up around it. Lianhua set the bundle aside with care and, without hurry but without pause, knelt and began to clean the grave. Her hands swept away the dry leaves that had accumulated on the base of the headstone and her fingers pulled out the weeds that had sprung up around it, working with the same meticulousness she applied to everything she did, as though the cleaning of a grave deserved the same attention as the care of a princess.

She wiped the dust that had gathered on the stone with the sleeve of her clothing without the slightest hesitation, and when she finally stopped, the headstone looked brighter than before, as if the mere act of cleaning it had restored some of the dignity its previous state had stolen. Lianhua observed her work for a moment and seemed satisfied, or at least as satisfied as anyone can be standing before their mother's grave and then proceeded to unwrap the bundle.

Inside were a small bronze incense burner, three sticks of incense, and food offerings wrapped in leaves, modest but prepared with care. Lianhua placed the offerings first before the headstone, positioning them with a precision that turned the gesture into something almost ceremonial, then lit the three incense sticks with a talisman she drew from within her clothing.

The incense smoke rose in three thin threads that twisted lazily in the air before dissolving, and Lianhua knelt before the headstone and closed her eyes, lost in her thoughts. Time passed, and it was impossible to say how much, because in a cemetery time does not keep the same cadence as in the rest of the world, and Lianhua seemed in no hurry to leave that silence, which was perhaps the only place where she allowed herself to lower her guard. But unfortunately, on this day that silence did not last.

Lianhua frowned without opening her eyes, and her expression, which until that moment had held an almost meditative serenity, hardened with an irritation she did not try to disguise. She had detected approaching footsteps. Several of them, and they were clearly not the Nei Wei's. Lianhua squeezed her eyes shut more tightly as she focused and surveyed the cemetery with the Vision of Horus, and what she saw caused the irritation on her face to transform into something colder and deeper.

A group of three men was approaching unhurriedly along one of the cemetery paths. The one walking in front appeared to be around thirty and wore lavish clothing that clashed with the modesty of the place, dark-colored silks embroidered with silver thread that caught the sunlight with a gleam that seemed calculated to attract attention. The other two walked one step behind him, flanking him with the rigid, expressionless posture of men who had spent their entire lives in the shadow of someone more powerful.

The three stopped a short distance from Lianhua, who remained kneeling with her back to them, her eyes still closed. And to an attentive observer, someone capable of looking beyond the clothes and the postures, something in the lavishly dressed man's features would seem familiar.

The line of the jaw, the arch of the brows, and even the way his eyes narrowed slightly when studying something were traits he shared with the woman kneeling before the headstone, though in him they were softened by a life of comfort that had rounded what in Lianhua remained sharp. A brief silence fell over the group, broken only by the almost imperceptible crackle of the incense burning down, until at last the man broke it.

"You're not even going to greet your brother?" he said in a tone that aimed for warmth but carried the ring of someone accustomed to having his words obeyed without question. A short silence followed his words, and just as it was on the verge of becoming uncomfortable, it was broken.

"I don't speak to sewer rats", Lianhua replied, and her voice was completely cold. There was no anger in it, no bitterness, no tremor of a contained emotion. Only a contempt so absolute and glacial it seemed to freeze the air between them. One of the men accompanying Lianhua's supposed brother stepped forward, his face contorting with rage.

"Bitch!" he spat with a violence that shattered the cemetery's calm in an instant.

"That is no way to address the head of the Wang family!" Lianhua did not flinch. She did not open her eyes, did not turn, showed not the slightest sign that the man's words had so much as reached her ears, and with the same slowness with which one would rise from a meditation, she began to stand while keeping her back to the three men.

"I am no longer part of the Wang family", she answered in the same glacial tone as she rose to her feet.

"Therefore I am free to say whatever I wish." The man who had spoken looked ready to continue the argument, fists clenched and jaw tight, when Lianhua's brother silenced him with a gesture of his hand, a subtle but unmistakable signal that shut him down instantly.

"Lianhua", the brother said, his tone having abandoned its earlier affability for something more akin to forced patience.

"We share the same father. Of course you belong to the Wang family, regardless of what you may believe." He paused briefly before continuing in what was meant to be a conciliatory tone "And despite the distance between us, I have always kept you in my thoughts." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. Hearing her brother, Lianhua, still with her back to him and her eyes closed, let out a short, ironic laugh that sounded like the crack of ice breaking.

"I have no doubt I've always been in your thoughts", she said, and now there was an edge in her voice that cut deeper than the contempt before.

"Since, unlike many of my brothers and sisters, I managed to escape your clutches." And then her tone changed. The ice shattered and beneath it appeared anger, a state that had been contained for years and that now, before her mother's grave, forced its way through with a strength Lianhua did not try to check.

"I know full well it was your mother who drove mine to her death", she said, and every word fell like a stone into the space between them.

"And I also know full well you had already arranged my sale to a brothel." Her voice shook, not from weakness, but from an anger she had learned to channel but not to extinguish.

"If I hadn't escaped to try to enter the Yushitai, and if I hadn't succeeded, I know very well the fate I would have suffered", she continued, and there was something in the way she spoke those words that turned them into more than an accusation, a testimony.

"The same fate that has befallen the few of my brothers and sisters I've managed to find and help." An uncomfortable silence fell over the cemetery after Lianhua's words, a silence so dense it felt as though the dead themselves were listening to what was unfolding. Lianhua's brother was the first to break it, and his tone, though it tried to maintain composure, carried a note of urgency that hadn't been there before "I don't know who told you those lies, but…"

"Nobody told me", Lianhua cut him off with an abruptness that sliced through his words like a blade.

"I broke into your study myself and read every paper and document referring to the fate you had prepared for me and for my brothers and sisters." The silence that followed those words was different from the one before. It was not uncomfortable. It was dangerous. And then, as if a mask had fallen from his face, the brother's expression changed.

The forced affability and calculated patience vanished to reveal something harder and more real, something that had always been beneath the surface and now emerged without pretense.

"Regardless of all that", he told her in a brusque tone he no longer bothered to disguise.

"You still carry the Wang surname, and therefore you must obey my orders as head of the family." Hearing her brother's words, something changed in Lianhua's posture. Her back, which had been tense with anger, relaxed slightly, and when she spoke, her voice adopted a strangely sweet tone that contrasted with everything she had said until now in a way that was more unsettling than any threat.

"And what are the head of the family's orders?" she asked with a sweetness that did not reach her closed eyes. The man, hearing her apparent docility, drew himself up slightly as he replied with the confidence of someone who believes he has won a negotiation.

"You must convince the Zhāohuán to ask her master for a copy of the auction's inventory", he told her.

"And then pass a copy to me." Lianhua listened to his words and began to laugh. It was not the short, ironic laugh from before. It was a longer, genuine laugh, as though her brother's words were the most absurd thing she had heard in a long time, and as she laughed she turned slowly and opened her eyes to look, for the first time, at the three men standing before her. Her eyes, when they finally settled on her brother, were completely devoid of the sweetness her voice had carried moments before.

They were cold, direct, and the look she gave him was the same one that, had Sun Wen been there, she would have recognized as the look Lianhua had once directed at Yao Zhi.

"I refuse", she said, and the two words fell with the weight of a sentence. Her brother grimaced, a brief contraction of his lips that betrayed his frustration before he could control it.

"If you refuse", he said, his tone acquiring an edge meant to be threatening.

"Then I'll have to make you aware of the consequences." Hearing her brother's threat, Lianhua did not flinch. Her expression did not change, her posture did not shift, and when she spoke, her voice retained that glacial calm more dangerous than any shout.

"Are you prepared for the consequences of touching the Zhāohuán's Fei Yi if you do?" she asked with a simplicity that turned the question into something far more menacing than its words suggested. Lianhua's brother smiled, and it was a despicable smile, the kind born from the confidence of believing one's power absolute.

"The Zhāohuán's position at court isn't as stable as it seems", he told her in a tone oozing poorly disguised satisfaction.

"And there are certain people who would be delighted if her Fei Yi were to disappear." He allowed a calculated pause before continuing "So perhaps you should reconsider your refusal and simply obey my orders." Hearing her brother, Lianhua simply smiled. And it was a smile that held nothing warm, nothing ironic, nothing amused. It was the smile of someone who had spent her entire life training for situations exactly like this one and who knew, with absolute certainty, how it was going to end.

"If you think that between you, your two escorts, and the three other men you have hidden nearby to ambush me, you can defeat me", she told him with a tranquility that was almost terrifying.

"You are very much mistaken." Something changed in her brother's expression at the mention of the three hidden men, a flash of surprise.

"I can kill all of you without needing to call the Nei Wei I have as an escort", she added in the same tone, as though she were simply commenting on the weather. And then Lianhua stopped holding back and, for the first time, released her aura. She did not do it gradually, nor with the restraint of someone measuring her strength. She did it all at once and fully, letting the pressure of her newly attained Condensation of the Elemental Cores expand without restriction. The effect was immediate.

The two men flanking her brother retreated half a step by instinct, their bodies reacting before their minds could process what was happening, and her brother, whose smile vanished as though it had never existed, looked at her with eyes in which a trace of fear had replaced the confidence.

"That's impossible", he said, and his voice had lost every shred of the arrogance that had sustained it.

"You can't have reached the Condensation of the Elemental Cores." Lianhua heard him and looked at him with an expression that might have been pity if it hadn't been so thoroughly stripped of the warmth such a feeling required.

"Unlike you, who seems to have stagnated", she told him, and there was something in her tone that was no longer anger or contempt but something worse, indifference.

"I have never stopped training." And here Lianhua made a brief pause that lent weight to her next words.

"Since from what I've heard, you've picked up our father's worst vices." Her brother looked at her, and though the fear was still there, behind his eyes something else was pushing through, the cold calculation of someone who believed that regardless of what happened, he was safe.

"It doesn't matter what your cultivation level is", he told her, and his voice had regained a firmness that sounded slightly forced.

"If you dare attack me, you won't go unpunished." Lianhua listened, and for the first time in the entire conversation, something resembling a genuine feeling crossed her face. Something that was not anger, nor contempt, nor coldness, but a deep, old weariness, the weariness of someone who had spent too long fighting her own demons.

"Although nothing would please me more than to rip your head from your shoulders", she told him, and the way she said it did not sound like an empty threat but like a real desire held in check only by something stronger than the desire itself.

"Anything I do will reflect on the Zhāohuán, and I don't want to drag her into political trouble as repayment for all the kindness I've received from her." She paused, and her expression changed. The desolation vanished, giving way to a merciless smile that transformed her face into something her brother had never seen.

"But neither do I need to, in order to have my revenge", she added in a tone that only pretended to be amused.

"Tell me, brother, what do you think would happen if I told the Zhāohuán that her Fei Yi was nearly sold to a brothel when she was barely her age?" Lianhua's words crashed over her brother like a bucket of ice water, and beads of sweat appeared on his forehead as he stared at her.

"The Zhāohuán doesn't have enough power to do anything to me", he answered, and the words sounded more like an attempt to convince himself than an actual assertion.

"Perhaps she does, perhaps she doesn't", Lianhua replied with a tranquility that was almost kind.

"But don't worry. I have no wish to soil the Zhāohuán's ears just to take revenge on a pathetic wretch like you." And after those words, Lianhua, apparently tired of everything that was happening, began walking toward the cemetery exit at an unhurried pace.

Her brother and the two men with him, still pressed down by the aura Lianhua had not bothered to withdraw, stepped out of her way almost by instinct, watching her leave with the helplessness of those who have just discovered that the person they intended to intimidate has become someone they cannot control. But before she had gone too far, Lianhua stopped and, without turning, spoke in a voice that carried the weight of a promise.

"Don't even think about touching my mother's grave", she said, and every word was clear and precise, without emotion but without ambiguity.

"If you do, I won't care about the consequences, and one day you'll go to sleep and never wake up again." An absolute silence followed her words, and Lianhua resumed her walk toward the exit as she added, in an almost casual tone that somehow proved more terrifying than everything she had said before, a few final words.

"I was trained for it."