Shi Family
After the hall, Shi Long did not bother with a trial.
Wang Feng, Shu Meng, and Guo Fong were stripped of rank and thrown out of Dan Shi with their names scraped off the city records. The council was finished. The city, for the first time in a long while, was his.
Patrick left him a box.
Not gold. Not cores. Pills. Each one felt like someone had folded a lecture about existence into something a man could swallow without going mad. Shi Long did not hand them out like candy. Blood first. Chun. Wu. The guards who had stayed on their feet when the last Ju envoy turned into meat.
Weeks went by.
The lowest gate-guard in the Shi family woke up one morning at Spirit Awakening and did not know how to stand about it. The streets noticed. Then the merchants. By the time the talk left the walls, nobody was saying pills anymore. They were saying treasure. A sacred one. The kind that made realms climb and made emperors send people.
Shi Long had started that rumor himself.
He was tired of politics.
…
Dan Bei City.
Bei Lu came out of seclusion like the sky owed him money.
He had broken through to Spirit Emperor and sat in a cave until the realm stopped trying to spit him back out. The first thing he heard on the other side was not congratulations.
"What do you mean the Shi family took over our mine?"
"Yes, ancestor."
"What happened to Bei Feng? What has he been doing while I was in seclusion?"
"Ancestor Patriarch Feng went to the Shi family to marry their daughter to Young Master Chong. He and his group have not been seen since."
"When?"
"A month ago, ancestor."
Bei Lu's qi hit the guard so hard the man skipped across the hall like a stone on water.
A mine was an insult. A son disappearing was a problem. Bei Feng had been Spirit King. Last Bei Lu checked, Dan Shi's strongest was a sick city lord leaking blood from his eyes. A Spirit King embassy did not just evaporate in a backwater unless that backwater had started eating differently.
"Check the other mines. If they have been touched, I want names. Tell the elders to follow me. We wipe the Shi out for good."
The guard went.
Minutes later, Spirit King elders stepped out of torn space and fell in beside him. Some of them were one breath from the next realm and trying not to look excited about it.
"Congratulations to the ancestor for achieving Spirit Emperor," one of them said, flying too close. "The Emperor will think twice before confronting the Bei now."
Bei Lu did not give him a smile for that.
Another elder, braver or dumber, asked the real question.
"Ancestor. What makes the Shi family worth assembling the entire force?"
"They acquired a treasure," Bei Lu said. "Their lowest guards are Awakening. They owed us and they paid in full, not half. That is not luck. Powerhouses from across the empire will smell it. We arrive first, the treasure is ours. My son's corpse is the excuse."
The elders thrilled on cue. Greed made the formation neat.
…
Dan Shi. City gate.
Gold lion-beasts came down the road pulling a cart chained in sparkling rings. People flattened themselves against the walls.
"Is that the Emperor's envoy?"
"The Shi found a treasure that grows realms. Even the immortal ones don't have that."
The Ju Emperor did not send Yan Chi to cities. Yan Chi had been the first prince's dog when that prince was still a prince, and he had kept the leash when the prince finished his brothers and sat down as Emperor. Yan Chi did neighboring empires. Not mud towns. Not families.
A Spirit King, ninth stage, sat the lead horse with a whip.
"Get out of the way, you weak peasants."
"Envoy Yan," the man said, a little too pleased with himself, "we are at the city where the Shi family lives. Do we send for them, or do we go ourselves?"
Yan Chi watched the walls the way a man watches a locked box.
"We go. Every hungry sect on this continent will be here. A treasure that boosts cultivation and realm is not found in the Immortal Realm, let alone this dirt. Expect Shi Long at Spirit Emperor at least. Their lowest guard is Awakening. If he has gone Divine Spirit, we use the Puppet Sect's Emperor-level puppet and we kill him anyway. I was sent to find the treasure. After that, this family is finished."
The cart rolled toward the Shi compound.
…
Shi Long broke meditation because the air in his city had gotten heavy.
He had wanted them in one yard. Bei. Ju. The stray powerhouses who thought a rumor was an invitation. One slaughter. Then the Shi could stop pretending they were a piece on someone else's board.
Bei Lu arrived first. He dropped a space-lock over the compound, the kind meant to keep treasure in and witnesses out.
"Shi Long! Come out and hand over the treasure. Perhaps I leave your corpse intact. Perhaps I spare your daughter the humiliation."
Silence.
No guards. No birds. The Shi household sat like a held breath.
"What is wrong with you fools? Destroy everything. Leave nothing alive."
Bei Lu turned to shout at the elders he had brought.
The sky behind him was empty.
He looked down.
Headless Spirit Kings were painting the courtyard. The blood had not even decided which way to run yet.
"Now that the flies are gone," a voice said above him, "it is time for the rats."
Shi Long hung there. His eyes burned. The pressure on him was not Spirit King, and it was not the sick man who had leaked blood in a hall a few weeks ago.
"Let's not be rude," Shi Long said. "Allow the others the chance to die in my hands."
Bei Lu's formation died like cheap paper.
The lock popped, and the hungry ones poured in. Yan Chi stepped off the gold cart and rose among them, his Spirit King ninth at his shoulder, a puppet token already warming in a sleeve.
Powerhouses filled the Shi sky. They had come for a treasure. They found a quiet house and a smiling city lord.
"Now that everyone is here," Shi Long said, and True Immortal energy unrolled off him like a stolen sky, "why don't we begin the slaughter game?"
…
Infinite Realm. Cloud bed.
Patrick had a screen the size of a wall. Popcorn refilled itself because of course it did.
Athena's thigh over his. Anastasia's mouth on his collarbone. Both of them still wearing last night, which was to say nothing.
They watched Bei Lu realize the courtyard was a grave. They watched Yan Chi's smile get thin. They watched Shi Long stop pretending to be a city lord.
"Father looks good with your pills," Anastasia said.
"He looks like a man who was tired of being polite," Athena said.
Patrick let the popcorn drift.
"Let the show begin."