Free Web NovelChapter 39: Chapter 39—Vanished Flames
Chapter 39—Vanished Flames
Lei Cheng walked through the gates of the Lei household with his father draped across one shoulder and the unconscious fox boy slung over the other.
The courtyard was still full of people—wedding guests who had been waiting for a marriage that would never happen, clan associates who had heard enough rumors to be curious, and a handful who simply had nowhere better to be. They turned to look at Lei Cheng the moment he stepped inside. Some studied him with carefully neutral expressions. A few—the braver or more foolish ones—had already arranged their faces into the faint, satisfied smirks of people who had been expecting disaster and felt vindicated.
The smirks lasted exactly as long as it took Lei Cheng to look at them.
The moment his eyes landed on them, they froze. The courtyard became so quiet that even breathing sounded loud. They did not yet know what had happened at the Xiao household. They knew only that the Xiao Clan was being torn apart by a Bizarre Creature—and that this young man who had been the city’s standing joke had walked back through his own gates carrying two unconscious bodies and trailing a faint, unmistakable energy that felt nothing like anything a regular person should possess.
Before anyone could form a question or a provocation, Lei Cheng snapped his fingers.
Bang! Rumble!
A massive vine erupted from the ground beside him—thick, dark green, radiating Life Intent—and rose several meters into the air, drawing every head in the courtyard at once.
"You have two choices," he said, his voice flat and cold. "Leave now, or die."
Everyone stared at the vine. A few of them swallowed visibly.
"Bizarre power..."
"This kid has become a Bizarre Cultivator...?"
"How?"
They murmured with disbelief.
Lei Cheng waved his hand. The vine extended toward the nearest man standing at the front of the crowd—a man who immediately lost all composure and all control of his bladder, as the vine stopped with its tip directly in front of his nose.
"I am counting. Three—"
"Two—"
Before he reached one, the courtyard was empty. Only scattered footprints remained where dozens of people had stood moments earlier. The guests, the associates, the smirkers—all of them had vanished through the gate at a speed that suggested genuine fear was an excellent motivator.
Lei Cheng let the vine retract. He looked at the people who remained—the household servants, maids, and guards who had stayed behind, most of them trembling, none of them having run.
He looked at the guards specifically.
"Mo Ming is dead," he said. "Mo Yong... Yun Che is dead. You have two choices—leave the Lei household, or pledge your loyalty to me." He paused. "I will not harm anyone who works for me sincerely."
He handed his father and the fox boy to the nearest maids. They took them with shaking hands. The maids carried Lei Feng to his room and laid him in his bed. The fox boy was placed in the guest room. The guards, one by one, dropped to one knee.
"We pledge our loyalty."
Lei Cheng scanned the kneeling row. His gaze stopped on three faces—guards who had been the right-hand men of Mo Ming. He pointed at them in turn.
"You—Fu, Gao, and Guo. Get out. Leave before I do something about it."
They swallowed and fled the compound without a word.
Outside the gates, once they were a safe distance away, the bulky one among them hissed under his breath. "Damn this lucky punk. Where did he get that power from? Something must have happened at the Xiao Clan—"
"Doesn’t matter where it came from," another muttered back bitterly. "He has it now. And we can’t do anything about it."
The last one—a thin man—stayed silent, his expression bitter and tight.
They stood at the edge of the street and looked back at the Lei household gates with combined fury and helplessness. The energy from that vine—they could still feel the memory of it pressing against their chests.
The thin man said quietly, "What do we do now? We were dismissed by one of the four great clans. No other clan in the city will dare take us on after this."
Nobody had a useful answer. For the first time in years, their future felt uncertain.
---
Lei Cheng returned to his room and collapsed onto his bed. The mental exhaustion hit him all at once—one day of facing multiple life threats, of coming close to death more times than he cared to count.
He pressed his hand against the soft quilt and grinned at the ceiling.
Then he yawned enormously.
"I am exhausted."
Hua Mingyue was already seated in the corner chair, a book open in her lap. Lei Cheng squinted at the cover from across the room—Story of Supreme Tong. The writing was not Chinese, but it followed the same construction logic, the same brushstroke-based method. He had tried to learn Chinese once, back in his previous life, motivated by the desire to read web novels in the original before translation. He had given up after a few months. The characters here had a similar logic—and he sighed, recalling the days spent under his father’s instruction and inside the Qiu Academy learning this world’s written language—Henia.
"Is it interesting?" he asked, straightening his back.
"Very," Hua Mingyue said, without looking up. "It is the story of one of the most powerful humans who ever lived."
"I’ll borrow it when you’re done," Lei Cheng said.
"You may."
It was the closest thing to ordinary conversation they had shared since meeting.
He didn’t forget—before sleeping—to send word to Doctor Chen to come and check on his father. Hua Mingyue had told him the fox boy would wake on his own when the time came. fгeewebnovёl.com
He closed his eyes and was snoring within moments.
---
The sky had already turned red at the horizon when he opened his eyes again.
His vision sharpened quickly, the blurriness of sleep clearing in seconds. He sat up and stretched, rolling his neck. Hua Mingyue was still in the corner. Still reading.
’Same book.’ He raised his brows. "Still on the book?"
"Still on the same book," she replied simply. "This is a fun story."
Lei Cheng leaned back against the headboard and murmured, "Status." He finally had the time to check his body properly.
『 STATUS PANEL 』
[ Name: Lei Cheng (Otherworldly Being)
Age: 17 / 32
Realm: Lv.0 — Mortal
Path: None
Health: Healthy
Cultivation Techniques: None
Skills: None
Dao: Illusion Intent {31%}, Death Intent {42%}, Life Intent {40%} ]
The familiar luminous panel appeared in his vision. He laid his eyes immediately on his lifespan.
’Five years.’
He clicked his tongue. He had estimated three to four. The cost of all those illusion Intent expenditures across a single day had been steeper than he had calculated.
’I need to start cultivating.’ He did not worry too much—he knew cultivation would restore lifespan. If he chose methods oriented toward lifespan extension, he could add far more than hundreds of years. But without cultivation, he could die even if he had thousands of years remaining. A frail mortal body did not last long, regardless of how full the counter read.
He exhaled and turned his awareness inward with inner vision.
’I still need to check whether that Lu Bizarre left anything in my body.’ He had been too focused on healing himself at Qian Pharmacy to do a thorough sweep at the time, and everything that happened was around his chest area. He sent Life Intent flowing through himself from head to foot—a slow, warm current, like something clean and green moving through every vein and cavity. The sensation was gentle, almost pleasant. The exhaustion his body had been holding dissolved as the Life Intent passed through it, restoring him to a fresh baseline.
Then, in his left foot—in the smallest toe—he found it.
A small node of Bizarre energy, glowing cold blue.
’There it is.’
He stared at it for a moment. ’So Mo Yong’s plan had actually worked, in its way. This would have killed me eventually—quietly, slowly, from the inside—if I hadn’t noticed it.’ Mo Yong had taken Lei Cheng to the Bizarre Domain Lu courtyard while he was unconscious the day before. He hadn’t had the opportunity to sweep properly in the chaos that followed.
He sent a thread of Life Intent directly into the node. Green light flooded it.
The blue energy was wiped by the overwhelming force of Life Intent—it was a small cold ember against a flood of surging green waves. It never stood a chance.
He exhaled, opened his eyes, and for the first time since waking in this body, he felt genuinely clean. No fox mark. No lingering Bizarre traces. Nothing planted, and waiting.
"I’m free from all Bizarres." He grinned and allowed himself to relax. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
A weight he hadn’t realized he was still carrying quietly lifted from his shoulders.
It didn’t last long.
Thud!
His bedroom wooden doors were slammed open.
A maid in a plain violet robe stood in the doorway—average-faced, hair escaping from its pin, sweating, trembling so thoroughly that her hands were shaking against the door frame.
"Young master—" Her voice broke. "The flames—the white flames in the sky—they’re gone. They vanished."
She could not hold herself upright. She dropped to her knees in the doorway.
Lei Cheng rose from the bed without particular hurry.
’As expected.’
He had understood the moment he encountered the Ninth Elder and witnessed his illusion power firsthand—the white flames burning in Azure Cloud City’s sky were the Ninth Elder’s work. An illusion sustained by his continuous energy output, designed to mask everything the fox clan had been doing inside the city. When the Ninth Elder was killed, the energy feeding the illusion had no source to draw from anymore. The illusion had simply continued burning on whatever reserve remained—and now that reserve was gone.
He walked out of his room and into the garden. Hua Mingyue followed without a sound. Not a single servant or maid so much as glanced in her direction.
He looked up.
The sky above Azure Cloud City was clear—genuinely clear, the illusion stripped away entirely. Every person in the city who tilted their head back saw the same thing at the same moment: real evening sky, open and unadorned.
And then, as Lei Cheng watched, the sky began to change.
The clear air thickened. Color drained. The evening blue darkened to light gray, then to a deep, pressing shade—and gray fog began to roll in from everywhere at once, moving like something with intention, filling the sky from horizon to horizon. It did not drift with the wind. It advanced against it.
Across all of Azure Cloud City, people who had been looking up felt their hearts seize in their chests. Almost everyone felt a chill that started at the base of the spine and climbed upward—not from cold air, but from the instinctive, wordless understanding of something large and dangerous arriving.
