Free Web NovelChapter 41: Chapter 41—Jiang Chen
Chapter 41—Jiang Chen
Lei Cheng arrived in the garden at a run and stopped.
Several rooms along the inner corridor had been partially destroyed—walls cracked, door frames splintered, furniture reduced to scattered wreckage. The fox boy was standing in the center of it all, nine tails swaying behind him, fox claws out and glowing, his small frame radiating more energy than his malnourished bones had any right to contain.
Lei Cheng did not hesitate.
"Life Intent."
A vine erupted from the ground and coiled around the boy in a single motion, binding him from shoulder to ankle. The boy thrashed against it immediately—arms, legs, tails all working at once—but the vine did not budge. Not a single loop shifted.
Lei Cheng checked his servants and maids next. A few had cuts and bruises. None had life-threatening injuries. He exhaled with relief. Only then did the tension leave his shoulders.
He turned back to the bound boy.
"What do you think you are doing?" he asked, keeping his voice cold and level.
The boy scowled upward at him. "I know exactly what you want. You want to make me your servant. Having me... doing your dirty work." He bared his teeth. "Rich people are all the same. Disgusting."
Lei Cheng looked at him—really looked. The malnourished frame, the bones visible at the shoulders and wrists, the defiance in a face that had been hungry for too long and had decided hostility was more useful than hope.
He tried a softer approach.
"What is your name?"
The boy spat to the side. "None of your business. I won’t tell you. I’ve read enough to know that some people can control others just by knowing their name."
Years of hunger and betrayal had taught the boy to suspect kindness before cruelty. Winning his trust was never going to be easy.
’What the...’ Lei Cheng’s shoulders dropped. His posture bent very slightly under the weight of this interaction. He suddenly understood why teaching this boy would never be simple.
"I am not trying to control you," he said patiently. "I wanted to take you in as a disciple. Nothing more."
"Right," the boy said, turning his head away with the air of someone who had made up his mind completely. "And any moment now you’re going to start the torture. I’m not as foolish as you seem to think."
He kept struggling. The vine remained completely still.
Behind them, Hua Mingyue had been standing quietly, her fan held at her waist. Now she took a deep breath, and her third eye opened in the center of her forehead for just a moment. The pupil shone crimson with a brief pulse of light before it closed again.
Her two eyes glowed white for a moment as she asked, "What’s your name?"
The boy’s eyes glowed white as well.
He replied instantly, "Jiang Chen."
’Jiang Chen...’ Lei Cheng narrowed his eyes.
Hua Mingyue looked up at the sky. The boy returned to normal, and he did not seem to remember any exchange between them.
"So you made your move," she murmured, with a smile that had no warmth in it. She glanced at the boy in the vines, and the smile faded. "But... it may already be too late." For the briefest moment, disappointment flickered across Hua Mingyue’s face before her usual calm returned, as though nothing had happened at all
She turned her gaze in several directions in quick succession, as though looking at things beyond the visible. "Those other cities are already close to falling," she said, almost to herself. "This one survived because of Lei Cheng." She pressed her fan closed against her lips, tilting her head slightly. "Is it for the future, then? Not for now?" She shook her head. "It doesn’t matter either way."
Lei Cheng did not notice her movement, nor hear her voice.
Hua Mingyue stepped forward and ordered, "Lei Cheng. Let the boy go."
The bound Jiang Chen’s head snapped around. "Huh? You’re both evil people! What are you trying to do?" He huffed, ’Don’t think I don’t know about playing rough and soft.’
His body began to glow—a warm, pulsing gold spreading across his skin and tails.
"Let me go, you evil people!" he roared, writhing around in the vines.
’What the heck.’ Lei Cheng clicked his tongue. ’Even releasing him is evil?’
He was already about to fling him with the vine when Hua Mingyue raised her hand and pointed in what appeared to be a completely random direction across the garden.
"Throw him that way," she said. "And use as much force as you can."
Lei Cheng turned serious. "Can he survive that?"
"Killing this boy..." Hua Mingyue said with a smile, "Is considerably more difficult than killing a cockroach with energy radiation."
Lei Cheng stared at her. He wasn’t sure whether to admire the boy or pity him anymore. A cockroach could adapt to all kinds of radiation and still survive, and yet she was praising the boy in the same breath. He couldn’t hold back the disbelief.
He stared at the boy, who was still struggling and still glowing with golden Bizarre Qi. He shook his head slowly.
"What a shame," he said. "He doesn’t want to come under me."
"It isn’t only you," Hua Mingyue said, with a sigh that carried something heavier than the words. "No one could take him in as a servant. No one..."
"No one?" Lei Cheng’s eyes sharpened. "Is he some kind of—"
"It is too much for you to know right now," she cut him off. "Just throw him."
He wanted to argue. He could hear how significant this boy was in every word she had chosen not to say—and to earn that kind of weight from Hua Mingyue required being something genuinely extraordinary. He asked again, "Is there truly no other way?"
Hua Mingyue exhaled. "There was one way—getting him to acknowledge you willingly, as a master takes a disciple. But now—" She glanced at the boy still thrashing in the coils, screaming and yelling. "He already believes both of us are evil. He will never acknowledge you now."
Lei Cheng clicked his tongue.
He directed the vine upward. It rose in a smooth arc and flung the boy into the sky with considerable force, aimed precisely in the direction Hua Mingyue had indicated.
"Just wait, you evil people!"
The boy’s voice dopplered away into the distance as he flew.
Hua Mingyue watched him go. Then she looked down at the ground beneath the space where the boy had been standing. Her eyes narrowed.
The boy’s shadow was still there.
And from it, slowly, a head was rising—a human-shaped head assembled entirely from black energy, featureless except for a single glowing red left eye. Its mouth was a gaping void, rimmed with thin threads of black that might have been saliva. The interior was a darkness that seemed to go deeper than it should.
It rose, oriented toward the direction the boy had flown, and followed. Not once did it look back. It glided forward without making a sound, its single crimson eye fixed on Jiang Chen as though it had found its rightful owner.
Hua Mingyue watched it go without expression.
’So that’s how he survived eating the fox body,’ she thought to herself, and said nothing aloud. freёwebnoѵel.com
Lei Cheng did not notice the shadow, as he focused on the boy above, and even if he had noticed it, he still wouldn’t have been able to see the Shadow Bizarre.
After a few moments—
"I need to start cultivating," Lei Cheng said, turning to her the moment she walked back to his side. "Can we start right now?"
"Tomorrow," Hua Mingyue said, raising her palm and pointing to the sky.
"But—"
She looked at him.
He looked at the sky, which was indeed almost dark. He returned to his room under her gaze without further argument.
In the corridor outside, Lei Fang stood watching the garden for a moment longer. He exhaled slowly through his nose.
"Dear," he said quietly, in the direction of no one visible, "I truly never wanted him to get involved in any of this. And yet—here he is." A pause. A short, bitter grin that contained things he had been carrying for years. "He has his own path now. All I can do is hope he walks it safely."
He turned and went back to his room. His shoulders seemed a little heavier than before.
In his own room, Lei Cheng dropped onto the bed and pressed a hand over his face.
"I forgot to ask how powerful my mother actually was." He stared at the ceiling. "She probably wasn’t that remarkable, honestly."
"Mm," Hua Mingyue nodded, settling back into her chair.
"If she were truly powerful, people would have spoken of her. There would be stories, rumors, something. But I haven’t heard a single person in Azure Cloud City mention her name." He turned this over. "Either she kept herself hidden deliberately, or she simply wasn’t that significant."
Hua Mingyue simply opened her book, unconcerned.
Lei Cheng looked at the ceiling for another moment, then let his eyes close. Within minutes, his breathing had slowed and steadied.
---
Across the city, in the government district of Azure Cloud City, a young woman in plain cotton robes pushed through the doors of the constabulary building and crossed the main hall of the ground-floor pavilion.
As soon as she stepped onto the polished violet marble floor, she screamed: "Help! Please—someone help me—my son is missing!"
She fell to her knees on the stone floor, tears flowing.
Every pair of eyes in the hall turned toward her. Even the constables who had seen countless tragedies fell briefly silent.
A constable moved toward her—a fat, unhurried man wearing the standard red luxurious robe of the Azure Cloud Police with the Qilin emblem stitched at the chest, a large sword at his hip, thick boots. Two golden stars on his shoulder. He had a steadiness about him, a practiced gentleness that seemed to calm anyone. His presence made the woman settle a little. She looked up at the two stars, and some of the panic retreated enough for her to breathe.
She grabbed his hands. "Officer... please, help me find my son."
"Tell me what happened," he said sharply.
She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "I work in the fields every day. My son plays in the street with the neighbors’ kids, and he’ll be home by the afternoon. I came back at lunchtime to feed him, and he wasn’t there. I went to the street—I asked every house—all the other children had come home. Only my son hadn’t." Her shoulders shook. "I searched for hours. Every place I could think of. Every person I could ask. I couldn’t find him."
The constable pulled out a small notebook and a pen. He pressed a drop of blood Qi into the pen’s tip, and it lit with a faint red glow. The pages were clean, white, soft.
"Where do you live?"
"Outer city—Luminous East Street, number 147."
He wrote it down. "Your husband?"
"He passed away five years ago."
"Other family member?"
"Just my son and me."
He studied her for a moment without writing. Plain features, thin frame—the kind of appearance that would let a woman move through the outer city’s dangerous streets without attracting the attention of gangs. Had she been beautiful, she would have been devoured to pieces. It was the kind of observation a constable made without being unkind about it.
"How old is your son?"
Before she could finish answering—
Crash! Crash!
Rapid footsteps echoed through the pavilion. Another constable, a young man of medium build, burst through the inner door carrying something over his shoulder.
A child. Small. Limp.
"It’s serious!" the young constable yelled. "The kid is dead. Everyone—"
The woman turned from her kneeling position and looked at the body being carried in.
The child was approximately six years old, wrapped in blue cotton robes.
’Xie’er was wearing blue clothes today.’ Her face went still.
