v7c30: The Fall of the Wu part 1

After commanding their cultivators to deal with things, naturally, the next step was to go to bed; Chanchou was utterly exhausted by the entire boring day, and so she slept soundly. She awoke quite early, however, quite excited to show her sister the error of her ways… but things were strange in the morning.

 

“What do you mean nobody arrived last night?” Father demanded of one of their servants, who had been instructed to receive their “guests”.

 

“Nobody arrived, My Lord,” the servant repeated. “We have had no contact from the people whom you said would arrive.”

 

“Lazy, no good bastards,” Father muttered under his breath. He swiftly went up to his room, and ripped in half another talisman. He waited. And waited. And waited some more.

 

When after twenty minutes, no cultivators materialized, he sent servants to the palace they kept to go and find the man.

 

However, when their minor transmission stone buzzed… it was not with good news.

 

“It’s empty, My Lord,” the servant stated.

 

“….what do you mean, empty?” her father ground out.

 

“I mean what I say, My Lord. The palace servants said they were dismissed late last night by Master Ye Shun, and so they went to the servants’ quarters. Now there is no furniture, no luxuries, no food—they even extracted the gold and jade from the inlay in the meditation rooms.”

 

Chanchou’s jaw dropped. Her husband’s eyes bulged. Even Father looked utterly baffled, before rage overtook him.

 

“Perfidious, feckless—this is why one should never trust a cultivator. Their oaths are worthless. The Azure Jade Trading Company must have somehow offered them something. Our informants said they had a lot of cultivation resources. And of course, the peasant chose that over his honour,” Father snarled, before glaring off to the side.

 

But… if the cultivator is gone, and the Auditor still has all of our records… Chanchou paled.

 

“Wha—what do we do then?” Chanchou asked. “They still have to be bluffing, don’t they?”

 

Father just stared at her.

 

“Idiot girl,” was all he said, and Chanchou flinched. “They’ve had some minor victories, so now they’ll think they are invincible. We have to—”

He paused at the sudden, frantic knocking on the door to his study.

 

“Enter,” he commanded.

 

A servant poked their head in. “My Lord. A special session of court has been called by the Lord Governor and the Lord Magistrate of Pale Moon Lake City, on behalf of the Auditor General and the Lord Director of Civil Service Examinations. They have not informed any of our men through the usual channels, and there are guards… They altered their patrol routes. They have us surrounded.”

 

Chanchou’s breathing hitched.

 

Father frowned. “I see,” he said, then lowered his voice. “How many men do they have with them?”

 

The servant, still nervous, swallowed. “At least a hundred. My Lord, what—”

 

“That is enough,” Father commanded. “Worry not, there is merely a political matter that must be attended to.”

 

The servant nodded hesitantly, before backing away and closing the door.

 

“They do not want us running, it seems,” her husband mused. Chanchou on the other hand, felt her heart beating out of her chest.

 

“Wha—what do we do—” she started her voice rising, but then something hit her. Heat and pain exploded in her cheek. The room spun. Chanchou blinked the stars out of her eyes, to see her father retracting his hand.

 

“Control yourself!” Father ordered her. As if she was one of the servants!

 

Her head whipped to her husband, who said nothing about the strike. In fact, he wasn’t looking at her at all. His eyes were narrowed into the distance past the window. They were cold and calculating. Chanchou swallowed, and clasped her hands together in her lap.

 

“Have the servants make preparations to leave. We shall wait, to see if they truly have the guts—but activate all contincencies,” Father declared.

 

Father took a scroll, and began to write. Chanchou just sat, her hands folded in her lap, and tried to ignore the stinging in her cheek.

 

Father called in another servant when he was done. “Send this transmission to our men in Grass Sea City and Yellow Rock Plateau. Open a bounty, for our dear Acting Lord Magistrate,” Father said, then rose, and turned to look at Chanchou’s husband.

 

“We will endure this,” he stated simply, “as we have endured since the Age of Heroes. Now, let us see what they do.”

 

Chancou’s husband turned to her father, and smiled. It was the smile he smiled when he had to, when he didn’t like somebody.

 

“Of course. I have no doubt of our eventual victory,” her husband replied.

 

The men nodded at each other. Both of them had cold eyes.

 

The stirrings of fear, quelled by pain, started up again.

 

….this was all her sister’s fault. If she hadn’t… Chanchou bit the thought off.

 

===========================

 

The Lord Governor of the Azure Hills was not in a good mood. He rarely was when he was asked to call an early morning special session of court, but the Lord Director of Civil Service Examinations, as well as the Auditor General had been insistent.

 

The request had come in last night, when he had been in the middle of enjoying a particularly skilled courtesan’s company. She had been supremely talented at go, her dance had been elegant and refined, and her voice divine. Her last ballad in particular had him misty-eyed… at least until his aide walked in, and informed him of the men wanting to see him.

 

Which had been an annoying conversation, and some of the documents had been concerning. Concerning enough to ruin his sleep, and upset his stomach.

 

He hadn’t even managed his morning meal yet.

 

He strode down the halls of his palace with a frown on his face, and met with Ban coming up the other way. The Lord Magistrate of Pale Moon Lake City fell in beside him with his own retinue, the two merging.

 

“Lord Governor. You look well this morning.” Ban said with a sardonic grin. The bastard.

 

The Lord Governor simply scowled at the Magistrate… before noticing the makeup hiding the eyebags on his counterpart’s face.

 

“That bad, Ban?” He asked.

 

“Certainly not good, Jufeng. It appears we drastically underestimated our good Auditor General.” Ban replied. “The weasel is indeed a weasel. Though in the case of attacking rabbits ten times his size, rather than being a coward. I’m rather baffled how he got this information.”

 

“There were rumours of the Wu Clan’s manse being raided yesterday.” Jufeng replied. “I thought it idle gossip, as nobody would be that foolish, but apparently somebody was.”

 

Neither of them liked being wrong. And neither of them liked the instability that was sure to arise from this.

 

“Ah, always exciting times, My Lord Governor.” His Magistrate replied. “Lets hope it’s not as exciting as thirty years ago, hmm?”

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The governor grimaced. Indeed. Thirty years ago. What a disaster. If it weren’t for that one green-haired man, the bald one and the freckly maid…

 

Well. No sense in dredging up painful memories.

 

Both of them paused outside the door to the meeting hall. Where another aide was waiting. The aide looked rather pale.

 

“Meng. Have they all arrived?” he asked the man.

 

“Yes, My Lord, everyone on the list is in attendance but…” The man swallowed. “We may have a… situation.”

 

The Governor took a deep breath, then let it out.

 

“What sort of situation?”

 

“My Lord, are you familiar with the main Heavenly Ascension Stone?” The man ventured.

 

“Yes, the broken one that doesn’t detect anything in the Initiate’s realm.” He replied.

 

Whoever had built the Palace had good ideas; a cultivation detector, built right into the floor. The problem was that it couldn’t detect the cultivation of ninety nine percent of the cultivators who existed in the province.

 

“It turned on. And… we checked the characters. Triple checked them, to be sure, but… it hit Spiritual.”

 

Everyone froze at that.

 

“You’re certain?” the governor

 

“We don’t know if it actually detected something or it was another Qi anomaly.” the man said again. It’s not on anymore; and we can’t see anybody who looks like a cultivator…” The man trailed off.

 

There was definitely something afoot. It had started three years ago, when a wandering cultivator had accidentally shattered a bunch of detection stones with his cultivation… and apologised. Then gave them money to replace them. That had been one of the oddest reports Jufeng had ever read. A cultivator, apologising for breaking something?

 

It turned out to break those pendants, the person had to be Spiritual Realm or Higher. Massively stronger than any cultivator in the Azure Hills.

 

Then, somebody matching that cultivator’s description started wandering around the province. He only appeared in bits and pieces, but soon after the Plum Blossom’s Shadow had sprung up out of the ground.

 

After that, there was the business at the dueling peaks. Then the Qi anomalies in the winter, which Mengde’s Crystal Emporium had said were natural.

 

And now this.

 

He sighed heavily.

 

“Well. No sense in putting this off.” He finally said with a grimace.

 

The servants opened the door for him, and he stepped into the hall. He immediately took in the people gathered. There were not many; it was mostly the directors, their aides, several noble families. Sheng Yanjing was sitting with the Lord Director of Civil Service Examinations, both men quietly speaking to each other, with documents open on the table.

 

There were also numerous members of the Wu’s faction in attendance, but the Wus themselves—and the Master of the Treasury—were conspicuously missing.

 

The guard captain was under orders to form a cordon around the Wu Clan compound.