Dragonblood Chaos Heir

Chapter 1: The Broken Engagement

The air in Verdant Cloud City tasted of roasted chestnuts, damp earth, and quiet desperation.

Lin Feng felt the weight of all three as he knelt in the central courtyard of the Lei Clan’s manor. The cold from the polished Obsidian Stone tiles seeped through the thin fabric of his disciple robes, a familiar chill that had nothing to do with the late autumn weather. Before him, seated on a raised platform like emperors of a tiny, cruel kingdom, were the people who were about to dismantle his life.

“The decision,” announced Lei Zong, Patriarch of the Lei Clan, his voice booming with a warmth reserved for public performances, “is not made lightly. It grieves this old one’s heart.”

Liar. The word was a hot coal in Lin Feng’s chest. He kept his head bowed, his eyes fixed on the complex carving of a coiling thunder python on the Patriarch’s boot. His own heart was a drum of silent, ragged thunder. Today was the day of the Broken Engagement Ceremony, a formal, humiliating ritual where his three-year engagement to Lei Meili would be publicly severed. The reason was an open secret: he was trash.

“Times change,” Lei Zong continued, addressing the small, select crowd of clan elders and promising juniors from both families. “The winds of fortune shift. What was once a bond of promise between two promising seedlings…” He paused, letting his gaze, heavy with false pity, fall upon Lin Feng’s kneeling form. “...must sometimes be pruned, for the greater health of both gardens.”

Lin Feng’s father, Lin Zhan, stood rigidly to his left. The master of the crumbling Lin Clan was a shadow of the fierce warrior he’d once been. A deep, soul-rotting poison, contracted on a mysterious expedition years ago, had sapped his cultivation from the peak of the Core Formation Realm down to a shaky, early Foundation Establishment. His knuckles were white where they gripped the ceremonial jade tablet of annulment. He had fought this. Oh, how he had fought. But a drowning man cannot fight the tide, and the Lin Clan was drowning in debt, in disgrace, and in the slow, unstoppable decline of its bloodline.

“We of the Lei Clan,” Lei Zong said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial tone that still carried across the silent courtyard, “are not without compassion. In recognition of Senior Lin Zhan’s past glories and our former alliance, we offer a atonement. A consolation.”

He gestured. A steward stepped forward, bearing a red-lacquered box. With a flourish, he opened it. Inside, resting on velvet, were ten glittering stones the size of pigeon eggs.

A collective, sharp intake of breath came from the Lin Clan side.

Spirit Stones. Low-grade, but genuine. A small fortune for a clan whose treasury echoed with emptiness. Enough to buy medicinal pills that might ease Lin Zhan’s pain for a year. Or to bribe a minor official for a favorable trade deal. It was a life raft thrown to a sinking ship, a life raft made of salt, knowing it would only prolong the agony.

“Ten Low-Grade Spirit Stones,” Lei Zong announced, as if bestowing a kingdom. “To heal the flaw. To soothe the wounded pride.”

It was the final, elegant insult. They weren’t just breaking the engagement; they were buying their way out of it, pricing Lin Feng’s worth, his future, his very dignity, at ten stones. The heat in Lin Feng’s chest spread, climbing his throat. He could feel the eyes of the Lei Clan’s young masters and mistresses upon him; a mixture of scorn, amusement, and detached curiosity, as if watching a strange insect pinned to a board.

And then, there were her eyes.

Lei Meili sat beside her father, a vision in robes of shimmering violet silk embroidered with silver lightning motifs. At sixteen, she had bloomed into a renowned beauty of Verdant Cloud City, her features delicate and cold as a jade carving. Her cultivation, bolstered by her clan’s resources, had reached the 7th Layer of Qi Condensation Realm. She was a rising star. And she looked at Lin Feng not with hatred, not even with contempt, but with a profound, chilling indifference. As if the boy she had once shared sweet cakes and childhood secrets with was now a stain on the scenery, soon to be wiped away.

“The engagement jade,” Lei Zong intoned, the ritual reaching its climax.

Lin Feng’s fingers trembled as he reached into his own threadbare robe. He pulled out a simple pendant on a leather cord. Half of a circular jade medallion, carved with the Lin Clan’s crest; a mountain peak against a rising sun. The jade was warm from his skin, a pathetic, living warmth against the cold ceremony. It pulsed faintly with the remnants of the blood-oath taken three years prior, a ghost of a promise.

Lei Meili stood. Her movements were fluid, elegant. She didn’t walk; she glided. From her own neck, she lifted the other half of the medallion, carved with the Lei Clan’s thunder python. Her jade was brighter, cooler, thrumming with her stronger qi.

Without a word, without a glance at Lin Feng, she extended her hand towards the steward, who held a silver dish.

The moment stretched. Lin Feng knew what was expected. He was to place his half on the dish. Together, they would be shattered, symbolizing the irreversible end.

But his body refused. His muscles were locked. The hot coal in his chest was now a fire, burning away the numbness, the years of accepted decline. He saw his father’s slumped shoulders. He saw the barely-hidden sneer on the face of Lei Kang, Lei Meili’s arrogant older brother, who stood at the 9th Layer of Qi Condensation. He saw the empty future stretching before him, a lifetime of whispers, of pity, of being “that crippled boy from the Lin Clan.”

“Feng’er,” his father whispered, the word ragged with pain and shame. “Let it go.”

That whisper, filled with a love that had been defeated by the world, broke something inside Lin Feng. Not his will, but his last vestige of passive acceptance.

He did not place the jade on the dish.

Instead, he slowly, deliberately, pulled the cord back over his head. He closed his fist around the warm half-medallion. Then he looked up. Not at Lei Zong. Not at the crowd. Directly at Lei Meili.

His eyes, usually downcast and shadowed, held a light she had not seen in years. Not since before the Spirit Awakening Ceremony that had shattered his dantian and revealed him as a martial waste.

“You want it broken?” Lin Feng’s voice was quiet, but it carried in the dead silence. It was hoarse from disuse, but it did not shake. “Then break it.”

He opened his palm. The jade lay there, the pale green stone against his calloused skin. He was giving her the choice, the action. He was forcing her to be the active destroyer.

A flicker of something, surprise, irritation, passed through Lei Meili’s jade-like eyes. The script was deviating. The quiet, broken boy was not following his lines. Her lips, painted a faint, fashionable pink, tightened almost invisibly.

“As you wish,” she said, her voice like wind chimes made of ice.

She took her own half-medallion between her thumb and forefinger. With a pulse of violet qi that crackled faintly in the air, she squeezed.

Crack.

The sound was small, final. The Lei Clan’s jade split into two clean pieces. The faint thrum of connection to Lin Feng’s half died instantly, leaving his pendant feeling like a cold, dead rock.

The ritual was complete. The bond was severed.

But Lin Feng still held his half. He looked at the broken pieces of hers on the silver dish, then back at his own intact jade. A strange, grim smile touched his lips, a smile that held no joy, only a bitter, boundless clarity.

“You broke your half,” he said, his voice still that unsettling calm. “Mine remains. The promise is gone, but the memory? The insult? That, I will keep.”

He tucked his half of the jade back inside his robe, against the skin over his heart. It was no longer a promise of union. It was a seal of humiliation, a reminder he swore he would never forget.

Lei Kang stepped forward, his handsome face dark with anger. “You insolent trash! You dare to twist the ritual? Hand over that jade so it may be ground to dust!”

Lin Feng finally rose to his feet. At sixteen, he was tall but lean, his frame hinting at a strength that his crippled meridians could never fulfill. He faced Lei Kang, the heir to the thriving Lei Clan, the genius of Verdant Cloud City.

“The ritual demanded both halves be broken,” Lin Feng stated, meeting Lei Kang’s furious gaze. “She broke hers. Mine is mine to do with as I please. Or does the mighty Lei Clan now demand to loot the personal belongings of their discarded trash?”

The insult was veiled, but it landed. Lei Kang’s qi flared, a visible aura of crackling violet energy that made the air smell of ozone. Pressure descended on the courtyard. Lin Feng’s knees buckled, but he locked them, grinding his teeth. He felt as if a mountain were on his shoulders. Blood threatened to seep from his gums. But he did not look away.

“Kang’er!” Lei Zong’s voice cut the tension, smooth as oil. “Control yourself. The boy is… distraught. Let him have his ornament. What is a broken piece of jade to us?” His smile was benevolent, but his eyes were chips of flint as he looked at Lin Feng. “Take your stones, Lin Zhan. See to your son. He seems… unwell.”

The dismissal was absolute, more crushing than any direct attack.

Lin Zhan’s body trembled with suppressed rage and impotence. He motioned to a clan servant, who stepped forward to take the box of spirit stones. The servant’s face was beet red with shame.

As the Lin Clan contingent turned to leave, a broken procession of defeat, a final, musical voice rang out.

“Lin Feng.”

It was Lei Meili. She had not moved from her platform. She looked down at him, her expression now one of detached analysis, as if studying a failed experiment.

“There is a saying,” she said, each word perfectly enunciated. “A dragon and a worm cannot share the same path. I am destined for the heavens. You are destined for the dirt beneath my feet. This… unpleasantness… was simply the universe correcting a mistake. Do not cling to it. It will only make your inevitable oblivion more painful.”

Her words were not shouted. They were not even particularly malicious. They were simply true, in the way that a law of nature is true. The sun rises. Fire burns. Trash belongs in the gutter.

Lin Feng stopped. He did not turn back to look at her. He stared at the grand, ironwood gates of the Lei Manor, gates that would never open for him again in welcome.

When he spoke, his voice was so low only those immediately around him could hear, but it carried a weight that seemed to warp the very air.

“Remember your words, Lei Meili,” he murmured. “Remember them when the worm you spurn today learns to swallow the heavens whole.”

Then, without another word, supporting his ailing father, Lin Feng walked out of the Lei Clan courtyard. He walked out of his past. He walked into a future that promised only darkness and decay.

But deep within his chest, against his skin, the broken half of the engagement jade felt suddenly, inexplicably, warm. Not with the remnants of a bond, but with a faint, phantom pulse, like the distant heartbeat of something ancient, something furious, and something that had just begun, for the first time in seventeen years, to awaken.