Dragonblood Chaos Heir

Chapter 19: Scorched Earth, Written in Ash

The night air over Verdant Cloud City, usually carrying the scents of spices and sewage, now tasted of pine resin, charred wood, and panic. The glow from the Lin compound painted the lower clouds a sickly orange, a false, feverish dawn in the southwest. Bells clanged from the city watchtowers, not the measured tones of curfew, but the frantic, overlapping cacophony of disaster.

Lin Feng moved against the tide. While the wealthy from the auction fled toward their secured manors and the common folk peered from shutters, he was a shadow flowing toward the conflagration. He didn't run. He walked with purpose, the hood of his grey robes pulled up, his senses expanded to drink in the chaos.

The fire was not his work. But the opportunity it presented was a gift, wrapped in flames and delivered by an unknown hand. He would not waste it.

As he neared the clan district, the heat became a visible wall, and the crackle of burning timbers mixed with the shouts of guards and the desperate screams of servants. The Lin compound's outer walls were a chaotic scene. City guards in soot-stained leather tried to form bucket chains from the public wells, their efforts pathetic against the inferno consuming the heart of the complex. Deng clansmen stood in a wary, ordered cordon a block away, not helping, just ensuring the blaze didn't spread to their properties. Their faces were grim, but their eyes held a cold satisfaction.

And there, at the main gates, which stood strangely untouched by the flames licking the structures behind them, a crowd had gathered. Guards held torches high, illuminating the massive, iron-bound doors.

Scrawled across the dark wood, in foot-high characters that seemed etched from the blackest pitch and shimmered with a malevolent, heatless light, was a message. The substance wasn't paint; it was spiritual ash, a residue of pure annihilation that refused to burn and drank the torchlight. Lin Feng recognized his own handiwork—a concentrated application of the Gasp of the Withering Root, its devouring essence made manifest and permanent.

The message was simple. Brutal. A haiku of hatred:

THE MOUNTAIN WAS DUST.

THE HEIRLOOMS ARE ASHES.

THE DEBT IS NOT PAID.

It was signed not with a name, but with a symbol: a single, slitted, draconic eye, rendered in the same shimmering void-ash.

"By the heavens… it's the Ghost…" a guard whispered, his voice trembling.

"He's not in the woods…he's here!"

"Elder Tian! Has anyone seen the Elder?!"

At that moment, a side gate burst open. A group of Lin retainers, faces blackened, staggered out, supporting a figure between them. It was Elder Tian. But the man who emerged was a ruin of the poised tyrant. His fine robes were scorched, his hair was wild, and his eyes… his eyes held the same vacant, shattered horror they had in the clearing, now amplified by the literal burning of his stolen kingdom. He stared at the message on the gates, his lips moving soundlessly, repeating the last line: "The debt is not paid… the debt is not paid…"

Lin Tao was nowhere to be seen.

A Deng captain stepped forward, his voice cutting through the panic. "Elder Tian! The fire is centered on the ancestral hall and the main treasury. We've contained it from spreading. But the heart of your compound is gone."

Tian didn't seem to hear him. He was locked in his private nightmare. He was escorted somewhere "safe".

The Deng captain's mouth set in a hard line. He turned to his own men. "Double the cordon. No one in or out without my direct order. This is a crime scene now." His eyes flicked to the message. "And a message from a terrorist."

Terrorist. The word, official and damning, hung in the air. The "beast" story was dead, incinerated along with the Lin ancestral tablets. This was now a conflict between cultivators. A targeted, symbolic attack.

Lin Feng watched from the shadows, his mind working coldly. The fire was too convenient. Too destructive. His message was a statement, a branding. But the arson? That was someone else’s move. Someone who saw a wounded animal and decided to kick it while it was down. The Lei? Possibly. A faction within the Lin itself, making a play in the chaos? Also possible.

He needed to know. And there was one place in the burning compound where answers, or at least more valuable pieces, might still be found: the Patriarch's Study in the inner family wing. It was separate from the main hall and treasury. If the fire was targeted, it might be overlooked. His father’s private papers, the true clan records before Tian’s corruption… they might still be there.

While the attention was on Tian and the gates, Lin Feng melted away from the crowd. He circled the compound to the northeastern wall, a section that bordered a narrow, fetid canal. The fire’s roar was louder here, the heat intense. This section of the wall was lower, and the guards here had been pulled to the front.

He placed a hand on the sun-warmed stone. He didn't climb. He consumed.

A Chaos-Stealing Palm, focused not on life force, but on the mineral bonds of the mortar and the weakest points in the stone. A section of the wall, about three feet wide, silently crumbled into a pile of inert, grey sand. He stepped through the new gap into his former home.

Inside was a vision of hell. The inner courtyard was a lake of flame. The ancestral hall was a roaring flame, its centuries-old beams collapsing with groans that sounded like dying giants. The heat was a physical assault. But the family wing, built of more stone and separated by a wide courtyard, was only now starting to catch, embers drifting onto its tile roof.

Using the Nine Phantom Steps, Lin Feng became a blur of motion, darting across open spaces where the heat threatened to cook him alive, using collapsed structures as cover. The acrid smoke stung his eyes, but his chaotic qi circulated, filtering the worst of it. He moved on memory, the layout of his childhood home etched into his soul, now a map through an underworld.

He reached the door to his father’s study. It was charred at the edges, hot to the touch. He channeled a wisp of chaotic energy, its devouring nature negating the heat for an instant, and shoved it open.

The room was a time capsule of loss. His father’s large desk. The shelves of ledgers and scrolls. The portrait of his mother. All untouched by flame, but blanketed in a layer of fine, drifting ash that fell like black snow from the burning world outside.

Lin Feng went straight to the desk. He ignored the official ledgers, those would be lies Tian had crafted. He searched for the hidden compartment his father had shown him long ago, a secret meant for the clan heir. He found the trigger under the lip of the desk—a slight depression in the wood. A soft click, and a panel in the side slid open.

Inside was not gold or spirit stones. It was a small, ironwood box, its surface plain. He opened it.

On a bed of faded velvet lay three things:

First, A jade seal—the true Patriarch’s seal of the Lin Clan, carved with the mountain and sun. Tian must have used a forgery.

Second, A sheaf of letters, tied with a black ribbon. The handwriting on the top one was his mother’s—elegant, flowing, and utterly alien.

Third, A single, crystalline memory-sliver, pulsing with a soft, desperate light.

He took all three, stuffing them into his robe. He looked at the portrait of his mother. In the flickering, hellish light, her gentle smile seemed sorrowful, as if she had foreseen this night. He took the portrait too, rolling it carefully.

A sound from the doorway, a cough, the crunch of a boot on ash.

Lin Feng turned, his hand falling to Frost Desire’s hilt.

A figure stood silhouetted in the doorway, not a guard, but a servant—an old woman, her face lined with soot and decades of service. It was Nanny Ling, who had helped raise him after his mother died. Her eyes, wide with shock and recognition, met his.

For a long second, they stared at each other across the burning ruins of their shared past. The roar of the fire was the only sound.

“Young… Young Master Feng?” she whispered, her voice cracking.

Lin Feng said nothing. He simply looked at her, allowing her to see the changes, the cold fire in his eyes that was not a reflection of the flames outside.

Tears cut clean tracks through the soot on her cheeks. Not tears of fear. Tears of grief. “They said you were dead. They said you… did terrible things.”

“They lied,” Lin Feng said, his voice flat, the first words he’d spoken to anyone from his old life.

Nanny Ling’s eyes darted to the open compartment, the empty box. Understanding dawned. She nodded once, a sharp, decisive movement. “The west servant’s passage. Through the kitchens. It’s clear. The guards are all at the front.” She stepped aside, making room. “Go. Before they find you here.”

Lin Feng hesitated for only a heartbeat. Then he moved, swift and silent, past her. As he passed, she reached out and grabbed his arm with a strength that belied her age. Her voice was a fierce, desperate whisper.

“He’s not in the main house. Tian. When the fire started, he was in the undercroft. The old cellars beneath the treasury. He… he took things down there. After your father…”

Lin Feng’s eyes narrowed. The undercroft. A place of damp stone and old secrets. Where a desperate man might hide his most valuable treasures, or confront his ghosts.

He gave Nanny Ling one last, unreadable look, a nod of acknowledgment that was more than he’d given anyone in weeks. Then he was gone, a shadow slipping down the dark, smoky corridor toward the kitchens, leaving the old woman standing in the doorway of the burning study, watching the ghost of the boy she’d loved disappear into the fire-lit night.

He had what he came for. And now, he had a new destination.

The mountain was dust. The heirlooms were ashes.

But deep beneath the burning earth, the root of the debt still festered.

And the heir was coming to collect.