SON OF THE MANOR

CH6

The heavy iron doors of the central banquet hall swung open with a booming echo. Long Jingchen and his sister weren't thrown into a dark dungeon cell. Instead, the guards ruthlessly shoved them straight onto the polished floor of the grand pavilion. Brilliant crystal chandeliers hung from the high ceilings, casting a warm glow over hundreds of wealthy nobles dressed in fine silk robes.

The Millennium Celebration had shifted into a highly restrictive, private feast for the absolute rulers of the realm. The corrupt patriarchs, high-ranking elders, and leaders of the Three Sovereign Houses sat in full regalia around the massive tables. At the head of the center table sat the ruthless Chu Grandfather, his cold eyes scanning the room alongside the patriarchs of the other two allied lineages.

Tianyou’s father stood behind the old man, a cold sweat breaking out across his neck as he desperately forced a proud smile onto his face. He had spent the entire morning pulling massive political strings to secure his son's promotion as the Future Palace Master before anyone noticed a problem. If the other two houses discovered that Tianyou’s gold core had completely siphoned away into a hollow void, they would strip the Chu family of their leadership instantly.

"Bring the trash forward!" Chu Tianyou shouted, stepping down from the raised platform with a look of pure, toxic arrogance on his face. He looked at Jingchen, who was kneeling in the dirt, pretending to tremble under the heavy spirit pressure of the room. "The Future Palace Master needs a fitting centerpiece for his celebratory banquet tonight."

Tianyou gestured to two massive guards, who dragged a five-hundred-pound slab of solid white marble into the center of the floorboards. "Since you like crawling so much, you can serve as my personal table today, slave. Get down on all fours and support the weight of your betters."

Jingchen didn't offer a single word of defiance, slowly dropping his palms to the floor and arching his back as the guards slammed the heavy stone slab onto his spine. The sudden, immense pressure made the floorboards groan beneath his knees, but his inner Primordial Chaos foundation easily absorbed the physical stress. He slouched his shoulders, deliberately mimicking the pathetic posture of a broken commoner.

"Look at him!" Julian, an elder from an allied house, laughed loudly, tossing a piece of boiling, greasy pork directly onto the back of Jingchen's exposed neck. The hot fluid seared against his skin, but Jingchen didn't even flinch, keeping his eyes fixed entirely on the floorboards. "The proud Long clan heirs have finally found their proper place in the dirt!"

"To make sure our table doesn't move, let’s add a little leverage," Tianyou sneered, giving a sharp nod to his personal guards. One of the brutes lunged forward, grabbing the seemingly frail Xiaoxiao by her hair and yanking her head back, pressing a cold, jagged steel blade directly against her throat.

"If your brother moves even a single millimeter, I will slice your windpipe open right here, little freak," the guard hissed, tightening his grip on her hair. Xiaoxiao let out a sharp whimper, her tiny hands trembling as she looked at the blade, her inner body perfectly healthy but her face acting completely terrified.

"Your parents were the exact same kind of naive, stupid fools," the old Chu Grandfather said, letting out a dry chuckle as he sipped his wine. "Six years ago, they thought they could rule this palace through kindness and honor. We slaughtered them like dogs in their own courtyard, and no one even remembered their names the next morning."

The entire hall erupted into a roar of cruel, mocking laughter, the wealthy nobles clinking their crystal glasses together as they celebrated the memory of the massacre. Jingchen handled the agonizing weight and the vile insults with an absolute, terrifying calmness that ran deep into his bones. He knew this entire display wasn't just a random act of cruelty; it was a highly calculated test.

The suspicious Chu Grandfather was using this humiliation to see if the "trash" slave possessed any hidden magic or connection to Tianyou's sudden ruin. Jingchen completely suppressed his god-like aura, masking his internal cosmic rivers so deeply that even the high-tier detection arrays registered him as a dying worm. He allowed them to believe they had completely broken his spirit.

"Let go of my brother! You are all wicked thieves!" Xiaoxiao suddenly screamed, her voice cracking with a childish, desperate anger as she tried to kick the guard's shin. She bit the guard’s hand, her face twisting in an emotional, frantic outburst that made the surrounding elders laugh even harder.

"Look at the little brat snapping her teeth," Julian mocked, completely dismissing her reaction as the harmless, pathetic whining of a dying animal. They didn't take her seriously, which was exactly what Jingchen wanted. He took a slow breath, his mind completely detached from the noise as his golden perception expanded across the room.

While pinned beneath the marble slab, Jingchen’s mind was locked onto a single, strategic objective: he had to locate the secret layout map of the Sovereign Vault. He scanned the souls of every high-tier patriarch in the room, tracing the flows of hidden spiritual energy until his perception locked onto the robes of the Chu Grandfather. The map was sealed inside the old man's spatial ring.

"A toast to the eternal dominance of the Chu Family!" Tianyou's father declared, standing up at the head of the table to draw everyone’s attention back to the political theater. He reached into his robe and pulled out the high-grade King-Grade pill they had received from Master Shen's furnace earlier that morning.

He proudly dropped the golden medicine directly into a steaming cup of ageless Gem Tea—a brew that had been processed using the Phoenix Nectar mined from Xiaoxiao's bloodline. The golden pill dissolved with a sweet, heavy aroma that filled the entire pavilion, making the greedy elders lean forward in absolute envy.

"With this divine medicine and the destiny of the peaks, my son will lead us into an age of absolute power!" the patriarch shouted, raising the cup to his lips.

At that exact second, Jingchen let out a pathetic, loud groan, deliberately allowing his left shoulder to collapse under the five-hundred-pound marble slab. The massive stone table tilted violently, crashing onto the polished floor with a deafening shatter that sent the expensive dishes, hot meat, and wine vessels flying in every direction.

"You worthless trash!" Chu Tianyou roared, his face twisting in an absolute, public humiliation as the greasy food splattered across his pristine robes. He raised his right hand, a heavy current of explosive earth qi flaring around his fist as he prepared to execute Jingchen for ruining the feast. "I'll smash your skull into powder right now!"

But before his fist could move a single inch, Jingchen reached deep into his consciousness, triggering the hidden Karmic Backfire Trap he had embedded inside the King-Grade pill.

The Chu Patriarch, who had just swallowed the tea, violently stiffened in his seat, his eyes widening to the brink of bursting as his mouth opened in a silent scream. The siphoned, volatile energy inside the pill didn't stabilize his core; it turned into a raging torrent of dark lightning that began to tear his inner meridians to shreds from the inside out.

"Ahhh... my core! My soul-core is exploding!" the Patriarch shrieked, his hands clawing desperately at his throat as a massive fountain of thick, black blood erupted from his lips. The dark blood splattered across the golden tablecloth, his siphoned power rampaging wildly through his limbs, shattering the chair beneath him.

The entire grand banquet plunged into a state of total, terrified chaos within a fraction of a second. Women screamed, chairs scraped back violently, and high-ranking elders scrambled over each other to drag the convulsing, bleeding Patriarch away from the center table.

"It’s a jinx! The trash janitor brought a curse into this house!" Julian yelled, backing away from the black blood in a panic, completely blind to the fact that the rightful prince had just delivered a surgical strike. "The slave is a walking omen of death! His bad luck has contaminated the holy medicine!"

"Get the high doctors! The Patriarch’s cultivation is collapsing!" the Chu Grandfather roared, his face pale with a sudden, deep terror as he tried to stabilize his son's body with his own mana, completely forgetting about the slave on the floor.

Chu Tianyou stood in the middle of the ruins, his body shaking with a murderous rage as he looked at the black blood staining his celebration. He looked down at Jingchen, who was lying in the mud, holding his head and crying fake tears of terror to maintain his pathetic disguise.

"Drag him away!" Tianyou hissed to his personal guards, his voice shaking with an embarrassment that went deeper than his bones. "Throw him into the back cages. Tonight... I will skin him alive myself and erase his entire existence from this mountain."

The guards grabbed Jingchen by his clothes, dragging his limp body out of the chaotic, screaming hall, while Xiaoxiao was kicked into the transport cage right behind him. The doors slammed shut, but through the dark slits of the wooden carriage, Jingchen's face returned to a calm, terrifying stillness.

The trap had been sprung, the leaders were bleeding, and he now knew exactly who held the key to his parents' prison.