THE CHAOS SOVEREIGN

CHAPTER 4

The Spirit Stone blinked once, a dull, weak grey light, and then went dark.

"Hahaha! Look at him!" Wei Feng shouted "Where is your power? The stone didn't even react! He’s still a cripple!"

Elder Zhao sighed. "Always the same. Lu Chen, you are a waste in the Afure sect. Go back to the stables. You’re lucky we didn't kick you out today."

Lu Chen lowered his head, trying to make his shoulders slump as if he were sad. "Yes, Elder. I’m sorry."

Under his hair, his eyes were cold and sharp. He had hidden his power perfectly. No one knew he was now stronger than any of the disciples standing there.

A Hidden Conversation was going on somewhere.

Later that night, Lu Chen didn't go back to his bed. He moved through the shadows of the sect like a ghost. His new senses were so sharp he could hear the breathing of the guards from afar.

He crept toward the Elder’s Hall, a forbidden place for someone like him. He wanted to see if he could find more spirit stones to eat but he couldn't.

As he climbed the roof of the back of the hall, he heard voices coming out from the window. It was Elder Zhao and the High Elder, Elder Mo’s voice discussing.

"The boy is getting older," Elder Mo said.

"He’s still a trash disciple, High Elder,"

“No, I disagree with you. His roots are still broken. The seal on the jade pendant we gave him worked perfectly. He’ll never know who he is." Zhao replied

Lu Chen froze. He stopped moving. The jade... they gave it to me?

"Good," Elder Mo growled. "We did the High Heaven Emperors a great service sixteen years ago. If the world knew the Afure Cloud Sect led the massacre of the Lu Clan, the other sects would turn on against us. We had to kill his parents to stop the Chaos Power from rising."

Lu Chen’s stomach turned. He used power and pressed the edge of the roof so hard, the stone turned to dust in his hand.

These elders, they were murderers.

The people who had taken him in, out of mercy were the same people who had murdered his mother and father. They kept him here like a caged bird, making sure he stayed weak so he would never seek revenge.

"What about the boy? What are we going to do with him? Should we just finish him off?" Zhao asked.

"No," Mo replied. "As long as he is a crippled beggar, he is a trophy. A reminder of our victory. Besides, if he dies suspiciously, the Heavenly Dao might notice. Let him rot in the stables until he dies of old age."

Lu Chen backed away from the window, his heart was heavy. The humiliation he had felt his whole life was nothing compared to this. The very air of the sect now felt like poison.

He looked at his hands. He wasn't just a disciple anymore. He was the survivor of a war he didn't even know how the war was

Fought.

"You didn't keep me because you were kind," Lu Chen whispered into the dark. "You kept me because you were proud of what you did."

He looked at the Chaos Root in his soul. It was pulsing with a dark, hungry light. It didn't want to just eat energy anymore. It wanted to eat the Afure Cloud Sect.

"Eat," Lu Chen commanded his soul. "Eat until there is nothing left of them."

Lu Chen stood on the cold roof, filled with anger. The words of Elder Mo and Elder Zhao strike in his head like a harmer. The massacre of the Lu Clan. We had to kill his parents and use him as a toy.

The anger inside him wasn't hot; it was cold anger. It was a dark, quiet hunger that wanted to swallow the entire mountain of Afure Cloud sect.

"So," Lu Chen whispered, "The people I bowed to... the people who gave me 'mercy'... are the same people who turned my mother into a memory and my father into a ghost."

He simply let the Chaos Devouring Root spin faster.

Lu Chen didn't slip away into the night, he dropped from the roof and landed silently in the courtyard outside the Elder’s Hall. He walked to the heavy oak doors and pushed the doors open.

The two Elders stopped their discussions immediately. They looked up, and were stunned to see the trash disciple standing in their private sanctuary.

"Lu Chen?" Elder Zhao’s face twisted in immediate rage. "How dare you enter this hall! Guards! Drag this dog out here to the whipping post!"

The Guards were under the control of Lu Chen. No guards came up. Lu Chen had already felt their presence outside and, with a flick of his fingers, had sucked the breath out of their lungs as he walked past them. They were unconscious in the dirt.

"You talk about my parents as if they were trophies," Lu Chen said. His voice was not like a boy of seventeen years old.

Elder Mo, the High Elder, narrowed his eyes. He felt something shifting in the air. The room was getting darker. The candles were flickering, their light being pulled toward Lu Chen’s chest.

"You... you said, you heard us right?"

“Yes of course” Elder Mo stood up, his hand reaching for a glowing spirit-staff. "It doesn't matter. A cripple who knows too much is just a corpse that hasn't fallen yet."

"Try it, t..ry and see," Lu Chen said.

Elder Zhao quickly moved forward to meet Lu Chen. He was a Peak-Level Foundation Cultivator. His palm glowed with a bright blue light, a strike to shatter Lu Chen’s skull. "Die, you were a mistake!"

Lu Chen didn't move. He didn't even raise his hands to defend himself.

When Zhao’s palm hit Lu Chen’s chest, there was no sound of breaking bone. Instead, there was a sound like a vacuum in his palm.

‘kaakum’