2025-08-04 15:00:24
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Chapter Thirteen: The Betrayer Among Us
Some betrayals come from your enemies. The worst come from those who once stood beside you in fire,Swore loyalty in blood, And waited years to slide the knife in. I built this war with ghosts. But one of them had already died inside me. **** At the Eastern Ridge The snow hadn’t reached the mountain yet, but the wind came cold and sharp like knives cut from memory. We stepped off the train of the Dragon’s Spine beneath a steel hatch, concealed beneath an overhang of boulders and moss. From the outside, it looked like a forgotten military station. Inside, it was something else entirely. A war room. A sanctuary. A tomb. “Is this one of your old bases?” Xue’er asked, pulling her coat tighter. I nodded, leading her past armored doors and motion-triggered lanterns. “Project Solstice used it during winter campaigns. We used to run satellite disruption and smuggling intercepts out of here.” “How long since you’ve been back?” “Not since the night I burned our records.” We pass
Chapter Twelve: Beneath the Ashes, a Spark
Some wars are won with bullets while others are won with silence and the people you buried before anyone knew their names. That was the war I had prepared for. **** Northern Jincheng in an Abandoned Industrial Sector The old textile plant hadn’t operated in over two decades. Broken windows gaped like empty eye sockets. Rusted conveyor belts sat buried under dust and poison ivy. But beneath its hollow bones was something else. A bunker. Built by my hand. Funded with money that had never seen a bank. Coded with biometric locks that only five people on earth could open. Two of them were dead. One had betrayed me. The last stood beside me now, Zhang Xue’er, no longer just a heiress, no longer a pawn. But a witness to everything. **** We entered through a false wall of crates, descending a spiral staircase carved into concrete. The deeper we went, the more the city faded. The noise. The fear. The name they’d plastered across the news like a curse. Here, I wasn’t “Li Tian” or
Chapter Eleven: Ghosts Beneath the Steel
The world didn't need truth. It needed spectacle. So when the news broke,when every major network flashed Li Tian's face across a dozen time zones with the word "fugitive" beneath it,the world didn’t ask why. They asked how long he’d been hiding it. And that’s exactly how the Circle wanted it. They didn’t just want to destroy me. They wanted to rewrite who I was. **** 6:00 AM : Jincheng Central News Network The anchor wore an expression too calm for the words she was reading. “Breaking this morning: Jincheng’s newest billionaire, Li Tian, founder of Dragon Holdings, is now under international investigation for alleged involvement in global arms trafficking and illicit asset laundering. Sources suggest his rise may be linked to off-grid military operations in North Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe…” They rolled the clips: stockpiled crates, black-market weapons, edited footage of foreign ports. Most of it fake. All of it convincing. Then came the final blow: “Aut
Chapter Ten: The King Steps Into the Light
I had spent the last five years building an empire behind the curtain, letting my enemies believe I had died in Marrakesh. Letting the world forget the name that once sent governments into negotiation rooms and corporate giants into panic. But now, it was time to return to the board and flip it over Power isn’t always taken in secret. Sometimes, the most devastating blow is dealt under the sun, while the world watches,too stunned to act, too afraid to breathe. That was the purpose of my announcement. The Circle had made their first open move. Now, I would make mine. **** Sky Eagle Tower : 11:00 AM The skyline of Jincheng was a grid of glass, steel, and silent ambition. And at its center stood Sky Eagle Tower,taller than all the rest, home to the corporate front of Dragon Holdings. It was there, in the thirty-ninth floor conference room overlooking the city, that I prepared for the press conference that would change the course of the region’s power structure. Duan Yu stood be
Chapter Nine: The Grandfather’s Secrets
There are three ways to start a war. The first is loud,public, violent, and unavoidable. The second is quiet,through finance, blackmail, and silent allegiances. The third is personal,something buried so deep, the victim doesn't even know it’s already begun. That’s the one they chose for me. The morning air was sharp when I left the villa. I hadn’t slept. Not because of insomnia, but because I could feel something shifting in the soil beneath my feet. The meeting with Jiang Mu had confirmed it: the Circle wasn’t simply targeting me,they were preparing to erase everything I had touched. My network. My name. Even the few people who still mattered. And if they couldn’t break me directly, they would reach for those closest. Zhang Xue’er was a prime target. That terrified me more than I thought it would. **** At the Zhang Family Memorial Estate I didn’t expect to visit his grave again so soon. Zhang Guoyang—Xue’er’s grandfather. The one man in this family who ever treated me li
Chapter Eight: The Poison Within the Bloom
For the first time in years, the Zhang family household was quiet. Usually they had one guest or the other but today it was different.The villa was not peaceful, it was never peaceful. Just quiet, like a ballroom after a masquerade, with torn silk masks and half-drunk glasses littering the corners. That silence before the real mess reveals itself. And in that quiet, I could feel the weight of every eye watching me.Meiling, Deshun, even the house staff,none of them could look me in the eye without some cocktail of fear, confusion, and desperation in their gaze. The charity auction had turned their reality upside down. The rumors spreading through Jincheng’s elite class had done the rest.They no longer knew what kind of man lived under their roof.But Zhang Xue’er was different.She hadn’t run. She hadn’t pretended. In fact, she watched me even more closely now,not with contempt or suspicion, but with the same intensity as someone realizing they had mistaken a lion for a housecat… an
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