"That was completely expected, and I totally did not think that they would go through with anything like that," I said. The Fallout from the attack was going nuclear as in, the entirety of the emperor's court appeared to have turned out to take a look at the newest inner city gentrification project.

  I wanted to make a snide remark about them changing the housing code or code enforcement, but it felt wrong. My best guess was at a few dozen people had died in the attack. It had been unintentional and if I knew that I could absorb that blast, I would have taken the person and crushed them.

  I didn't know if I could have taken it though.

  "Based on a blast like that," the elder Kang said. "They had a pill furnace or they had an ability that somebody else tagged them with. That automatically happened. I'm guessing that it sucked in his entire life force as well as the three men around him to power that. Whoever it is that's doing. They really wanted you dead."

  The ashes from the explosion were still swirling above us. You'd think that the aftermath of an attack where I'd survived should be a place where I'd be calm and cool and collected.

  I might project that way on the outside on the inside. I was a raging River ready to smash through whoever was orchestrating this stunt. Clearly, they were running out of options and just lashing out in any way they could.

  "I don't think we can trust anyone here," Moon Lee said. "I don't even know if we could save the capital if we had to."

  "I think I know who's doing this," Xiran said. Her quiet voice filled the bubble of clean air inside of the formation space.

  We all turned to face her. She was kowtowing. "I'm pretty sure that this is my parents doing. This humble cultivator regrettably asks for your aid."

  "Your parents?" Lee said. "How certain are you?"

  "What do you have? A better explanation?" she said. "Nobody else except my parents could have orchestrated this. They're just trying to get back at me for betraying them. Or they're trying to get you."

  Cruelty knew no borders.

  The unjust had no end to their attempts to disrupt good society. These mother fuckers were going to pay dearly for this

  "Do you think that your parents are in the Capitol right now?" I asked.

  She mulled it over, then shook her head. "It's very unlikely but if they were here, they would be not at their primary residence but maybe at their home by the lake. There's a lake on the north side of the capital and... Okay, let's go there then."

  I was already moving when she pointed out a direction.

  I nearly manhandled the girl as we started walking that way. It was enough for the blue robes to get a message from fast. I dispatched my Spirit base to let them know that there was a cleanup that they were going to have to do and that if they wanted to talk to me, I would be heading northwards and they could follow the cat.

  I'm sure that Min would add her own spin to it.

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  “Are you sure you want to head that way,” Lee said, sneaking up to next to me.

  I gave her the blank look that let her know that I loved her, but I was definitely going to do something right then. My anxiety over being continually ambushed and having demonic cultivator’s stomp all my boundaries was at an all-time high.

  I might be an eleven in anxiety but I was a 10 as a handsome dude.

  Mood: dude where is my shirt?

  Rather than walking further towards the center of the Capitol, we made our way on a little bit of an outwards file spiral away from the calamity that had been fallen that one little block there. I'm sure that somebody was going to ask us to give a statement or something eventually, but the way things worked here was that the bureaucrats would send the blue robes to eventually figure it out. There was probably going to be somebody with a path that could see into the past and show what had happened. They would see us flying away right before a giant blast took out and leveled that whole block.

  To think that I had come here with good intentions, and they kept shitting on them.

  The next time the emperor asked me to show up. I probably wouldn't.

  “Hey, does anyone think it's weird that we got someone by the emperor here and our little interview ended up like this?” Egiya was trying to

  “My little Entourage. I'll look a bit sheepish at that. I mean it's a little bit suspicious, Egiya,” I said. “You would think that they wouldn't hand us off to someone… Junior.”

  “I mean he was Junior but that's kind of what I expect to them.”

  I said slowly. “Say that again.”

  “They sent a junior blue robe. Possible out here to direct us to this area. This was a deliberate ask.”

  My mind raced back to our interaction with the blue robes on our arrival. It was like they were expecting us. Even though we'd arrived on an airship and there was no cell phones or telephones that could cross from wester Jewel to here. They had expected us here or somebody at the airship Depot had tipped them off that we were showing up and perhaps that was enough for them to set up the ambush, but they would have had to set up a whole lot of shit in order to get us into this trap.

  “Guys, why don't we take a beat here and let's think about why they want us to do this. Why did they direct us here? And I know it was a situation where they were just trying to do the best they could with what they had. But we'd already ratted out their senior chain or their people that had infiltrated through the blue robes and they started going through people and testing them to be demonic cultivators or not. And I don't know that we could test these people down. They're dead but my sense is that they were not demonic cultivators they were just what ideological terrorists?”

  “Ideologic terrorists?” the elder kang said. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

  “People that believed in the cause even if they weren't members of the sect. Or maybe they just didn't like me for some reason. But that's a hell of a way to go if you're going to try to kill someone just because you don't like them.”

  “Cultivators kill for less,” Xiran said. “That is definitely a thing that happens.”

  “They've killed us for less reasons,” Xueyie said. “They killed my cousin for less at least. But now I'm thinking about if they're just that stupid?”

  “It's Occam's razor. You're thinking that they're this intelligent adversary when reality is that they're probably just the kind of mundane evil that just tries to deal with a problem by throwing resources at it. The resources in this case just so happen to be human lives that would have otherwise been not saved bah this.”

  “There was a place for us where we can live without this kind of problem,” Lee said. “I can tell her the attack had already taken a lot out of her. As the second most powerful person in our group, she had the problem that she needed to deal with keeping the group safe in places where I couldn't do it. Unfortunately for her, her path was a bit stranger than mine so I could really give her pointers as to how advance to build her own domain but she's saying to each other along so far.”

  I understood the frustration of the poor girl that had been kicked out by her parents to try and kill me or whoever they thought was a threat. She had thought that she was going to come back after her glorious Mission and be awarded something great. But she had gone to the wrong opera.

  It was more for us to love. She had gotten her found family in exactly the wrong way and now of course she was a part of my platoon of child soldiers. Life sometimes did not work the way that you wanted to work, and she was exactly the prime example of that.