"Ning Hanyue. For the sake of our years as husband and wife —
cooperate with me and offer up the child in your womb for sacrificial refinement, and I can grant you a comfortable death."
"..."
"Sister Ning, it's not as if there's any love between you and my darling husband anyway — why insist on birthing this child at all?
If we're being truthful, it's you, Sister Ning, who owes me.
My husband and I loved each other for years, yet because you existed, we loved and could not be together.
And now the Ning family has made enemies and been wiped out. Perhaps that is simple karma — and simply your fate, Sister Ning.
Besides, the child in your belly carries my husband's blood.
Naturally he has the right to decide whether it lives or dies. Doesn't he?"
"..."
"Li Su, this is your own flesh and blood... and you... you would refine her into a death-substitute puppet for that bastard child...
I will die before I let you use my daughter's life to complete that little bastard!"
"..."
Over more than half of Shengjing's sky,
that impossible-to-believe conversation played on loop.
One speaker: the Li Clan's radiant, upstanding Second Master.
The other: the famously virtuous Madam Qingwu.
And these two, of all people, had been caught doing the one thing that set every listener's blood boiling.
Ning Ruan stood on the Li Clan's roof.
Popping the occasional spirit-rich dried plum into her mouth.
She'd waited only moments.
When a roar of fury erupted from inside the Li estate:
"A Crimson Heaven Sect direct disciple?
My Li Clan has neither feud nor grievance with you — and you dare frame us like this?
Direct disciple or not, if you cannot answer for today, we will have our price out of you — even if it means taking this to the Crimson Heaven Sect itself!"
Ning Ruan had very nearly been amused into laughter by the sheer shamelessness of it.
She swallowed her dried plum.
Reached up to tighten the black casket's straps, and drawled her reply:
"Aren't you the ones broadcasting everywhere that I 'nearly murdered my father'?
What's this — you don't even know who I am?"
The bell-toned roar of fury cut off into sudden silence.
A moment later.
A middle-aged man in scholar's robes rose into the air.
Face cold and heavy, he faced Ning Ruan across the sky:
"You have already crippled my second brother and killed my sister-in-law. What more do you want?
Conjuring these forgeries to frame my second brother — do you mean to hound my entire Li Clan to its death?"
Behind him,
a dozen more figures rose one after another, glaring murder at Ning Ruan.
Below,
outside the Li Clan's main gate,
the Second Master of the Li Clan was wheeled out in a chair. At the sight of Ning Ruan's face, raw terror came first.
Hatred followed fast; on a face nearly wasted to the bone, the veins stood out stark:
"Wretched spawn! I should have taken your life before you ever left the womb!"
"Oh." Ning Ruan laughed lightly down at him:
"Missed your window. You can't even stand up now.
You know, I used to think letting you live was a waste.
Looking at you now, though... this works too."
For certain people, living-worse-than-death was a crueler sentence than dying.
And the eternally proud Second Master of the Li Clan was exactly such a person.
All Second Master Li could do was pound his fists on the armrests of the wheelchair. "Wretched spawn — you deserve death! You and that whore mother of yours BOTH deserve death!
Shameless slut, seducing a demonic cultivator — I should have killed her years earlier.
You're nothing but a feral stray! You and your mother both deserve to DIE!"
"Second Brother. Silence." The Li Clan Head, scholarly and refined-looking, frowned faintly — then turned back to Ning Ruan:
"You needn't goad my second brother.
Though he isn't wrong. It was your mother who took up with that demonic cultivator back then.
Bring all the doctored image-recording mirrors you like — what my second brother did not do, the Li Clan will never confess to."
Ning Ruan laughed softly:
"I didn't come today to relitigate the past with you people.
Whether the mirrors are genuine — there are experts enough to judge.
But this past week you've been manufacturing rumors about me everywhere, and that, I confess, has soured my mood.
So: I'm displeased. Now nobody gets to be pleased."
Ning Ruan had zero interest in a rhetoric contest with a pack of black-white-inverting fuckwits.
If a problem could be solved by explosives, don't use fists.
If it could be solved by fists, don't use words.
Ning Ruan smiled sweetly.
And in her hands appeared two fistfuls of jet-black spheres that the Second Master of the Li Clan knew — and feared — on sight: Thunderclap Bomb 2.0.
Li Su's eyes nearly split their sockets. "BROTHER! That's the thing that crippled me!"
The Li Clan Head froze, then retreated a full zhang, wariness flooding his face:
"Are you insane?
If you strike first today, then direct disciple of the Crimson Heaven Sect or not — this old man is done extending courtesy!"
"Oh. Then let's dispense with courtesy.
Fair warning: I'm a famously petty person. I keep every grudge.
Do bear with me!"
Ning Ruan's smile was radiant as morning.
She leapt back onto the Scarlet Feather Kite.
The Kite climbed sharply.
And Ning Ruan hurled both fistfuls of Thunderclap Bombs down without a flicker of hesitation.