Three sword cultivators: one wounded, two crippled.
In full view of a watching crowd.
And yet not one person present had even glimpsed the culprit.
As for the hidden seniors who COULD have seen the culprit — they were far too entertained by the Crimson Heaven Sect's drama to spoil it.
Minding other people's business was not their hobby.
Ning Ruan, for her part, was thoroughly bewildered.
But looking down at Li Yu wailing herself hoarse, and the Li Clan glaring up through shock and fury, she found the fun had abruptly gone out of the game.
Her lip curled.
She flicked a single Thunderclap Bomb 2.0 down at Li Yu, almost as an afterthought.
The tear-streaked girl's hate-filled eyes flooded, in an instant, with terror.
She abandoned even her three unconscious senior brothers on the ground.
And bolted.
Apparently one develops instincts after enough bombings.
Li Yu dodged fast this time.
Only when she realized her senior brothers still lay in the dirt did she stop — but by then the black sphere was nearly upon them.
All she could do was scream through her tears:
"SENIOR BROTHERS!"
Ning Ruan clapped her hands together, tsk-tsking in delight:
"How moving.
Truly. I'm dying of emotion over here."
Unless her eyes deceived her, Li Yu was carrying at least five or six defensive artifacts today.
Had she chosen to stand and shield them —
she could have tanked one Thunderclap Bomb outright.
Her artifacts would merely have paid the bill.
In the end, though... the black sphere never touched the three luckless senior brothers on the ground.
A skin of pale light wrapped around it and lowered it, gently, to the earth.
In the same moment.
An aged sigh sounded in Ning Ruan's ear alone.
"Leave them a thread, child.
That one sphere of yours lands, and those two ruined-dantian boys likely die where they lie."
Ning Ruan blinked, glanced instinctively toward a corner of the Li Clan's rear courtyard, and mouthed her reply. "And what's that to me?
If they die, it's because your Li Clan would rather shield its artifacts than its people. Isn't it?"
Moral blackmail? Her?
Hilarious.
She didn't HAVE morals.
Besides — the three on the ground had come to kill her.
"...Child. You too were born of the Li Clan."
"I was not."
"As you like. You've every right to refuse the name. It is the Li Clan that failed you...
Which is why this old man bears you no grudge for today.
All of it is cause and consequence come home. Even if you took Li Su's life here and now, I would not raise a hand to stop you.
But the events of those years — the rest of the Li Clan knew nothing of them.
Even this old man learned the truth only after the fact.
Back then your mother detonated her own dantian and leapt from a cliff, and from that day vanished from the world. However I searched, there was not one thread to follow."
Ning Ruan smiled faintly and said nothing. By that point, her mother — through the strangest of accidents — had already stumbled into Longevity Village, carrying her.
Finding them would have required a miracle.
Longevity Village was called a village.
In truth it sat inside its own independent pocket of space.
To this day, her crowd of bargain dads still couldn't work out how a woman with a self-detonated dantian, on the verge of labor, had fallen into the village at all.
At her silence, the voice in the transmission sighed again:
"You hate the Li Clan. You hate Li Su. Should you hate even little Yu, that too is your right.
But the child is, in the end, innocent of it.
She was raised from the cradle as the whole clan's treasure, and never once knew you existed. To lose her mother overnight — of course she cannot bear it.
I will tell her the full truth of those years myself, and see that she never troubles you again. On those terms — could you spare her life?"
So the everyone's-darling script was REAL?
For the first time, genuine interest surfaced on Ning Ruan's face.
What little killing intent she'd held toward Li Yu had just been replaced by... other ideas.
...
One round of "peace talks" later —
the melon-munching crowd watched the little girl on the Scarlet Feather Kite — the one in a guaranteed death trap — hop down INTO the Li Clan estate, a lamb strolling into the tiger's den.
As for the black sphere that had been caught mid-fall, no great deduction was needed.
One of the Li Clan's Old Ancestors had moved. Obviously.
But what was THIS, now?
Forget fleeing — she was delivering herself to their door?
Ning Ruan couldn't have cared less what anyone thought.
She tightened the casket straps at her back, a few Thunderclap Bombs 2.0 still in hand, and swept a not-quite-smile across the ring of Li disciples itching to charge her with drawn swords:
"Want to hit me? Come on, then."
"What's wrong? You all want me dead — but nobody's stepping up?"
"Ohhh, I see. It's the Thunderclap Bombs, isn't it."
"Or maybe you're worried you'll end up like those three Suiyun Peak blockheads — beaten senseless without ever seeing how."
The Li disciples: ...
Could this person try being a PERSON?
Could she possibly be LESS brazen?
Ancestor, WHY have you still not put this devil down?!
The Li Clan Head's brow was knotted just as hard — until his ancestor's voice sounded beside his ear:
"Return to her every spirit artifact belonging to the Ning family.
Whatever was the Ning family's, she may take. All of it."
That part was for the Clan Head.
The final sentence was for every ear in the Li Clan:
"Li Su. You will kneel before Ning Hanyue's memorial tablet, kowtow — and repent what you did."