Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 28: The Family Grieving (Patreon)

The old body sagged in the chair; the young one sprawled across the floor. Two Baos out cold, and one poor sod, me, still conscious.

This could easily come back to bite me.

Rushing to one of them felt like a natural reflex. The problem was which one.

I got to my feet, but froze for a second in indecision.

The old man showed no sign of life whatsoever. I listened as closely as early Stage Four allowed. I stared at his nose, his lips, his chest beneath the silk robe, trying to catch even the smallest movement, but there was none. Even that single drop of blood from his nostril refused to ooze any further.

If the old man really had kicked the bucket, I didn't want my fingerprints anywhere on his body. Not that a Stage Four needed to touch someone to kill them, I just didn't want to.

That helped me make up my mind.

Bao Liu was the safer option. I dropped to one knee beside her and gave her cheek a gentle tap. "Wake up, you've got an old man to poke."

I slapped her cheek harder, and her head wiggled like a bobblehead's. Bao Liu's eyelids twitched.

"Come on, come on," I muttered.

You need to be on your feet before anyone walks in. Though I hoped there were hidden cameras somewhere that would show I hadn't killed the old man.

Bao Liu groaned and reached for her head. At that exact moment, the door opened again with the same predatory hiss.

Two armoured figures burst into the room first.

"Get away from her!" one of them ordered, levelling the Bao family's signature vine-mace at me.

I obediently stepped back and spread my hands, showing I meant no harm. "Just trying to help."

The armoured pair positioned themselves between me and Bao Liu, and behind them three medics rushed past the girl still lying on the floor and went straight for the old man.

The medics surrounded the chair from every side, scanners all pointed at the body in unison, and I turned my attention back to the guards. If things went south, they'd be my real problem.

My interface showed neither of the armoured pair was a Bao. They were also Threes, and not even late-ones. Both were past fifty, so I let out a breath. Armour was a great equaliser. Under ideal conditions, it could level the field against higher cultivation, or even tip it in the wearer's favour, but this pair clearly came from the culls. Specifically, from the Black Lotus culls, judging by the wooden maces.

Elite fighters don't work as house security on Earth. Elite fighters stay close to Verdis and the other moons, where the chance of profit and progress sits right beside the risk of losing everything. It's exactly that risk that keeps them sharp.

Besides, I had my armour with me, in my pocket, and I could put it on…

Not in one smooth motion, though. Not with this damned suit, I'd have to take it off first. That would make quite a sight, and would definitely startle the guards.

Better save that for a last resort. Nothing irreversible had happened yet.

One of the medics tore open the old man's silk robe, exposing a sunken chest with three grey hairs on it, and slapped a flat device, like a thickened coin, onto his skin.

"Asystole," the medic called to a colleague. "Starting stimulation."

The old man's body jerked in the chair from the shock, and his arm slid limply off the armrest and hung down.

The second medic, meanwhile, opened some kind of case and began quickly attaching thin tubes with needles to the old man's neck, where the major vessels ran beneath the skin. "Stimulants going in," he reported.

The third medic raised a hand holding some sort of disc above the old man's head, and I saw golden qi pour from it. The shade was similar to the Palm Qi, but nowhere near as nauseating, as far as I could feel at this distance.

Another jolt followed, and the body jerked again. Thirty seconds of silence…

"No activity," the first medic said.

All three exchanged glances, as though deciding whether it was worth trying again.

Knowing the Bao family, I figured they'd want the medics to keep going until the old man was thoroughly fried, just so no relative could later claim they hadn't done everything possible.

But the medics decided otherwise.

The second one began withdrawing the needles from the neck, and the third pulled the artefact away.

"Time of death," the first one said, "twenty-one thirty-four."

Shit. This wasn't going to end well for me.

I glanced over at Bao Liu, who had finally sat up on the floor, still clutching her head. For one brief moment, before she could hide it, relief flickered across her face.

Well, if that had been my own great-grandfather, I doubt I'd have mourned him much either. But I was an outsider who'd just been sitting alone with the old man in his final minutes of life. Pretty much the perfect scapegoat.

No. I wanted nothing to do with this shit.

"Well then," I said quietly, "looks like this meeting's over. Bao Liu, walk me to the flyer. With all due respect, I'd rather stay well away from your family drama."

The armoured pair exchanged glances, weighing whether to let me go. They couldn't detain me by force, and they probably knew it. But if it came down to force, that would look very suspicious. They knew that too.

"Would you be willing to stay until one of the family's senior members arrives? You were alone with the old master when he died."

"Bao Liu and I were together," I corrected the guard, though I had nothing else to object with.

Damn it. I'd have to meet with them one way or another.

I sighed, agreed, and offered: "Let's at least step outside for some fresh air, or something."

They didn't refuse me that small request. The same two guards accompanied me, though they led me not to the flyers but to a balcony on the same building, several floors up. The mountain air hit me cold and sharp, much colder than when I'd first arrived, but the view here was grander even than the one from Novak's window on Verdis.

The sun had almost set. The last red glimmers still clung to the jagged horizon and the peaks, while down in the gorges, solid darkness already reigned. Somewhere in the distance, the first electric lights of settlements and individual estates flickered on. The Baos weren't the only ones with elite real estate in these mountains.

The cold cleared my head a little.

This situation clearly wasn't a simple one. In medieval times, it could easily have ended in a massacre among the heirs. Good thing the Middle Ages were over. Bad thing the Baos mostly behaved as if they hadn't heard.

They shouldn't try anything against me because of Novak, but in a situation this tense, anything could happen. Novak probably would be occupied just like last time, with the probe.

Someone might do something stupid, and there was no real measure I could take to prevent it.

What could I actually do?

All my allies were up in orbit. A regular call wouldn't reach Verdis. That required a null-communication system, and an estate of this calibre should have had one.

I turned to the nearest guard.

"Do you have a null-comm station? I need to inform my master about what's happened."

He didn't even hesitate, as though he already understood I'd insist.

"Not without the senior family members' permission."

"Do you know ‘who’ my master is?" I asked him pointedly.

Judging by the way the armoured pair exchanged glances, they did. I didn't even need to see their faces under the helmets. And yet the First Six were somewhere far away, while the senior Baos were already inbound. Literally. I could see a flyer approaching.

I opened my contacts list in the interface. Bao, Zola, Rene, Johansson, Kate, and the rest of Novak's disciples were all off-planet. Only the trio of old friends from first year were here. And I doubted they had the kind of connections that could pull me out of this situation.

The closest to where I was should have been Nur.

I selected her contact. It began ringing.

"You're on Earth?" her voice greeted me cheerfully.

"Yeah, but I'm having a bit of a bad time and situation," I said, ignoring the guards exchanging glances again. They'd realised I wasn't talking to them, but didn't dare tell me to stop. "I was meeting with Bao Feng's great-grandfather, and he died."

"Died how?" Nur blurted out. "Did you—" she started.

"Of course not!" I cut in. "Get this to Bao Feng urgently. And to Novak, if you can. I'll cover the null-comm later."

"Wow," Nur said. "I've missed you a bit, but I definitely haven't missed this."

The first flyer landed, and I could already see another on the horizon. The Bao family was gathering.

The first to arrive was a tall woman, looking about thirty, in an impeccably tailored black trouser suit that hugged her figure as well as a standard jumpsuit and could fit under armour with ease.

She came out onto the balcony to meet me, flanked by two more armoured guards.

"What did you talk about with the old man?" she asked without preamble, then tossed over her shoulder, offhand, "Brew us some Mountain Wind."

My interface identified her as Bao Xue, the family's chief prick. She was more than a hundred years over thirty.

"He wanted to know more about Bao Feng," I said.

"Did he learn anything?"

"Does it matter?" I asked. "He clearly didn't have time to change his will during our conversation."

While the tea was being brewed, the woman who should have been the worst of the lot questioned me about my version of events with surprising civility. During that time, Bao Hai, Bao Feng's father, joined us. He and Feng practically shared a face, though he was thinner and looked older. Older than Feng, but also older than Xue despite being eighty years younger.

Like Xue, he knew who I was and what I was doing there. A cold spark of hostility passed between the two of them at once, but things got far worse when three more senior Baos arrived: two men and a woman, one after another. All of them were Fours, but none of the newcomers knew who I was or what I was doing there. They were all intensely interested in my conversation with the old man. The moment it came out that it had been about Bao Feng, every look pierced his father.

The fact that news of the demon's attack had triggered the old man's death didn't interest them in the slightest. From that, they just went back to the family business.

At one point, the woman, Bao Ke, asked outright how much Bao Hai had paid me to kill the old man.

I didn't even bother denying it, I started speaking the language the Baos actually understood: the language of strength and nerve.

"I take it this one's your dumbest?" I asked the rest, rudely pointing a finger at the woman.

"Are you tired of living?" she asked, outraged. "One word from me and you'll be ground to dust!"

"By whom?" I asked, pointing my fingers at the armoured guards. "These? They know exactly who I am, and they're not about to start anything."

Bao Ke glanced uncertainly at the rest of her relatives.

"Who is this little shit, anyway?" she asked. "He's not from any of the great families."

Bao Xue rolled her eyes. "You'd know that if you took even the slightest interest in anything beyond your glamorous socialising. He's the First Six's disciple."

That was mentioned at exactly the right moment. Bao Ke looked at me with new eyes, and I decided it was time to start throwing my weight around.

"Speaking of which," I said. "About anything beyond your family drama. Doesn't the attack itself bother any of you?"

"It was repelled," Bao Xue said with a shrug.

"I see," I said, and turned pointedly to Bao Hai. "You can carry on without me. I'm heading back to Verdis. I'm hoping Bao Song can drop me at the portal station and I won't have to fly there on a board?"