Chapter nine: the grandfathers secrets
1389 Words
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 like a human being. He’d died mysteriously three years ago, right after insisting I marry his granddaughter. Everyone had written it off as age. They all blamed it on the stroke that eventually killed him.
But I had always suspected something more.
And now, with Jiang’s warning echoing in my mind, I needed answers.
The mausoleum was quiet, built of dark granite with gold-accented calligraphy etched into its arches. The air inside was cold, like the tomb still breathed.
I knelt in front of the old man’s plaque, setting down the stick of sandalwood incense I lit with a single match.
“I think they killed you,” I murmured. “And if I’m right, they’ll come for her next.”
There was no response, of course. Just the whisper of wind against stone.
But I didn’t need a ghost to answer me.
I needed proof.
And I was going to find it.
****
Back at the Villa : Xue’er’s P.O.V
The envelope hadn’t moved since she tucked it in her desk drawer.
She hadn’t opened it. Hadn’t read the letter her mother gave her.
But the weight of it gnawed at her like a blade hidden in silk.
Zhang Meiling hadn’t asked her directly to spy on Li Tian again. Not after their argument. But her tone had shifted. Her smiles were tighter. Her suggestions sharper. Now everything came laced with implication.
“He’s not telling you everything.”
“Don’t you want to know the truth before he uses you?”
“Your grandfather never would have trusted someone like him blindly.”
But hadn’t he?
Hadn’t her grandfather insisted she marry Li Tian?
Hadn’t he said that the family’s future depended on it?
She opened her laptop and pulled up the article again the one now circulating internationally.
Li Tian, The Dragon King. Alleged founder of Dragon Holdings. Rumored to have survived a targeted assassination two years ago.
It didn’t sound real.
Yet, she had seen the evidence with her own eyes.
His money. His power. The way men bowed to him without understanding why. It made her blood chill and yet, it also stirred something warmer in her chest.
She didn’t love him. She wasn’t even sure if she liked him.
But she trusted him… more than she feared him.
****
The Zhang Family Archives
The Zhangs had a private archive in their old estate,it was filled with records dating back generations, sealed in humidity-controlled chambers and guarded more fiercely than their stocks. Deshun thought of them as relics. Meiling used them only when she needed to prove lineage during political campaigns.
But I knew better.
Guoyang had kept secrets here.
I bypassed the security lock with ease,he had given me his thumbprint access once, claiming it was a gesture of trust. I’d never used it.
Until now.
I passed rows of scrolls, books, ledgers, photos. A history of the Zhang legacy in gilded ink. But I wasn’t here for that.
I was looking for a small black file Guoyang once mentioned to me on a drunken night. He’d called it “the insurance policy.” Something he kept in case the family turned on itself… or if someone tried to steal what he built.
I found it in a floor hatch beneath the family altar—sealed in a lead case, fingerprint-locked, labeled only with one thing:
PROJECT TIGRIS
I broke it open and began to read.
Inside were surveillance logs, voice transcripts, and one flash drive. The recordings were from three years ago—only weeks before Guoyang’s death.
What I heard made the back of my neck ice over.
“You’re playing a dangerous game, Guoyang,” a man’s voice said on the tape.
“You think I care?” Guoyang replied, voice hoarse with age but steady. “I’m old. But my granddaughter,she deserves more than this circus you run.”
“Dragon Holdings is a threat to the global order. You’re protecting a man who should have stayed dead.”
“You mean Li Tian.”
Silence.
“You think I don’t know what you did in Marrakesh?” Guoyang said. “I was there. You sanctioned it. You tried to erase him.”
“Because he disobeyed orders.”
“No. Because he wouldn’t become your puppet.”
I sat there, fist clenched, teeth grinding.
They had threatened him.
They had warned him to stay away from me, to break the marriage, to keep the Zhang family out of what they called “the coming shift.”
And he had refused.
He’d died two weeks later.
The final entry in the file was a scanned page from his personal journal.
“If I die suddenly, it wasn’t age. Tell him to look for the ash tree near the koi pond. I left the rest there.”
****
The Ash Tree
It took me twenty minutes to dig.
The old tree near the pond had a hollow at its base, covered by moss and time. Inside was a rusted lockbox containing a thumb drive and a simple silver ring.
The ring bore an old crest,one I hadn’t seen in years.
Not since my first mentor in the Dragon Corps was killed.
It was a symbol of my origins. And proof that Guoyang had known about my past from the very beginning.
He hadn’t just accepted me.
He’d chosen me.
****
I returned to the villa late that night, exhausted but focused. Xue’er was waiting in the hallway.
“I went through his journals,” she said without preamble. “My grandfather’s.”
I paused.
“And?”
“He believed in you,” she whispered. “Long before I even knew what kind of man you were.”
I stepped closer.
“I told you he wasn’t wrong.”
She looked at me with something between awe and sorrow.
“My mother wants me to betray you.”
“I know.”
She blinked. “How?”
“Because everyone wants you to choose a side, Xue’er. But only one side is honest about what it costs.”
Her throat moved. “And what if I don’t choose?”
“Then the war will choose for you.”
I reached into my pocket and handed her the silver ring.
“He left this for you.”
She took it carefully, turning it in her palm, the moonlight catching the crest.
“What is it?”
“Your legacy,” I said. “And your weapon. Depending on how you use it.”
****
THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE LINE
In a room across the ocean, a dozen figures sat in darkness around a long digital conference table. The Circle.
“The Zhang girl is wavering,” one said.
“Then apply pressure.”
“Her husband won’t bend.”
“No,” said another. “But he has something he doesn’t know yet.”
The screen shifted.
A video began to play, it was grainy and filmed in a dark cell.
A figure chained to a chair, barely breathing.
A voice offscreen said:
“Li Tian... he still thinks his mentor died in Marrakesh. He doesn’t know we kept the body breathing.”
The Circle’s leader smiled coldly.
“Then it’s time we remind him what happens to kings who defy gods.”
- Writer
