Untitled Episode
1691 Words
The Shen Aerie, once a sanctum of dynastic power, now resembled the antechamber of hell. Harsh crystal chandelier light warped the air, illuminating the claret-dark gore splattered across the onyx conference table—a tableau of congealed lava reeking of ferrous decay. The portable vital monitor’s shrieking alarm pierced eardrums like frozen needles; its convulsive ECG line and plummeting crimson digits were death’s own sigil etched upon glass.
“Father—!”
“Hold on, Patriarch!!!”
“Medics! WHERE ARE THEY?!”
“Oxygen! NOW!”
Terror shrieked. Feet scrambled. Glass shattered. Metal gurneys shrieked against marble. The Shen elite—paragons of icy control—unraveled: faces waxen, limbs collapsed; potted ferns overturned by panicked collisions. Shen Yaoyang’s handsome visage, spattered with his father’s arterial spray, twisted into a gargoyle mask of horror and incandescent rage, eyes locked on the monitor’s screaming display amidst the gore.
Amidst the apocalyptic chaos—
Shen Yuehan alone defied oblivion.
Blood-streaked, skeletal, sunk into the ebony throne, the patriarch summoned preternatural will. Medics pinned his thrashing limbs. Nurses clamped an oxygen mask over his blood-flecked mouth—instantly stained burgundy. Yet his right hand—a skeletal claw veined in crimson—scrabbled with necrotic strength across the slick table! Nails screeched against blood-thinned water, a sound to set teeth on edge!
His rheumy eyes, nearly rolled back, blazed with unnatural incandescence—a death-fuelled inferno. That gaze pierced blood-mist and frantic bodies, spearing—
The shattered remnants of Shen Qianqian’s blood-drenched phone!
Beneath its cracked screen protector!
Through gore-smeared fractures!
The card corner that had triggered his mortal dread—that light-devouring matte black, those eldritch dark-gold iridescent tracings—persisted! A spectral ember radiating glacial luminescence through plasma and ruin!
*Hhhh-CCCKKK!—*
Shen Yuehan’s throat convulsed—a death rattle like tearing leather! The mask rattled violently! His pupils, reflecting that baleful gleam, flooded with soul-crushing terror and tsunami regret!
That light!
That abyssal stillness!
That unearthly chromatic shift—no earthly alloy could mimic!
Those core-glyphs—beyond military-grade replication—stellar wills made manifest!
Fragments detonated in his dying mind—reassembling into a symbol sealed in Shen █████-level archives! His body jolted as if electrocuted!
Not counterfeit!
That was…
That was the sigil capable of grinding Shen’s century-old dynasty to dust!
The ultimate sequence—unnameable to mortal tongues!
*SPLURT!—*
Another torrent of clotted black blood, flecked with tissue, erupted! Drenching the fresh oxygen tube!
“Father!” Shen Yaoyang lunged, hand outstretched.
“BA̴C̸K̴—̶!̷” Shen Yuehan’s death-rattle rasp shredded the air! He batted his son’s bloodied hand aside with shocking force! Bloodshot eyes, blazing with ancestral-betrayal fury, impaled Shen Yaoyang blocking Qin Hao! Hatred deeper than violated graves!
As medics fumbled for cardiac stimulants—
“Sufficient clamor?”
A voice—low, level, utterly devoid of inflection—cut through screams, alarms, chaos. Like arctic wind over glacial millennia.
*SNAP!—*
All motion ceased.
Every frantic, terrified eye swivelled.
Under the Aerie’s glacial chandelier light—
Qin Hao.
He remained seated in the farthest, forgotten corner—a mote of dust on a hard wooden chair. His stained jacket, flecked with fresh blood-spatter, looked shabbier than ever.
Yet he sat.
Unchanged.
He had merely lifted his eyelids—a motion barely perceptible.
But—
The air within his immediate radius plunged into liquid nitrogen stillness. Chaos, blood-reek, shrieking alarms—all severed by an invisible, mountain-thick barrier.
Space congealed. Sound annihilated.
Time flowed millennia around him while outside, a vacuum of silence reigned.
His gaze bypassed the gore-splattered table, the raving patriarch. It slid over Shen Yaoyang’s frozen fury like a stone. Finally, those abyssal eyes lifted, settling on Shen Yuehan—propped up by medics, chest heaving, face blood-masked, eyes wide with shock.
“Life,” Qin Hao stated, voice soft yet each syllable an ice-pick to the heart, “tethered. Rules. Established.” His tone brooked no argument—a decree. Slowly, he raised his right hand towards his chest. A motion of unnerving casualness.
“Scoundrel! What now?!” Shen Yaoyang roared, face twitching, a cornered beast. But his body remained frozen by that earlier, paralyzing aura!
Qin Hao ignored him. From the worn jacket’s inner pocket, he withdrew—
A thread-bound tome. Edges curled and sallow. Cover worn featureless, perhaps coarse, oil-stained hide?
Three archaic characters—chiseled as if by primordial axes—radiated palpable menace even through decay:
*《JI YANG CLASSIC》*
*THUD.*
He placed the decrepit volume on his knee. The sound echoed dully. Calloused fingers pinched a page edge, poised to read—amidst the c*****e.
Silence.
Absolute.
The Aerie plunged into mute shock.
Shen Yaoyang’s snarl died in his throat. Shen Qingxue’s glacial storm froze mid-tempest. Every Shen mouth gaped in petrified stupor. Even Shen Yuehan’s death-rattle breath hitched. All eyes speared that ragged book on Qin Hao’s knee!
What?! Rubbish?! In the Shen sanctum! Amidst patriarch’s death-throes, blood, and screaming alarms—he produces… a book?! And reads?!
Astonishment! Absurdity! A surrealist nightmare!
A deeper chill gripped them: the moment the book touched his knee, the monitor’s shrieking alarm dropped an octave—still crimson, still flashing, but throttled! A roaring beast suddenly muzzled!
Shen Qingxue’s nails gouged her palms. Her father’s blood on her hand burned like a brand. Witnessing this grotesque, terrifying farce—the “backwoods refuse” she’d publicly humiliated, now radiating unfathomable calm amidst Shen ruin, producing a book—her pride felt crushed by an invisible fist. Humiliation and icy fury flooded her, freezing her gaze into lethal tundra.
She shoved aside a consoling relative. Stiletto heels struck marble like ice picks. Step. Step. Step. She halted before Shen Qingwu—slumped, pallid, blind eyes wide towards the medical clamor.
Shen Qingxue bent low. Her sculpted face, a mask of glacial fury, breathed soul-freezing malice. Contempt, sharp as honed steel, stabbed her blind sister.
Her hand flashed—not a slap, but razor-tipped nails aimed with vicious precision at Qingwu’s temple bruise—reopened in the chaos, weeping fresh blood.
Icy nail met inflamed wound! Qingwu gasped, body flinching violently!
“Vermin!”
Shen Qingxue’s voice—venom-tipped icicles—pierced Qingwu’s ears, each syllable ringing in the silent hall, a sovereign’s decree:
“Cease your pathetic theatrics! A moldering book? Cheap mysticism?” Her lips curved in arctic mockery, eyes twin abyssal voids fixed on Qingwu’s sightless face. “Hear my edict, Qin Hao—!”
Her voice ascended—a thunderbolt from celestial courts:
“You—backwoods filth! Unworthy even of scrap!”
“Never presume to ascend by clinging to Shen coattails! Not an inch!”
“Never lay a finger on my sister!”
“Mark this—Shen Qingwu! Blind she may be! Foolish she may be! Bound to refuse like you! Her fate! Her body! Every drop of her blood—bears the Shen brand! While I draw breath—!”
Her nail pressed down! Qingwu’s wound wept anew—a crimson tear tracing her temple, mingling with real tears at her sightless eye’s corner.
“—You remain! A scrap-grubbing backwoods clod! A leech feeding on a woman’s pity! Fit only to rot! Wallow in your stinking ditch! This! Is! Your! Place! Shen charity! Comprehend?!”
Each word a frozen curse, dripping venom.
The hall plunged back into tomblike silence. Only the monitor’s throttled whine persisted.
Every gaze welded to the silent man on the wooden chair.
Qingwu trembled—pain and humiliation incarnate. Lips clamped shut, stifling sobs, blood and tears painting a tragic fresco on her face.
At the silence’s suffocating peak—
Qin Hao closed the weathered Ji Yang Classic.
A motion casual as discarding lint.
He did not immediately raise his eyes to Shen Qingxue’s imperious glacial mask.
His gaze traversed slowly.
First, lifting from the ancient tome—steeped in ancestral blood and wisdom.
Then sweeping calmly over the tableau of power, wealth, cruelty, and dying gasps.
Finally, those unfathomable eyes—whirlpools of cosmic dark—settled, utterly placid, on Shen Qingxue’s face.
No anger. No disgust. Not a flicker of insult.
Only an absolute detachment—beyond human emotion—like a glacier observing ants. A chasm of existential separation.
Shen Qingxue’s thunderous humiliation was less than dust motes dancing—unworthy of his full regard.
As Shen Qingxue stiffened—lashed by this unimaginable contempt, every cell freezing—
Qin Hao’s gaze shifted away.
As if brushing off a speck.
Past Shen Qingxue’s rigid, fury-and-shame petrified beauty.
Past Shen Yaoyang’s apoplectic, fear-twisted flush.
To land on Shen Qingwu—trembling under shame and terror, temple bleeding.
His eyes remained deep, still pools.
Yet in their profoundest depths, beneath eternal calm, a flicker—minute as a quark—stirred. A ripple utterly alien to this decaying world…
…Pity?
It vanished faster than thought.
Qin Hao’s lips parted. Voice low, even, toneless, yet each word a boulder dropped into frozen silence:
“Cease.”
A pause. His gaze lingered on Qingwu’s bleeding temple. Words light, yet ironclad:
“Her wound. Demands stillness.”
“As for House Shen…”
He tilted his head slightly, gaze meeting Shen Yuehan’s—still riveted on the book, terror-stricken.
“The vow. My master’s charge. Shen Qingwu. Is my nominal wife.”
“Should she honor the pact. Survive five years…”
He lowered his eyes back to the Ji Yang Classic—vessel of primordial healing, dismissed as trash. Fingers turned a worm-eaten page. Calm. Focused. As if blood, death, and towering humiliation were mere static.
The final words he uttered with the flatness of stating weather:
“—I shield her. Lifelong.”
“This Shen dynasty’s gilded cage… its power plays…”
Qin Hao lifted his gaze once more, meeting Shen Yuehan’s burning eyes—now ablaze with dread and avarice!
- Writer
