Zhongguan and the others did not hold back.

This was not a ceremonial beating. Baima and Heitu worked the brothers with systematic thoroughness, and Fengji and Keen-Eye Jinyun — operating on the accumulated resentment of men who had personally experienced the welcome ceremony and found it formative — threw themselves into the available gaps with the energy of people who had been waiting for exactly this opportunity. Fengji kicked. Jinyun kicked. Neither stopped until they physically needed to.

The younger brother started crying almost immediately.

The elder brother, to his credit, did not. He started talking instead, at full volume, with particular attention to the two weakest members of the assault:

“You two — remember this face! When I get out of these chains, I’m going to take you apart bone by bone — you hear me? Come on, hit harder! Is that all you’ve got? You eat nothing? What is this? You two are embarrassing yourselves, you soft — you hit like flower girls—”

Fengji and Jinyun took this feedback personally and applied full effort.

The fox-tribe elder and Gold-Tooth, watching from a safe distance, were both developing concerns about whether the brothers would survive to be employed.

Hulei and his companions, stealing glances at Yue Yang, noted that the Titan Lord was watching this with the tranquil expression of a man observing a pleasantly organized garden. No concern. No hesitation. No mercy. This, several of them concluded privately, was what it looked like to genuinely not assign much value to lives below a certain tier — the specific emotional flatness of someone raised so far above the common run of existence that the common run of existence simply didn’t register as particularly significant.

The national ruler’s personal guard captain raised an eyebrow. His lord gave him a look that said: relax. If the cost of this relationship was a pair of prisoners who had been arrested anyway, the exchange rate was extraordinary. Two Sacred-rank gifts had just been waved past without eye contact. A man who dismissed Sacred-rank gifts was not a man short on resources, and a man not short on resources was worth every prisoner in every wagon in the city if the relationship landed correctly.

The guard captain then made a private sign: could this be connected to the Freedom Queen situation?

Steward Ye, who had come out earlier and seen the whole sequence, waved this off immediately. The Titan Lord hadn’t known the Freedom Queen was involved when he walked up to that wagon. He’d acted on immediate reaction, the way a young man who still sorted the world into right and wrong would act. If this person had any actual connection to the Freedom Queen, she would not have been caught by a group of Sky-rankers in the first place — one appearance of Tianzhu would have reduced the entire capture operation to a memory.

The national ruler barely thought about the Freedom Queen at all. She was an administrative problem belonging to a domain emperor’s standing orders, not something he’d have personally prioritized. Her followers were paupers. The only reason she’d been caught was that paupers, given sufficient incentive, became informants. There was a lesson in there, but it wasn’t one he found interesting right now.

What he found interesting was standing six meters away from him, watching two enormous men get beaten for refusing to use a form of address.

Zhongguan dragged the brothers to a clear section of street, and the sounds that followed suggested the brothers remained committed to their position.

Standing around watching a beating seemed like a waste of an opportunity, but re-extending the invitation at this particular moment also felt like poor timing. The national ruler caught Steward Ye’s eye.

Steward Ye caught Gold-Tooth’s eye.

Gold-Tooth understood: this is your moment. Don’t ruin it.

The weight of this responsibility traveled through Gold-Tooth’s entire nervous system and emerged from his mouth as a slight cough followed by an extremely smooth segue:

“Titan Young Lord, as you may know, this is the Windstill National Ruler — you’ve been introduced, of course. Your Majesty, the Titan Young Lord has come all this way with the warmest possible intentions to participate in our city’s celebrated birthday banquet, and was actually seeking this humble servant some days ago to obtain an invitation—” Gold-Tooth found his rhythm quickly, because surviving this long in his particular career required exactly this skill, and he deployed it now at full capacity, narrating a connection between Yue Yang and the ruler that made the two of them sound like they’d been meaning to meet for years.

“So that’s the situation!” The national ruler had what he needed: an excuse. “The Titan Young Lord has traveled so far and Windstill failed to send a proper welcome — forgive this discourtesy.”

The young lord had expressed interest in the banquet. The young lord liked a lively event. Why hadn’t anyone simply said so earlier?

Steward Ye was simultaneously annoyed at himself — Gold-Tooth had mentioned this during the initial defense of Yue Yang’s presence and somehow Ye had let it slide past — and deeply relieved that Gold-Tooth was, despite everything, genuinely useful. He moved to formally extend the invitation.

Yue Yang slapped his forehead. “Oh — I walked out without bringing a gift. The young lord’s manners are terrible, I’m embarrassed.” He reached into his storage ring and began producing items.

The crowd watched.

They watched for quite some time.

Each object that came out of that ring was the kind of thing that warranted its own dedicated display case, its own ceremony of presentation, its own documentation. The sheer density of extraordinary objects passing through Yue Yang’s hands as he assessed and dismissed them one by one was having a measurable effect on everyone present. Hulei, who had been at the receiving end of considerable violence from several directions in the last quarter hour, had nonetheless become entirely distracted by what he was seeing. Steward Ye’s professional composure was showing strain at the corners.

The national ruler, who had personally handled more significant treasures than most people would encounter across several lifetimes, was producing saliva at a rate his dignity found undignified.

“Wasn’t that a Spirit-Soul Pill just now?” he asked, before he could stop himself.

“Giving a Spirit-Soul Pill as a birthday gift seems a little disrespectful,” Yue Yang said. “Let me keep looking.”

The ruler’s heart did something painful. The Spirit-Soul Pill was one of the rarest medicinal artifacts in existence, capable of pushing a cultivator past their current ceiling. It had just been deemed insufficiently formal as a birthday present and returned to a ring that apparently contained several more of them.

Nobody lunged for it. The room understood that lunging for anything this young man was holding was not a strategy that ended well. They settled for watching with the complicated longing of people observing something extraordinary through glass.

Yue Yang went through a number of other candidates, each of which caused varying degrees of internal suffering among the assembled observers.

Finally, he selected something.

The national ruler looked at the small jade bottle in Yue Yang’s hand.

The color drained from his face, re-entered as something that wasn’t quite any natural color, and then his mouth opened:

“Divine blood?” He caught himself, recalibrated, and tried again: “That — that is — far too, that is tremendously — the young lord is too generous, this is entirely — Windstill absolutely cannot accept something of this — this is truly—”

He was maintaining the social form of declining while his eyes had fastened onto the jade bottle with the focused intensity of a man who had stopped being capable of looking at anything else.

The jade bottle contained one drop of divine blood.

The ruler knew what that meant. He knew what one drop of divine blood could do to a cultivator who absorbed it correctly. He knew that this was the single most valuable thing he had seen in his entire life, and that it was being offered to him as a casual birthday gift by someone who had just spent several minutes flipping past Spirit-Soul Pills as too ordinary for the occasion.

He also knew he was afraid. Not of the gift — of the family behind the person giving it. Accepting divine blood from someone and then having that someone’s people show up asking questions about it was a sequence of events that did not end in longevity. The gift was real. The danger attached to it was also real.

He continued declining with his mouth while his eyes refused to participate in the performance.

Steward Ye and Gold-Tooth were both operating somewhere in the territory between near-fainting and religious experience. The concept of divine blood changing hands as a birthday gift was simply not one their existing frameworks were equipped to process.

“It’s only one drop,” Yue Yang said. “I have quite a bit more.”

Something in the assembled crowd broke. Not visibly, but internally — the specific crack that appears in a person’s relationship with the concept of material reality when they encounter someone for whom things they’ve spent their entire life pursuing are stored in bulk.

“Since the young lord has already been so gracious as to bring it…” Steward Ye, demonstrating what thirty years of professional composure looked like under maximum stress, managed to produce a coherent sentence.

“Since this is the Titan Young Lord’s kind intention — Windstill accepts with great gratitude.” The national ruler was briefly, passingly honest with his own face about how he actually felt, and then had that expression under control. “This drop of divine blood is the highest gift this birthday celebration has received. It will be displayed with full ceremony at the head of the great hall, that all honored guests may witness the Titan Young Lord’s extraordinary generosity. Bring the escort of highest ceremony — the reception befitting a lord of the celestial realm — and welcome the Titan Young Lord and the divine blood into the residence.”

What he intended to do with the divine blood once the banquet concluded, where he would perform that operation, who he would trust to guard him during it, and how he would avoid any of the twelve Sky-rank guests currently in his residence making a move on it — these questions were already organizing themselves into a sequence of planning that would occupy him for the next several hours.

“I’m first? Ha — that’s exactly what I wanted.” Yue Yang looked pleased with himself in the specific way of someone who has won a minor social competition. “First place is the point.”

Fengji and Keen-Eye Jinyun, both of whom had been briefed on the plan, kept their faces neutral.

To an outside observer, the scene was a pampered young lord of extraordinary wealth making an absurdly lavish gesture to win a banquet-ranking competition.

To the two of them, the single drop of divine blood going into that hall was the beginning of something — bait, precisely constructed and precisely placed, with the patience of someone who had already identified which fish would rise to it and approximately how long the water would take to move.

The Titan Lord, Fengji reflected, had a smile that was warm and uncomplicated and completely without tells.

It was one of the more unsettling things about him.