Chapter 941: Talking People to Death — Without Liability

“What about you — I have no idea,” Yue Yang said, scratching the back of his head. “But I’m planning to run some experiments on the Wild Bull Brothers. Their physiques are exceptional test subjects.”

“More divine blood?” Ming Rihao seized Yue Yang’s collar with the focused energy of a man who had been pushed past several personal limits in one evening. “If you actually have that much divine blood, stop wasting it on a pair of overgrown cattle and give some to me. I’ve barely recovered to my current level and I’m nowhere near my peak. If you want your alliance partner operating at full capacity, the divine blood goes to me — that’s a hundred times more valuable than whatever you’re planning to do with those two idiots.”

“You want divine blood?” Yue Yang looked at him with what appeared to be genuine surprise. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

“Who wouldn’t want it? Anyone who doesn’t want divine blood is not a functional person. If I’d known you had it earlier, I’d have seriously considered robbing you.”

“You can have some,” Yue Yang said agreeably.

Ming Rihao blinked. That had been too easy. Something was wrong.

“Just not yet,” Yue Yang added.

There it was.

“One day I’m going to have you in a position where I can make your life genuinely difficult,” Ming Rihao said, with conviction, “and I intend to be creative about it.”

“I’ll try to avoid that situation,” Yue Yang said, with the absolute sincerity of someone who would do nothing of the kind.

“You’re seriously giving the Wild Bull Brothers divine blood?” The waste involved was causing Ming Rihao physical discomfort.

“I never said that.” Yue Yang looked amused. “I said I was going to run experiments on them. Specifically, extracting a certain unidentified divine-attribute energy that’s sitting in their bodies doing nothing useful.”

Ming Rihao stopped. Thought. Then smacked his own forehead — the sound of a man who had let irritation outpace observation. Of course. Yue Yang and generosity with divine blood, unprompted, toward two strangers who had contributed nothing to his interests — these concepts did not naturally coexist. He’d known that. He’d just been too worked up to apply it.

The Wild Bull Brothers had not yet submitted.

They had been beaten for several hours and were presenting the specific appearance of men who were approximately thirty seconds from death. This appearance was not entirely accurate. The Dragon-Binding Chains and Blood-Tear Ghost Shackles remained on them. Remove those, and within roughly thirty seconds, Zhongguan’s group would have an entirely different problem.

Yue Yang had spotted it the moment he first saw them: buried in their physiques, completely inert under normal conditions, was a variety of divine-attribute energy unlike anything he’d encountered before. It didn’t activate during combat. It activated in response to injury. The moment the brothers sustained damage, this latent power moved — repairing tissue, restoring cultivation, undoing what should have been lasting harm. It was the mechanical explanation for why, absent decapitation or an instant-kill technique, the Wild Bull Brothers simply did not stay injured.

He’d seen something functionally similar before. In the Sky Stairway’s elemental palaces, he’d extracted the Heart of Earth from the Earth King, which had eventually gone to Aman and made her an inexhaustible war goddess — her power replenishing perpetually as long as she stood on solid ground. The brothers’ divine energy operated on a similar principle but with different parameters. No geographic restriction. But not perpetual, either — dormant during normal activity, triggered only by injury.

The key observation was that this energy was fundamentally incompatible with the brothers’ cultivation type. It was sitting in the wrong host. That mismatch was why it manifested as raw healing function instead of whatever it was actually designed to do.

Recruiting these two was part of the plan. Extracting and studying that energy was the larger objective.

Yue Yang gestured for Zhongguan and the others to step back, and crouched in front of the wagon.

“Are you two alright?”

“You’ll die before we do, rich boy — and even then we still won’t surrender!” The elder brother had maintained his voice even when the rest of him was flagging. “Hit us for another day. Another week. We’re not bending.”

“We’re not giving up,” the younger brother confirmed, currently crying with the steadiness of a rain front that has committed to an afternoon. “We’re really not.”

Yue Yang settled into a comfortable position.

“You know,” he said, with the warmth of someone revisiting a long-held conviction, “I’ve always had the deepest respect for people like you. Genuinely. Loyal, principled, straightforward — good-hearted and brave. Those qualities are rare. Do you know how rare? Across the whole of Tianhua Domain, I think I could count on one hand the people who combine them the way you two do. You might actually be it.”

The elder brother had been winding up for another insult. The insult derailed somewhere in the middle of its assembly.

“I’ve never believed in using force to resolve anything,” Yue Yang continued. “Violence is for people who can’t communicate. I’ve always said — if the person across from you is reasonable, decent, worth talking to, then talking is what you do. And looking at the two of you—” He shook his head with the expression of a man whose faith in humanity has just been meaningfully restored. “There’s no question which category you fall into.”

“We are… yes, we are reasonable,” the elder brother said, in a voice that had lost its aggressive edge somewhat and replaced it with something uncertain.

“You understand us,” the younger brother said. He was still crying, but the tenor had changed. This was no longer grievance crying. This was feeling-seen crying, which was a different thing entirely.

Ming Rihao, watching from a distance, pressed his palm against his face.

“You’ve been misunderstood for a long time, haven’t you,” Yue Yang said, and it was barely even a question. “I find that genuinely unfair.”

“Nobody,” the younger brother managed between sniffles, “has ever — nobody has ever put it like that—”

“Because they’re not paying attention. Anyone who actually looks can see exactly what you are.” Yue Yang leaned forward slightly. “Let me tell you what I see. Two men who chose to follow an ideal that most people are too cynical or too comfortable to take seriously. Who kept following it through every hardship, every loss, every fight where the odds were against you. That’s not stupidity. That’s the rarest kind of courage.”

The elder brother was blinking very hard.

“Not just courage, actually,” Yue Yang said, as though arriving at a new realization. “Real intelligence. Not the small kind — the kind that calculates advantages. The large kind. The kind that understands what actually matters.”

The elder brother’s eyes had become substantially less dry than they’d been five minutes ago.

“Young lord,” Zhongguan said quietly, to no one in particular. He and his companions had spent several hours on this problem and produced nothing. The Titan Lord had been at it for approximately ninety seconds.

Fengji and Keen-Eye Jinyun exchanged a look. Both of them had been recruited through processes that were, in retrospect, suspiciously efficient. The pattern was becoming clear.

“When I saw you in that wagon,” Yue Yang said, with appropriate gravity, “I was angry. What happened to you was unjust. Nine against two, with ambush conditions and everything suppressed — that’s not a defeat. That’s a political outcome. And good people getting caught in political outcomes is something I find genuinely difficult to accept.”

“That’s exactly it,” the elder brother said. He sounded like a man who has just found the precise words for something he’s been trying to articulate for years. “That’s exactly it.”

“Wuuuu,” said the younger brother, for the third or fourth time, but with new emotional depth.

“You came here for the Freedom Queen,” Yue Yang said. “That’s loyalty. That’s what it looks like when someone means what they say.” He paused. “I want to help you.”

Both brothers stared at him.

“Enemies like the ones you’re fighting — they don’t play fair. They can’t. If they played fair, they’d lose. So they use numbers and poison and tricks and every underhanded method available, because that’s the only way they can hold position against people like you. People with genuine principles don’t have those tools. So people with genuine principles get beaten.” He spread his hands. “Unless they have the strength to make tricks irrelevant.”

“That’s…” The elder brother trailed off. It was so precisely true.

“Ancient dragon blood,” Yue Yang said. “I have it. And I’m going to give it to both of you.”

Silence.

“You’re currently approaching Sky-rank tier two. After the dragon blood, tier two becomes tier three. More than that — the energy in your bodies that’s been there all along, dormant and untapped, will finally have a foundation to activate properly.” Yue Yang met both sets of eyes directly. “With that power, rescuing the Freedom Queen becomes possible. With that power, the kind of change you want to see in Tianhua Domain — it becomes something you can actually work toward instead of just believe in.”

The younger brother’s jaw was trembling. He was trying to form words and the words weren’t coming.

“I want to ask you something seriously,” Yue Yang said, his voice shifting into a register that was quiet and direct and completely without performance. He produced two small vials from his ring. “Merging with ancient dragon blood is painful. Even for physiques like yours — genuinely — it is not easy. So I need to know: do you have the will to push through that? Do you have the courage to become what you need to be?”

Both brothers looked at him.

The encouragement in his eyes was real. Or it looked real. It looked like morning light.

“YES,” they said, together, loud enough that the nearby street briefly stopped what it was doing.

Ming Rihao turned away.

He was making a private vow. Whatever Yue Yang said to him, in any future conversation, he would think about it three times before responding. He would apply critical analysis. He would not allow himself to become a person who shouted YES from inside a prison wagon at someone who had just explained, with complete sincerity, that they were about to receive pain as a gift.

He would absolutely not.

He was almost certain of this.

He was less certain than he’d been thirty seconds ago.

He decided to go inside.