Chapter 235: Trying to bully
Zhao Yunfei swept her gaze across the crowd of outer sect disciples surrounding them, taking in their number and their posture with the calm, unhurried assessment of someone who had already made up her mind about them.
Then she turned slightly toward Lin Huang beside her and dropped her voice low.
"Master, want me to deal with them?"
Her tone was crisp and clean — carrying not a trace of hesitation, as if the outer sect disciples hemming them in on all sides were little more than an inconvenient pile of leaves blocking a path.
Lin Huang heard her and nearly lost his footing.
Since when had this girl grown so bold?
He steadied himself and turned his attention back toward the crowd. The lightness of the moment faded as quickly as it had come. A solemn expression settled onto his face as his eyes moved carefully from figure to figure.
Even the weakest among them is at the Resonance Realm.
At the front of the gathered crowd stood a young man who carried himself with the particular ease of someone who had never once been told he couldn’t have what he wanted. His robes were slightly more luxurious than those around him — subtle, but deliberate. His features were sharp and handsome, and his bearing radiated the kind of confidence that came not from hard-earned strength, but from a lifetime of unopposed privilege.
This was Chen Hu. Son of an outer sect elder. The number one candidate to become the sect master’s personal disciple — a story that had been quietly building for years, a steady and inevitable rise. Until Lin Huang had arrived and unraveled all of it without even trying.
Chen Hu’s eyes were fixed on Lin Huang’s figure, and the burning anger in them made no effort to hide itself.
What does this little Golden Core worm have that I don’t?
The thought gnawed at him, restless and relentless.
My cultivation at the Grand Ascension realm is a thousand times greater than his. My understanding of alchemy has been refined over years of tireless effort — ten thousand times more polished than anything a lower realm outsider could have scraped together.
Then why? Why does the sect master want him and not me?
The question had no answer he was willing to accept, and so it had curdled into something uglier the longer it sat.
Meanwhile, surrounding him, his underlings — a congregation of outer disciples whose futures inside the sect depended entirely on whose coattails they could grab tightly enough — had already begun to speak.
"How dare you take the good fortune that belongs to our Young Master Chen!"
"Do you honestly think someone like you deserves to be accepted by the sect master as his disciple?"
"If I were standing in your shoes, I would have already stepped aside gracefully and asked the Ancient Sentinental Sect for reassignment. At least that would show some self-awareness..."
The words came one after another, stacking up like thrown stones, each one aimed to chip and bruise.
Lin Huang stood quietly and listened to all of it. The frown on his face deepened by degrees, slowly and steadily, the way a sky darkens before rain.
If there was any choice available to him, he would have preferred to avoid this entirely. Not out of fear — he wanted to make that distinction clearly in his own mind. His cultivation was weak by the standards of this place, yes, but weakness in cultivation didn’t mean helplessness in a fight. He knew that better than most.
But conflict invited attention, and attention invited complications he didn’t need right now.
Still, the crowd showed no sign of parting on its own.
He looked out across the gathered faces — the sneering mouths, the contemptuous eyes, the borrowed courage of people who only dared this much because they outnumbered him — and after a long, quiet moment, he spoke.
"Quite." His voice was calm. Almost bored. "Scram, before I do something rash."
Dead silence fell over the courtyard like a held breath.
It lasted barely a second.
The lackeys exchanged glances — and then the laughter came, sudden and shrill, tearing through the quiet like broken glass. It spread from one to the next, feeding itself, growing louder and more unhinged with every passing moment.
"Look at him! He really is as arrogant as the rumors say!"
"What if we don’t shut up? What exactly are you going to do about it — run to momma and ask her to hold your hand?"
"You know what, just call your mama over. As long as she’s willing to warm our bed, we might just let you walk away from here..."
The laughter that followed was ugly and hysterical, high-pitched and indulgent, the kind that came from people who had never once faced a real consequence. Saliva flew. Shoulders shook. A few of them doubled over as if they had said the funniest thing in the world.
Chen Hu stood at the front of it all. For a brief moment, genuine surprise flickered across his face — he hadn’t expected quite that level of audacity from his underlings. Then a wide, slow smile spread across his lips, and he said nothing. He simply watched.
"Master—!"
Zhao Yunfei’s voice cut through the noise like a blade.
The word came out sharp and instinctive, laced with a sudden, staggering dread that rose through her chest before she could stop it. She didn’t know everything about Lin Huang. There were still many things about him that remained a quiet mystery to her. But there was one thing she had come to understand with absolute certainty since the day she began following him.
Lin Huang loved his family. Deeply. Completely. Without condition or reservation.
And he would not — could not — stand by while someone dragged that love through the mud with their filthy mouths.
She knew, the instant those words had left the lackeys’ lips, that something terrible was about to happen. What she couldn’t reconcile was the glaring, brutal arithmetic of the situation. What could a Golden Core realm cultivator possibly do against people who stood at the very threshold of immortality? The gap between them wasn’t a step — it was a cliff face.
Lin Huang’s face had gone very still.
The warmth that normally lived somewhere in the lines of his expression had drained away entirely, replaced by something cold and flat and absolute — the kind of cold that didn’t rage or tremble but simply settled in, like iron dropped into deep water.
You had to do this, huh.
Each word left his mouth measured and deliberate, the way a man speaks when he is choosing his words not to express himself, but to give the other party one final, fleeting chance to understand the gravity of what they have done.
You just can’t keep my family out of your filthy mouth, huh.
With every syllable, the cold on his face sharpened. The frown carved itself deeper. His eyes, which had been calm and calculating moments ago, now carried something else entirely — something that hadn’t been there before, something that had been asleep and was now very, very awake.
What the lackeys didn’t know — what most people looking at him couldn’t know — was the truth buried beneath the surface of that unassuming Golden Core cultivation. Lin Huang’s time under Wang Chen’s roof had not simply been a period of growth. It had been a cage, however comfortable. As someone whose dao was woven from pure potential, Lin Huang only truly grew in the crucible of genuinely dangerous battle. Real danger. The kind that tested not just strength, but survival.
Wang Chen’s presence, vast and all-encompassing, had kept that danger at arm’s length. Protected him. Limited him in ways neither of them had fully spoken aloud.
But Wang Chen wasn’t here.
And Lin Huang was no longer a seed sheltered beneath a great tree.
He was outside. Finally, truly outside.
As the cold on his face reached its peak, the world around him began to change.
It started subtly — a shift in the air, a pressure that hadn’t existed a moment ago, pressing down on the courtyard like the first signs of a storm no one had forecasted. Then the sky above Lin Huang twisted. Space itself seemed to fold and shudder as though something immeasurably vast was pressing against it from the other side, straining to bleed through.
Then it appeared.
A phantom — enormous, ancient, and silent — descended from the heavens above Lin Huang’s figure. A wide river, boundless and timeless, its waters dark and churning with a depth that had no visible bottom, flickering into existence like a memory of something that should not exist in this age. It stretched behind him like a second sky, its presence swallowing the light around it and replacing it with something older.
The laughter in the courtyard died instantly.
The lackeys went rigid. Chen Hu’s smile vanished from his face as if it had been wiped clean.
Far in the distance, Long Baishan’s eyes snapped wide open.
For a fraction of a second — just one fraction — the Grand Elder of the Ancient Sentinental Sect, a man whose composure had remained unshaken through things that had broken lesser cultivators entirely, almost lurched to his feet.
Almost.
His hands gripped the edge of his seat. The ancient parchment in his lap slipped unnoticed to the ground.
His deep, pond-still eyes, which nothing in this world was supposed to disturb, now held a single, undeniable emotion written plainly across them.
Pure horror.