Chapter 555- Stop Ancestor
His dark hair lay loose over bare, carved shoulders. The impossible architecture of his torso caught the hall’s light — each abdominal muscle casting its own small shadow, the V of his lower body disappearing below the chair edge, his thick cock resting against the polished stone of the seat with the same serene, gravity-anchored frankness it had maintained all morning.
The remaining female elders stood in a semicircle before him.
They were looking at various points in the middle distance with the universal discipline of women who were absolutely not going to let their cultivation-enhanced perception embarrass them.
The sect master Yaolan stood at the center. Her hands were clasped in front of her. Her silver hair lay perfectly still. Her face had its authority back, assembled over the course of the half-hour flight back from the border territory with the kind of effort that did not show.
"The sect has declined," Tianlong said.
It was not a question.
The sect master absorbed this.
"Ancestor," she began, "this one acknowledges that the sect’s ranking has fallen. From the second position to the fifth. It has been a matter of —"
"Why."
The word landed flat. Not curious. Not sympathetic. The tone of a man who already knew the answer and was checking whether the people in the room would tell him the truth.
The elders exchanged the rapid, peripheral glances of people making synchronized calculations. One of the older male elders — thick-set, his Nascent Soul cultivation giving him a resonant physical presence that had, for two hundred years, been the most impressive thing in most rooms he entered — stepped forward.
"Ancestor," he said, his voice carrying the practiced authority of a man used to being listened to, "the decline of our sect is directly attributable to the fall of the Grand Elder in battle with the Crimson Tide Demonic Faction fourteen years ago. His loss created a cultivation vacuum at the upper levels that we have been unable to adequately —"
"Elder Boming," another elder interrupted, a woman with sharp eyes and a jaw that had the set of someone who had been waiting to say something for a long time. "What Elder Boming has omitted is that the Grand Elder’s vulnerability in that battle was in part a consequence of cultivation resource misallocations that certain members of the elder council had been engineering for their own advancement. In particular —"
"Elder Mengsha," said Elder Boming, his voice dropping a register.
"In particular," Elder Mengsha continued, with the steady momentum of a woman who had calculated that the current situation represented an opportunity that would not repeat, "the diversion of three consecutive cycles of spirit vein revenue to private pill purchases. Revenue that should have gone toward reinforcing our formation defenses."
"Those allegations were —"
"Reviewed and suppressed by you. Yes."
Tianlong watched this.
His expression did not change. He sat with his chin resting on one hand, elbow on the granite armrest, the way a man sits when observing entertainment he finds moderately interesting.
The sect master’s eyes moved between the two elders with the controlled tension of a woman who had been managing this particular fracture line for a decade and was watching it split open in front of an audience she had not planned for.
More elders spoke. One after another, in the way that groups under pressure will do — each one adding their piece, building a structure of blame and counterclaim that had clearly been under construction for years and simply needed a large enough seismic event to bring it fully to the surface. Betrayals. Colluding with rival sects. Resource theft. Political maneuvering disguised as cultivation guidance.
Tianlong listened.
His cock rested against the stone. The Horny God Physique pumped its passive pheromone emission into the enclosed hall, thickening the air in a way the assembled cultivators were all feeling in their meridians and none of them were addressing. Several of the female elders had developed a faint flush somewhere between the border territory clearing and this moment that had nothing to do with cultivation temperature management.
After a long moment, he straightened slightly.
"What if I killed the ancestors of every powerful sect in this county," he said.
The hall stopped.
Not paused. ’Stopped’ — the way a mechanism stops when a key piece is removed. Voices ceased mid-syllable. Hands froze in gestures of illustration.
"The ranking sects," he continued, his voice maintaining its even, unhurried register. "The ones above yours. What if I simply removed them."
The sect master’s lips parted.
"Would the Plum Blossom sect be positioned to rise?"
He was not asking because he needed the answer. He was asking because watching people respond to the question was more useful than any intelligence briefing.
The elder council’s faces cycled through a rapid progression of reactions. Shock, then — and this was the interesting part, this was the part Tianlong was watching for — ’greed.’ Clean, pure, uncurated greed in the eyes of cultivators who had spent a decade watching their sect decline and who had just been presented with the image of that decline being reversed by a single external actor.
Elder Boming’s jaw was tight.
Elder Mengsha’s eyes had a light in them.
Two others exchanged a glance that said, ’yes but we cannot say yes.’
"Ancestor," said one of the older male elders, his voice thickening, "this humble one cannot speak for the sect’s strategy, but to have the weight of such an ancestor’s support would be —"
"We do not need your help."
The sect master’s voice cut across the hall cleanly.
Everyone turned to look at her.
She was looking at Tianlong. Her silver hair, her lined, carefully preserved face, her Peak Nascent Soul cultivation base that felt like a candle in this room and did not let that stop her from saying what she was saying.
"This sect’s decline," she said, "was caused by our own failures. Our own betrayals of each other. Our own failures of discipline and honor." Her eyes did not waver from the gold-crimson gaze across the hall. "An ancestor arriving to sweep away our problems for us would simply mean we had earned nothing. We would fall again. We would deserve to fall again."
Silence.
One of the elders opened his mouth.
"Sect Master Yaolan," said Elder Boming, his voice carrying the specific warning note of a senior cultivator who was addressing someone he believed had just made a catastrophic miscalculation in the presence of a catastrophic power, "I would suggest —"
Tianlong snapped his fingers.
The sound was small. Dry. A single, quiet click of thumbnail against middle finger.
Elder Boming’s head exploded.
The sound it made was not small.
It was a wet, total concussion of pressurized spiritual energy meeting organic matter with no frame of warning between them, and Elder Boming ceased to have a head with the same instantaneous finality that a soap bubble ceases to be a sphere. The spray was immediate and generous, coating the cultivators within a two-meter radius in a hot, dark mist that the hall’s stone floor received with the patient, practiced indifference of stone.
The silence lasted one breath.
Then the screaming began.
Another finger-snap.
Another.
Another.
"KYAAAA!!"
"ARRRGHHH— NO!!"
"ANCESTOR PLEASE STOP!"