Chapter 166 - 165: Humiliation (2)
"IT WASN’T JUST ME!"
Mu Tianyang scrambled to his feet. His hair was completely disheveled, his silver-threaded robes stained with the dust of the floor. He looked up at Patriarch Yun, his face twisted into a mask of cornered desperation.
Patriarch Yun stood up, his terrifying Peak Nascent Soul aura flaring with lethal intent. "Silence, you disgrace! You have humiliated our name! You will return to the sect and face the lightning whips!"
"No! Ancestor, you must listen to me!" Mu Tianyang shrieked, entirely abandoning whatever shred of dignity he had left. He refused to be the only one to burn. If he was going down, he was dragging his co-conspirator into the abyss with him.
Mu Tianyang spun around, extending a trembling, accusatory finger toward the eastern terraced seating, aiming directly at the mass of minor nobles and clan representatives.
"I did not plan this alone!" Mu Tianyang roared, his voice echoing frantically. "I was approached! I was manipulated! Han Zilie! The Young Master of the Han Clan!"
On the eastern terrace, Han Zilie completely froze. The blood drained from his face so fast he looked like a corpse. The surrounding nobles instinctively recoiled, creating a wide, empty circle of isolation around the trembling young master.
"He came to me in the garden last night!" Mu Tianyang continued, screaming to the crowd. "He was furious that Lord Zhao had stripped him of his position as the Participating General! He wanted revenge against Lin Yuan’s household! Han Zilie is the one who bribed the servant! Han Zilie is the one who planned to slip the hairpin onto Bai Chen! He orchestrated the trap; I merely executed it!"
"Lies!" Han Zilie squeaked, his voice pitching high with terror. He looked wildly around the amphitheater, his hands raised defensively. "He is a cornered dog! He is lying to save his own skin! I had nothing to do with this!"
"Is he lying?" Lin Yuan’s voice suddenly cut through the chaos, smooth, cold, and utterly dominant.
Lin Yuan remained seated in his chair, but his gaze pinned Han Zilie to the spot like a physical spear.
"Because a few hours ago, in the dungeons of this very palace," Lin Yuan stated calmly, "a certain Qi Condensation servant confessed to receiving fifty spirit stones from your hand, Young Master Han. He confessed to receiving the hairpin directly from you. We have the boy in custody. Would you like us to bring him out to verify your innocence?"
Han Zilie’s mouth opened and closed like a suffocating fish. He looked at Lord Zhao Shenming, whose face was a mask of judgment. He looked at Lin Yuan, whose deep purple eyes promised absolute annihilation.
Han Zilie had no alibi, no defense, and no escape. The trap he had so proudly engineered had snapped back and crushed his own neck.
Deafening murmurs immediately erupted across the terraced seating.
"The Han Clan orchestrated this?"
"To use the Pure Cloud Sect as a proxy for a petty grudge..."
"To risk the stability of the entire province right before the Lord Tournament over a bruised ego!"
"They are a disgrace. A nest of venomous snakes."
The whispers were not hushed; they were loud, venomous, and entirely unforgiving.
Sitting three rows behind Han Zilie was a broad-shouldered, heavily bearded man draped in the luxurious, dark green silk. This was Han Wuji, the Clan Head of the Han Clan, and Han Zilie’s father.
Han Wuji’s face had turned a deep, violent shade of purple. The veins in his thick neck bulged as he listened to the entire province openly mock and condemn his bloodline. For two generations, the Han Clan had meticulously built a reputation of honor, strength, and unwavering reliability. In the span of ten minutes, his foolish, arrogant son had reduced their lineage to the status of back-alley, cowardly schemers.
The shame was an unbearable, crushing physical weight. In the cultivation world, a loss of face of this magnitude was a fate far worse than death. It was the death of a legacy.
Han Wuji stood up. The sheer force of his aura knocked over his chair, the heavy wood clattering loudly down the steps.
Han Zilie whipped around, looking at his father with wide tears streaming down his face. "Father... Father, please! I only did it to restore our honor! I only did it to take back what was rightfully ours!"
Han Wuji looked at his son. There was no love in the patriarch’s eyes; there was only the cold, dead ash of a burning empire.
"You have no honor," Han Wuji said, his voice a low, terrifying growl that carried over the immediate vicinity. "And you are no longer my son."
Han Zilie collapsed to his knees on the terrace, weeping openly, grasping at the empty air as his father turned his back.
Without offering a single apology to Lord Zhao, without looking at the Pure Cloud Sect, and without uttering another word, Clan Head Han Wuji began to walk up the terraced steps. He walked with stiff, rigid movements, his pride utterly shattered, leaving the amphitheater in disgrace.
Several other elders of the Han Clan immediately stood up, keeping their heads bowed in shame, and followed their patriarch out of the Celestial Summit.
They left Han Zilie kneeling entirely alone on the terrace, a discarded, disgraced young master surrounded by a sea of hostile eyes.
On the floor, Mu Tianyang had finally stopped screaming. He stared blankly at the sky, realizing that his betrayal had accomplished nothing but cementing his own ruin.
Lin Yuan sat back in his chair, adjusting the celestial-fox shawl over Bai Qingyue’s shoulders. He looked down at the center of the arena, where Bai Chen and Su Yin stood together, the only pure, untainted thing remaining in the aftermath of the slaughter.
"Well," Lin Yuan murmured softly to his wife, a faint smile on his lips. "I believe we are finally ready for the tournament."
With the Zhao Province’s internal conflict resolved and Lin Yuan’s position absolute, how will the Six Peerless Geniuses of the Upper Division react when they discover the true, monstrous depth of the people they previously ignored?