Book 8: Chapter 60: Lord Lu’s Justice
“You needn’t participate in this,” said Sen. “I almost think it might be better if you didn’t.”
“It’s kind of you to want to spare me,” said Grandmother Lu. “But I have to be there, and your people have to see me being there.
Sen offered a reluctant nod. She was likely right about that. He just didn’t like that he was making her a party to his revenge. It was like he was somehow making her less by associating her with something he expected was going to be gruesome. In the end, she had the right to make her own decisions. I should probably be grateful that she wants to show me her support. He turned to Long Jia Wei.
“The gates are sealed?” he asked.
“They are, Lord Lu.”
Lo Meifeng was already in the courtyard, making preparations for the first half of Sen’s demonstration of his unhappiness. That just left one person in the room. His gaze fell on Yeung Fen. The woman looked gaunt, and she flinched as soon as his eyes landed on her. Sen had been shocked when Lo Meifeng’s people had not only found the woman but dragged her back to the manor alive. He’d expected her to be long gone and far away by the time anyone knew that she was involved. If not that, then he would have thought she’d prefer to go down fighting. He knew that’s what he would have done. Still, he wasn’t one to bemoan a positive turn of luck. She had proven truculent about providing information. So, Sen planned to use today’s demonstration as one method to motivate her cooperation.
“Yeung Fen. I want you to pay close attention to what happens here today. Think of it as a window into the future. Your future,” he said.
He walked over to the door, dragging Yeung Fen along with a tether of air qi he’d wrapped around her neck. Her hands were bound by manacles that Sen had personally crafted and reinforced. He’d felt her laughable attempts to break them with her own qi, but she had not experienced his explosive growth in power over the intervening years. She was still in foundation formation, which meant that the only way she was breaking those bonds was if he gave her a hundred years of uninterrupted time to get it done. She stumbled along in his wake. Long Jia Wei and Grandmother Lu simply ignored her. He supposed that they’d already started thinking of her as dead and not worth the effort of giving their attention.
He pushed open the front door to the manor. There was usually a servant there, but almost everyone in the manor save for the children and their minders were in the courtyard already. As were a small number of people who were kneeling, hands tied, and watched over by hard-faced guards. These people were the most directly responsible for the attack. The ones who had done the most to bring the explosives into the manor. One had been separated out. He was the one who had actually lit the fuse. Sen intended to make him into the first example. With a negligent wave of his hand and a minor application of air qi, he drove Yeung Fen to her knees. Then, he walked out in front of the crowd of people, his people, and assumed a thoughtful expression.