Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Chapter 147: The First Table

The room they withdrew to was smaller and quieter than the hall, chosen for exactly that. Lin Zhen lowered himself into the chair at its head and let the bad leg take its weight by degrees, the way he had taught himself over the past months so the wince wouldn’t show.

Only a handful of them had come through: himself, with Min at his right for the protocol of the thing and Tao at his left, the ledgers he never travelled without already under his hand. Across the lacquer waited Su Han and one of his grey-robed elders, a lean woman with frost at her temples who had not spent three words all evening and had watched everything.

A servant poured, bowed, and left them to it. The warmth Su Han had carried through the banquet stayed on his face, but his eyes had gone to work behind it, and Lin Zhen’s had done the same. They had known each other a long time. They could be fond of one another and be counting in the same breath, and neither took it as an insult.

"We can spend an hour praising each other’s wine," Lin Zhen said, "or we can speak plainly, the way men our age have earned the right to. I’d sooner the second, if it’s all the same to you."

Su Han’s mouth curved. "I came a long way for the second. Let’s not squander it."

"I’ll begin where we both already stand." Lin Zhen turned his cup without lifting it. "The Emperor is dying, and he’ll die without ever naming which of his children takes the throne after him. When that day comes, and by everything I’m hearing it will come this year, the question stops being a thing of court whispers and becomes something decided with armies. I’d rather our two houses knew where they stood before the first of those armies starts to march."

Su Han inclined his head. "We read it the same way. Am I to take it you’ve already made your choice among the four?"

"There isn’t much of a choice to make, if you look at them with clear eyes." Lin Zhen lifted a finger off the cup for each one, an old habit from his years teaching disciples. "The Second Prince is the likeliest of them to end the year wearing a crown. He’s spent the better part of a decade making the northern generals owe him favors, and an army that owes you is worth a great deal more than a claim written on paper. If it comes to open war, I’d put my coin on him taking it in the end, which is precisely why I’ll not have him."

"And the eldest?" Su Han prompted, though the set of his face said he already knew the answer.

"The First Prince has the birthright and very little else to go with it." A short breath that didn’t quite become a laugh. "The man can’t draw a single thread of qi. He was born without the root for it. In a realm of farmers that might count for nothing, but ours kneels to cultivators, and no sect of any weight will spend its disciples’ lives setting a mortal on the Throne. He’ll have supporters on parchment and precious few of them in the field. I wouldn’t waste a night’s worry on him."

"Which leaves the princess," Su Han said, and there was something close to warmth in how he said it.

"Which leaves Wei Xinhua." Lin Zhen nodded, unhurried. "The third child, and to my eye the only one of the four worth a damn, if you’ll forgive me saying so of an imperial. The common folk love her already. They felt her hand in the tax relief, and in the grain stores she forced open last winter when the north was starving, and people are slow to forget who fed them. She has the country behind her in spirit, if not yet in swords. Both our houses have put their weight at her back." He spread the hand on the table. "Which is the difficulty, of course. It also makes the pair of us enemies, by default, of everyone who hasn’t."

Su Han’s elder spoke for the first time, dry as her master’s frost. "Enemies of the Second Prince first, and most. He has the longest reach of the lot and the shortest temper."

"So let me tell you what Skyedge would bring to a friendship," Lin Zhen said, "rather than have you buy a sealed crate on my word." He tipped his head at Tao, who needed nothing more.

"Two mines," Tao said, sliding a folded sheet across the wood though he plainly carried the figures in his head. "Both back in our hands, both producing again. The first yields common spirit ore, which we smelt and sell, and that alone will keep a war fed in silver for as long as one runs. The second goes deeper. It carries Dragonvein."

Lin Zhen let the word stand a breath, because it had earned the pause. "You’ll know better than I do what Dragonvein is worth. There’s no open market that prices it; there’s barely a forge in the province that has handled the stuff in living memory. Folded into a blade by a smith who understands the work, it cuts through spirit-armor as though the armor weren’t there at all." He met Su Han’s eyes. "Frostmoon has the smiths and the sword-craft to make use of it. We don’t, not yet. So here is my first offer, and I’ll put it down before you think to ask, so you can see the spirit I mean to bargain in: a share of the Dragonvein, raw, for your forges. Weapons for your people, drawn out of our mountain."

Su Han turned the folded sheet under one finger, not truly reading it. "It’s a generous thing to open with. Generous enough that I’ll ask the rude question, since we agreed on plain speech." His gaze came up. "If your mountain has held wealth of this order all along, how did Skyedge come to spend two years bleeding over it?"