Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Chapter 148: A Crown Without an Heir

It was the question Lin Zhen had known would arrive, and he didn’t shy from it. ’Let him see it whole. No man ties his house to one he believes is hiding its wounds.’

"Because they were ours, and they were taken from us." He said it without heat. "Both mines have been Skyedge’s for generations. We lost them in the worst stretch this sect has ever known. My son was crippled. You’ll have heard some version of that, I imagine; the true one is that an enemy inside our own walls arranged it. And in the same season I was summoned to the capital and held there two years, on courtesies I couldn’t refuse without giving open insult, while my house bled at home and could not reach me."

His jaw tightened once and loosened.

"By the time I came back, the mines were flying another sect’s banner and half my elders were either in the ground or in an enemy’s pocket. We didn’t seize those mines this spring, Su Han. We took them back."

He watched the words reach the far side of the table, and under the old grief in them he felt an unfamiliar steadiness hold him up. A year ago he could not have said all that aloud without something fracturing in his voice.

He could say it now because the ending of the story had changed. His son had walked into the deepest of those wounds and come back out of it holding two mines and an enemy elder’s secrets, and a man who could say we took them back bargained from a different chair than a man who could only say we lost them.

Su Han took that in without hurry. When he spoke, the trading edge had gone off his voice for a breath. "I had heard a version, as you say. Not that one." He nodded, slow. "It speaks well of the boy. And of the house that raised him to it."

"Let me answer your offer in kind." Su Han laid both hands flat.

"Frostmoon can’t match your mountain for silver, and I won’t insult you by pretending otherwise. What we have is people, and seasoned ones at that." His elder shifted, and he tipped his head toward her.

"Elders like Shu here, who have stood in real engagements and not merely tournament rings. Disciples enough to hold a line and to relieve the ones holding it. Forty years of standing in the northern courts that a younger sect couldn’t purchase at any price. You have the wealth and the high ground and the will, Lin Zhen, and from what I can gather a son worth two of most heirs. What you don’t have, after the bleeding you’ve just described to me, is bodies enough to wall it all in should the Second Prince decide to finish what his people began."

"Which is the shape of the thing exactly," Lin Zhen agreed. "You’ve put it better than I would have. You bring the numbers; we bring the means to arm them and feed them. Apart, the two of us are each a target he can pick off at his leisure. Together we’re a wall he’d have to think twice before throwing himself against, and a war chest that won’t run dry inside a single season."

"Defense that runs in both directions," Su Han said. "If they come for your mountain, Frostmoon marches. If they come for the Ridge, Skyedge marches the same day. I’ll not put my seal to anything that shelters one house and leaves the other to bleed alone."

"Both directions," Lin Zhen said. "I wouldn’t have offered it any other way."

Min spoke into the pause, in the measured voice she kept for these matters. "There’s a third house worth folding in, should the two of you be willing. Greenvein has run cool toward us of late, I’ll grant, but their patriarch’s own daughter dwells in this sect as the patriarch’s third wife, and a thread like that can be warmed again with the right hand. Three houses standing behind the princess become a bloc the court can’t simply wave aside. Two of us make an alliance. Three of us begin to look like a side."

"Warm it," Su Han said. "The more banners the princess can hold up before the Emperor passes, the fewer of us will have to die proving the point to anyone afterward. How long do you reckon we have?"

"Months, not years," Lin Zhen said. "Past that I won’t pretend to read the man’s lungs for you. But when he goes, it’ll go quickly, and I’d far rather our ink were long dry by then."

By the time the candles had burned down a finger’s width, they had the bones of it laid bare on the table. Mutual defense, running both ways, sworn and sealed. One banner raised behind the Third Princess. Skyedge’s Dragonvein and silver flowing the one direction; Frostmoon’s disciples and battle-worn elders flowing back the other. Greenvein to be courted into a third corner. It was more than Lin Zhen had let himself hope for walking into the room: an alliance with a real chance of keeping his battered house upright through the storm climbing toward all of them.

Su Han let his elder fill the cups again, and there was the loose ease of a deal nearly closed in the way he eased back into his chair. But the man wasn’t finished, and Lin Zhen knew him far too well not to see the last piece coming before it left his mouth.

"That handles the houses." Su Han turned his cup, and the matchmaker’s gleam he’d worn all through the banquet came back into his eye. "Which leaves us the one knot we haven’t laid a finger on yet. The children."

Lin Zhen set his cup down. He had known it was coming since the moment the man’s gaze first trailed Xuan and the girl across the banquet floor.

"The children," he agreed. "Yes. I suppose we had better talk about the children."