Return of Black Lotus system:Taming Cheating Male Leads

Chapter 425: Chapter-425

With the lighthearted moment over, the Grandfather turned his attention back to the bleeding groom on the ground. He looked at Soram as if he were looking at a piece of dog excrement stuck to his boot.

"You," the Old Marquis growled, his deep voice rumbling with danger. "Did you not hear my granddaughter? Get lost."

Soram looked up, trembling in disbelief. "M-My Lord... but I—"

Before the pathetic groom could finish, the Marquis—Heena’s father—hurriedly stepped in front of him. He puffed out his chest, desperately trying to maintain his dignified aura, even though his legs were visibly trembling under his father’s gaze.

"Father, please," the Marquis pleaded.

The Old Marquis looked at his son with utter, unadulterated contempt. "What? A pathetic boy who cannot even block a single strike from my granddaughter wants to marry her, and you are actually supporting this garbage?"

The Marquis lowered his head, trying to spin the narrative. "Soram only lost because he is a chivalrous knight. He naturally could not bring himself to use a real sword against Seera. It is a sign of his good character, right, Father?"

The Grandfather took a slow, deliberate step forward.

’’SMACK!’’

The sound echoed like a gunshot across the courtyard. The Old Marquis didn’t hold back. He backhanded his own son directly across the face in front of the entire staff, the grooms, and the guards.

The Marquis stumbled hard, clutching his rapidly swelling cheek in absolute shock.

In that single second, the lovable, pouting grandfather entirely vanished. A heavy, suffocating, dead-eyed murderous aura erupted from the Old Marquis. It was the terrifying presence of a man who had slaughtered thousands, pressing down so heavily that several servants buckled to their knees, unable to breathe.

"Do you honestly think you have become the true master of this house?" the Grandfather snarled, his voice dripping with pure disgust. "This estate belongs to ’me’. This Marquisate is ’mine’, not yours to ruin. Who the hell do you think you are to force such an incompetent bastard onto my granddaughter as a son-in-law?"

The Old Marquis grabbed his son by the collar of his expensive robes, hauling him upward.

"I have not beaten you to death yet, and that is already my utmost mercy," the Grandfather spat. "You were supposed to be kneeling in the Ancestral Hall reflecting on your absolute failure as a father, yet you dare to come out here and speak? What, did you think this old man lost his strength? Did you think I no longer have the power to break you?"

The Marquis trembled violently, dropping to his knees the second his father let go of his robes. "N-No, Father! That is not what I meant! I—"

"When you brought these four stray dogs into my house," the Grandfather interrupted, his voice echoing like thunder, "I did not slaughter them immediately only because my granddaughter found them amusing! I thought she wanted to play with them. But that does not give you the permission to play with her life!"

The Old Marquis pointed a massive, scarred finger directly at Heena.

> "She is the sole heiress I have chosen. She is the ultimate, rightful owner of this entire Marquisate! If you ever think you have the guts to slap her, or even raise a hand against her again... ’’I will personally break your arms and gouge out the eyes that dared to glare at her.’’"

>

The Grandfather then turned his terrifying gaze to Soram, who was openly weeping on the ground.

"And you," the Old Marquis scoffed. "I have never seen such a pathetic excuse for a swordsman. You claim you held back because she is a lady? Do you think I am as blind as my useless son? I saw your footwork. You were trying to hit her, and you simply couldn’t."

He looked back down at the Marquis, his eyes completely devoid of paternal warmth.

"Remember this," the Grandfather promised softly, a tone far more terrifying than his yelling. "If I wanted to, I could crumble your pitiful lives into dust right now. I am only restraining myself because it is time for my wife to rest. If not for her peace of mind, I would have dragged every single one of you down into the dungeons."

He leaned in close to his son. "And you know my methods of torture quite well, don’t you, my dear son? You have seen them since you were a boy."

The Marquis violently shuddered. All the blood drained from his face, leaving him as pale as a corpse.

Of course he knew.

A horrifying memory from when he was thirteen years old violently resurfaced in his mind. He had thrown a childish tantrum and dared to openly defy his mother, deeply angering her. That very night, his father had grabbed him by the back of his neck and dragged him down into the pitch-black dungeons beneath the estate.

His father hadn’t laid a single finger on him that night. Instead, he forced his young son to watch what happened to the people who dared to make his wife unhappy.

The Marquis remembered watching an enemy assassin strapped to a chair. He remembered his father, entirely devoid of emotion, using a pair of iron tongs to slowly pluck out the man’s fingernails one by one. He remembered the sickening ’crunch’ of a heavy screwdriver being driven straight through the assassin’s palms, pinning his hands to the wooden armrests.

Then came the ’Death Whip’. It was a heavy leather lash entirely wrapped in jagged iron spikes. When his father struck the assassin and violently twisted his wrist, the spikes dug deep into the flesh, literally ripping chunks of muscle from the bone.

Afterward, the guards had poured concentrated saltwater and crushed chili directly into the open, gaping wounds. And finally, as the ultimate psychological break, they had unleashed a colony of ten thousand biting ants over the man’s raw, flayed body.

That was just the baseline. That was the ’merciful’ route his father took when he was only mildly irritated.

The Marquis stared at the cobblestones, his heart hammering against his ribs in sheer, animalistic panic. He knew the absolute truth: his father loved his mother to the point of literal madness. And now that his mother had transferred all of her obsessive, protective love onto Heena... the Grandfather would not hesitate for a single fraction of a second to butcher his own son to keep them happy.

Desperate, terrified, and completely out of options, the Marquis slowly turned his head to look at his mother, silently begging for salvation.

But the Grand Madam simply stared back down at him. Her eyes were not the eyes of a mother looking at her child. They were entirely dead, completely cold, and devoid of any lingering affection.

She was looking at him exactly the way one looks at a disgusting, squirming cockroach right before stepping on it.

Seeing that look of absolute, chilling indifference in his mother’s eyes, the last remaining shred of the Marquis’s pride shattered into a million irreparable pieces.

​His mother had always been his absolute shield against his father’s terrifying wrath. Even when he was a disappointment, even when he failed his martial arts exams, she had always protected him. But now, that shield was completely gone. He had crossed the one line he could never uncross: he had threatened the only thing in the world she currently valued.