Perspective: Zhuge Su Yeon
The Shu Clan should be thanking me for my mercy.
After all, I hadn't killed anyone.
Not a single one of them.
And considering how they had interrupted my breakfast, that alone should count as an act of imperial generosity.
But I was certain none of them would ever thank me.
Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
Men, women, young and old — all of them lay on the ground, struggling to breathe, trying to understand what had happened.
Some attempted to rise, but their legs no longer obeyed.
Others simply wept in silence.
And I knew why.
They weren't feeling pain.
They were feeling emptiness.
The same emptiness that fills a body when its cultivation base collapses — when the dantian, the spiritual core that sustains a cultivator's Qi, is reduced to dust.
Yes, they were still alive.
But what made them powerful was gone forever.
I had completely destroyed their cultivation bases.
Without exception.
The Shu Clan hadn't lost a single life today — but they had lost something infinitely more important than life itself:
they had lost the right to call themselves a clan.
They were no longer the second pillar of Zhuge Island — just beneath the Imperial Clan — but had become what they had always been inside:
a gathering of powerless mortals.
No power. No respect. No future.
Now, they ranked below even the palace servants.
And the strangest part was that, deep down, I felt no pride in it.
Only inevitability.
The world of cultivation is simple: the strong live; the weak are hunted.
And the Shu Clan, who had feasted on their arrogance for decades, would now learn the bitter taste of being prey.
For years, they had made enemies across the island — minor clans, merchants, even common families crushed under their ambition.
Today, all those enemies were smiling without knowing why.
Because tomorrow, the Shu Clan would cease to exist.
Even so, I stood by my decision.
Not out of cruelty.
Not out of pleasure.
And certainly not out of some abstract idea of divine justice.
My judgment was simple.
People with as little moral spine as the Shu — those who swear loyalty one day and bare their fangs the next — are unworthy of power.
Not true power.
The kind that shapes worlds and builds empires.
So I took it from them.
Just like that.
And honestly, I considered that merciful.
Because if the roles had been reversed — if the Zhuge Clan had been the defeated ones today — I doubted any member of the Shu would have granted me the same luxury.
They would have cut off our heads and paraded our corpses in the streets.
They would have turned my generals' blood into trophies and my sisters into bargaining chips.
They would have claimed the imperial palace as their new seat of power and sung songs of victory over my grave.
But I did none of that.
I merely let them live.
Without power, yes — but still alive.
But Yeon no longer wished to dwell on it.
The Shu Clan, in their pitiful state, no longer posed any threat.
They would simply become a reminder — a silent warning, carved in humiliation, to any other force on Zhuge Island foolish enough to make the same mistake.
The lesson was simple:
if even the largest wolf in the pack failed to bring down its prey, what chance did the smaller ones have?
The lesser clans — hungry for influence, lurking in the shadows, believing the throne to be vulnerable — would now understand the message clearly.
The empire was not an open game.
And he was not an emperor who entertained wagers.
Even so, Yeon knew that peace would only be temporary.
Because despite all the titles, walls, and loyalties, Zhuge Island was never truly an isolated empire.
It was merely a fragment —
a shard of ice drifting in a sea full of much larger monsters.
Beyond the storms and mists surrounding the archipelago, other empires existed.
Other colossi.
Nations whose cultivators reached realms so high that even the oldest Zhuge scrolls dared not describe them.
And none of those colossi would ignore the chance to seize a piece of influence, should the opportunity arise.
Yeon knew that.
And by the way his sister, Su Lan, looked at him from the palace balcony above, he knew she understood it perfectly as well.
That exchange of glances required no words.
It was the kind of silent conversation only two Zhuge could have — a shared calculation, a mutual deduction.
She was thinking exactly what he was.
The Shu Clan would never have dared march into the heart of the empire relying solely on their own strength.
Not even Lord Shu Lin was foolish enough to challenge a throne defended by four generals, a princess, and an emperor who carried the blood — and the instincts — of the man who once conquered the entire island.
No, this hadn't been mere ambition.
There was planning.
There was funding.
And, above all, there was support.
Yeon raised his hand to the spiritual ring on his finger.
With a light touch, a faint golden glow pulsed.
From within the ring, an object emerged — the sword that, minutes earlier, had been wielded by Shu Lin.
The spiritual metal emitted a sharp, almost living sound as it left the ring.
Even dormant, the blade vibrated with dense, deep Qi.
The inscriptions along its surface were foreign — not of Zhuge Island's tradition.
The energy it radiated was cold, ancient, far more refined than any spiritual weapon ever forged by the island's craftsmen.
Yeon studied it silently.
He could feel it.
It wasn't an ordinary weapon.
It was an Earth-grade spiritual sword — even if only of the lowest stage, it was the kind of relic that simply did not exist on Zhuge Island.
Only someone with access to the great cultivation centers of the mainland could have forged something like this.
The blade's gleam briefly reflected his face.
And for a moment, the emperor smiled — a restrained, humorless smile, the kind that appeared only when truth stopped being pleasant.
"So that's it…" he murmured.
"You really sold your pride for scraps."
He turned his wrist, and the sword vanished back into the ring.
Yet even stored away, its presence lingered — like a secret refusing to be forgotten.
The conclusion was obvious.
The Shu Clan hadn't acted alone.
They had received help from beyond.
The sword was the proof.
And now that he had already beaten the dog, as the elders would say, Yeon could only think of one thing:
How long would it take for the owner to show up, demanding answers?
The wind blew — cold, heavy — carrying the scent of burnt Qi that still clung to the battlefield.
In the distance, snow began to fall again, slowly covering the fallen bodies of the Shu cultivators — as if the world itself were trying to erase the evidence of what had just occurred.
Yeon lifted his gaze to the gray sky.
The calm he felt now was not peace.
It was the brief breath the world takes before the next storm.
And somehow, he knew —
this one would not be small.