Chapter 143: Lu Feng’s First Torture

"Let’s try this again," Lu Feng said, crouching down until he was roughly level with the two bound men. "What were you actually sent here to find?"

Silence answered him, the same stubborn, tight lipped silence that had met every question Old Ma had apparently thrown at them over the past two days.

One of them, the younger looking of the pair, actually turned his face away entirely, as though refusing to meet Lu Feng’s eyes might somehow make the question disappear along with it.

Lu Feng sighed, long and theatrical, and rose back to his feet. "I hate to do this. I want you both to understand that. But you haven’t given me much choice."

He crossed to the fire Old Ma had built, picked up the iron rod still lying beside it, and fed its end back into the flames.

The effect was immediate. Both prisoners tensed, shoulders drawing up tight, eyes fixed on the rod as it settled into the coals. Neither spoke yet, though the stubbornness in their expressions had started to fray visibly at the edges.

If Lu Feng was honest with himself, some small, uncomfortable part of him had always wondered what it might feel like to actually do something like this. He’d never had reason to find out before, back when his life had consisted of little more than hiding from his own family’s contempt.

Standing here now, with two men who’d tried to violate his household and would very likely have hurt Han Lin given half the chance, he found he didn’t have to search very hard for the will to see it through.

There was something almost clinical about the way he watched himself do it, a distant part of his mind observing the rest of him from somewhere just outside his own body, cataloguing the whole process the way he might have studied a new pill formula. It unsettled him, faintly, that he could feel that detached about it. But it didn’t stop him.

He watched the rod shift slowly from dull black toward a deeper, angrier red.

One of the prisoners cleared his throat, the sound rough and hesitant. "Wait, I..."

"No," Lu Feng said, cutting him off without looking away from the fire. "There’s no reason to speak yet. I’m only going to use this on one of you, so it doesn’t much matter which of you talks first, does it. You can both sit there and wait it out a little longer, if that’s what you’d prefer."

The man’s mouth snapped shut, and an uneasy quiet settled back over the small enclosure, broken only by the crackle of the fire and the faint hiss of the rod’s tip beginning to glow.

By the time Lu Feng judged it ready, drawing it free of the coals in one smooth motion, the tip burned a bright, furious orange. He turned toward the two of them, letting the light of it catch their faces.

"I confess," the same prisoner blurted immediately, words tumbling out fast now that the moment had actually arrived. "We were sent here for a book. A ledger. The previous owner of this estate was believed to have hidden it somewhere on the grounds before the property changed hands."

"What kind of ledger?" Lu Feng asked, keeping his voice level.

"I don’t know. Truly, I don’t. We weren’t told what was in it, only that we needed to find it and bring it back." The man’s eyes darted toward the glowing iron and back again. "That’s the truth. All of it. I swear it."

Lu Feng studied him a moment longer, then turned his attention to the second prisoner, who had gone visibly pale, his breathing shallow and quick.

"Is that true?" Lu Feng asked him directly.

The man nodded, fast and jerky, apparently past the point of caring which of them had broken the silence first.

Lu Feng scratched idly at the back of his head, glancing down at the still glowing iron in his hand. He’d gotten what he wanted. There was no real need to follow through on the rest of it now.

But he’d said what he’d said, and heated the iron for exactly this purpose, and something stubborn in him refused to let the moment pass without consequence.

He turned toward the prisoner who hadn’t spoken first, the one who’d simply nodded along a beat too late to matter, and shrugged.

"You should have spoken up at the same time he did," Lu Feng said, almost apologetic, and pressed the hot iron against the man’s forearm.

The scream that tore out of him was raw, animal, echoing off the enclosure’s bare walls, and Lu Feng held the contact a moment longer than strictly necessary before finally pulling it away, keeping his expression carefully blank throughout.

Inside, something twisted uncomfortably.

Torture, it turned out, wasn’t something he had any particular talent or taste for, whatever grim curiosity had briefly convinced him otherwise. He doubted he’d choose to do this again if there was any way around it. But he also knew, watching the man slump against the wall, that this wasn’t a road he regretted walking, not entirely.

If Iron Fang’s men had actually succeeded in dragging Han Lin away from that market street, this was the kind of pain she might have faced, or something worse, or something entirely different depending on what use they’d have found for her. He didn’t let himself dwell too long on which possibility disturbed him most.

They’d been fortunate. Ye Chenxue had been there. That single fact had made all the difference between Han Lin coming home shaken but unharmed and Han Lin not coming home at all.

He thought of her sitting at the kitchen window earlier that day, scallions in her lap, laughing easily with Aunt Gao and the others as though the world outside these walls held nothing more dangerous than a difficult recipe.

That image sat uneasily beside the one currently in front of him, the unconscious prisoner slumped against the wall, and he found himself gripping the cooling iron a little tighter than necessary.

But that thought led directly into another one, colder and considerably harder to shake. Ye Chenxue wouldn’t always be standing beside her. Their enemies wouldn’t stay this crude forever either, four hired thugs and a stranger with a vial of poison.

Eventually, someone stronger would come looking, someone cunning enough not to be stopped by basic martial arts alone, and Han Lin, gentle, ordinary Han Lin with no cultivation of her own, would be standing in the middle of it with nothing but her own wits to rely on.

The iron had cooled in his hand by the time he noticed, the unconscious prisoner’s eyes rolled back white, his body gone slack against the wall, mercifully past the point of feeling anything further.

Lu Feng shook his head slowly, setting the cooled rod aside.

He didn’t know whether Han Lin carried any aptitude for cultivation the way Ye Chenxue did, and even if she did, his own investment system had made painfully clear she wasn’t a valid target for it, whatever exactly determined that particular boundary. He couldn’t simply pour resources into her the way he had with Ye Chenxue and watch her grow stronger in return.

But there was another path, one that didn’t depend on cultivation at all. If he couldn’t make her a fighter, he could make her nearly impossible to hurt instead.

The right defensive array, woven properly into something she carried or wore, might matter more than any amount of offensive strength ever would. If nothing could reach her in the first place, it hardly mattered whether she could strike back.

It was a simpler problem to solve, in some ways, than trying to force a cultivation path onto someone who might not have any aptitude for it at all. Arrays could be bought, commissioned, refined with enough coin and the right craftsman. Aptitude either existed in a person or it didn’t, and no amount of gold could manufacture what wasn’t already there.

He was still curious, though, about the other possibility, whether some hidden aptitude for cultivation lay dormant in her the way his own strange abilities had, waiting for the right nudge to surface. He had no idea how such a thing was properly tested.

His own path into all of this had never followed any route he recognized from the manuals and techniques everyone else in this world seemed to train by. When Ye Chenxue returned from Lin Laifu’s estate, he decided, he’d ask her plainly whether such a test even existed, and whether it was something they could safely attempt.

Satisfied he’d gotten what he needed for now, Lu Feng turned back toward the still conscious prisoner, who watched him with wary, exhausted eyes.

"Describe the book to me," Lu Feng said. "Everything you remember about how it looks."

The man swallowed hard before answering. "Dark leather cover. Old, worn at the edges. There’s a brass strip reinforcing the spine, and a crest pressed into the front, some kind of coiled snake wrapped around what looked like a broken anvil."

Lu Feng kept his expression carefully neutral, nodding slowly as though turning the description over for the first time. "I haven’t come across anything matching that description. Not on these grounds, at least."

It was, of course, a lie, and not a particularly convincing one if anyone in the room had reason to doubt it. Fortunately, neither prisoner was in any condition to press the matter further.

It was at that exact moment that Bai Bao rounded the corner into the small enclosure, opening his mouth to deliver his report before the sight in front of him stopped the words in his throat entirely. His eyes moved from the discarded iron rod, still faintly warm, to the unconscious prisoner slumped against the wall, the angry burn mark visible along his forearm, and back to Lu Feng’s carefully composed expression.

He hesitated, clearly uncertain whether to ask, or simply pretend he hadn’t seen it at all.

Lu Feng noticed the hesitation immediately. "Go ahead and say it."

"The burn," Bai Bao said carefully. "What happened?"

"He had some kind of metal implant, hidden beneath the skin," Lu Feng said smoothly, without missing a beat. "The iron pulled toward it the moment I brought it close. I had to burn it out of him myself, to keep it from spreading any further."

It was an obvious lie, transparent enough that Bai Bao’s eyebrows twitched faintly at the explanation. But there was nothing to be gained by challenging it, not here, not now, and Bai Bao clearly understood that well enough to let it pass without comment.

"Understood, Young Master," he said instead, and moved on to what he’d actually come to report. "The carriage has left. Ye Chenxue and Old Ma are on their way to Lin Laifu’s estate now, to deliver your letter."

Lu Feng nodded, satisfied, and tossed the cooled iron rod aside with a dull clatter against the packed dirt floor. He turned to leave, already thinking ahead toward what came next, then paused a few steps short of the doorway and glanced back.

"Separate the two of them," he said. "Different rooms, different guards if you can spare them. I have further plans for our two guests, and I’d rather they not have the chance to compare notes in the meantime."

"Understood," Bai Bao said again, already moving to see it done.

Lu Feng left without another word, the weight of everything he’d just learned, and everything he still needed to decide, settling heavily onto his shoulders as he made his way back across the quiet estate.

Behind him, he heard Bai Bao already calling for another guard to help move the unconscious prisoner, his voice brisk and businesslike, as though hauling a burned, half conscious man between rooms was simply one more ordinary task to check off before the day was done. Lu Feng supposed, in this household, it very nearly was.

======================

======================

A/N: Hello dear readers. We now have a discord server!!

To join, use the link: