Chapter 26: A Show of Force

Li Kuan had failed to wait for Changsun and Li Tai to return, so he and his younger sister Changle had lunch together in the Sweet Dew Hall.

“Changle, your brother has a question for you.” Having just helped his sister finish half a bowl of greens, Li Kuan suddenly adopted a solemn expression. “Suppose one day your second brother became incredibly wealthy. What would you want him to give you?”

“Second Brother, are you planning to sneak into Father’s private treasury again?” The little girl had just helped the maid beside her clear away the dishes. Now she turned and eyed Li Kuan suspiciously.

In her experience, whenever her second brother began coveting their father’s priceless treasures, he always said something similar.

“Come now! Do I really spend all day coveting those few trifles our father has?” Li Kuan laughed and sat down beside his sister. In a mysterious tone, he continued, “Your second brother has suddenly thought of a wonderful way to make money. I might even become richer than an entire kingdom someday.”

Hearing this, Changle reached out and placed a small hand against her brother’s forehead.

“Second Brother, have you caught a chill? Why are you talking nonsense in broad daylight?”

“Ah…”

Looking at his sister’s concerned expression, Li Kuan sighed helplessly. It truly was not that he, as her brother, lacked loyalty.

“All right, just pretend your brother ate too much and started daydreaming.” Li Kuan rose and gazed outside the hall, his expression apparently deep in thought. “Little sister, what if I were to leave the palace later—”

“Father will certainly have your legs broken.”

The little girl had no intention of following her brother’s lead. Whenever her second brother spoke in that hesitant, roundabout manner, it meant he was about to cause trouble—and that it was time for Changle, his little sister, to step forward and cover for him.

However, with troubled times upon them and having recently received instructions from Changsun, Princess Changle naturally did not want her brother creating any more problems.

“He dares!” Li Kuan stiffened his neck and declared loudly. “I’ll go straight to Grandfather and complain. I refuse to believe Grandfather wouldn’t stand up for me!”

“Second Brother!” Princess Changle frowned at him. For the first time, the little girl truly experienced the full force of her brother’s shameless stubbornness.

“I’m joking, I’m joking.” Li Kuan knew that, unlike himself, who had been raised beside his grandmother from childhood, his elder brother Li Chengqian and his younger siblings all regarded their father, Emperor Li Er, with genuine awe and reverence.

After soothing his sister for a while longer, Li Kuan decided that he would return to the academy for his afternoon lessons. Still, when it came to finding a way to sell this batch of glassware, he truly needed to hurry and begin making arrangements.

Seven days later, in Chang’an, at Silver Moon Tower.

A carriage came to a slow stop outside the gambling house. The person who stepped down was dressed in a remarkably strange fashion. He wore a black robe from head to toe, and more than half of his face was concealed beneath a black cloth.

“I wish to see the person in charge.”

After tossing a pouch of copper coins to the doorkeeper, the man in black remained where he was and waited while the suspicious guard went inside to summon the manager.

Before long, the portly manager, whose spirits had been high lately thanks to recent good fortune, emerged from the building with a broad smile.

“Esteemed guest, how may I serve you?”

“I have the glassware you want. A great deal of it.” As he spoke, the man in black drew a blue-green glass thumb ring from his robes and placed it in the fat manager’s hand. “In three days, I will come and inform you of the auction’s location. Prepare the silver in advance. This is a token of goodwill.”

“What… what did you say?”

The fat manager could scarcely believe his ears.

His gaze rested on the glass thumb ring lying quietly in the other man’s palm, flickering between uncertainty and calculation.

He did not reach out to take it. Instead, after scrutinizing the man in black once more, he gave a cold laugh.

“Friend, the young master of the Prince of Hejian’s household was the one who sold me those glass cups. He told me he had bought them from a caravan of foreign merchants. But judging by your appearance, you seem to be a native of the Tang.”

“Heh…”

The man in black gave a cold laugh. His voice was somewhat hoarse.

“My master has the goods, and you have the silver. If there is a deal to be made, then make it. If not, I will find someone else. In any case, my master has not approached only you about the auction three days from now.”

At this, the fat manager narrowed his eyes instinctively.

“You’re not afraid I’ll report you to the authorities?”

His words were simple, but the threat beneath them was perfectly clear.

Regardless of how that batch of glassware had come into their hands, the very fact that the man was hiding his face was enough for him to conclude that the goods had an illegitimate origin.

What? They dared deny it?

Unfortunately, if he said the goods had been illicitly obtained, then illicitly obtained they would be deemed.

The prestige of the Five Surnames and Seven Great Houses gave him the confidence to speak so arrogantly.

What could they possibly do to him?

The arrogance on the manager’s face at that moment seemed almost to spell out the words “the Taiyuan Wang clan.”

The atmosphere grew tense, as if swords had been drawn.

“Second Brother… make sure you have your target before you act.”

“Don’t worry! That just now was an accident…”

At the same time, inside the imperial palace, Li Kuan was fishing for golden carp in the imperial garden with his younger brother Li Tai. A trace of cold laughter curled at the corner of his mouth.

With a slight movement of his thoughts, dozens of miles away, the man in black outside Silver Moon Tower continued slowly:

“Has your Taiyuan Wang clan begun to take itself a little too seriously?”

The moment those words were spoken, bewilderment appeared on the fat manager’s face for the first time. It was quickly replaced by fury.

“Ha! Where did this ignorant little thug come from? Do you really take this place for a charity hall?” the manager snarled.

As soon as his voice fell, more than a dozen burly men emerged from the building and slowly surrounded the man in black.

“Care for a little practice?” one of the leading brutes asked mockingly, cocking his head at him.

“Second Brother! Second Brother!”

“I saw it, I saw it…”

“Take it slower this time. Make sure you’ve got your target!”

Inside the imperial palace, Li Kuan had just picked up a landing net to help his younger brother catch a fish for the second time. Dividing his attention between two places, he once again issued an order to the man in black.

Over the past several days, Li Kuan had left the palace only once, and he had done only one thing.

He had gone to the residence of his maternal uncle, Changsun Wuji, and used a hundred-square-zhang expanse of empty land within his summoning space—land capable of storing objects freely—to spirit more than ten thousand pounds of raw iron out of the Changsun family’s warehouse without a sound.

There was no other way. His enterprise was only just getting started, and this eldest nephew could do little more than rely on his uncle’s assistance to get things moving.

With those ten thousand pounds of raw iron, the blast furnace that had originally stood in the estate outside the city finally had a purpose.

Thus, when the burly man issued his provocation, the man in black vanished in a blur. In the next instant, he had rushed before the brute, and a gleaming military dagger was pressed against the man’s throat.

“What did you just say?”

In the blink of an eye, the fat manager saw the man in black, faced with a full encirclement, advance instead of retreating. He charged straight into the crowd and, before anyone had time to recover, placed his weapon against the throat of the manager’s most capable enforcer, Dragon Three.

“Easy… easy, hero…”

Dragon Three had originally served as an auxiliary soldier. He had fought on battlefields and seen blood. Though he now worked as an enforcer for the gambling house, he had never allowed his martial skills to deteriorate.

Yet after that brief exchange, he knew that his employer had provoked someone who should never have been provoked.

“This is Chang’an, a crowded marketplace! You dare kill someone?” Seeing that the man in black had seemingly thrown himself into the encirclement, only to effortlessly subdue one of his men, the fat manager’s face turned utterly grim.

But the other man acted as though he had not heard him at all. Instead, he continued speaking to Dragon Three.

“Did you just call me ‘Father’?”

Though surrounded on every side, the man in black seemed completely unaware of it. His expression remained indifferent and his words insolent, yet for some inexplicable reason, he exerted immense pressure on everyone around him.