"The whispers. they began not long after my father returned from the secret realm," Ye Wushang said, his voice low and tight. "There were rumors of a disagreement, a falling out among the elders. some even dared to suggest that my father had. changed."
**[System prompt: The host's suspicions are not entirely unfounded. Analysis of the available data suggests.]
"What is it?" Ye Wushang demanded, his hand tightening on the edge of the stone table until his knuckles turned white. "Tell me what you've found."
**[System prompt: Accessing restricted data requires expenditure of Luck points. Current balance: 200,000. Would the host like to proceed?]**
Two hundred thousand. it was the sum total of his current Luck point balance, currency that the system used to measure his potential and fuel his ascent to power. He had been hungering to burn those points to create an advantage in this deadly world he now called home. But the truth, he realized, cost money.
"Yes," he croaked, his voice a mere rasp. "The data. I need to know."
**[System prompt: Deducing 200,000 Luck points. Accessing restricted data. Data retrieved. Displaying information now.]**
The world around Ye Wushang shimmered, the familiar sights and sounds of the garden receding into the background as another scene replaced it in his mind's eye. He stood in a dark hall filled with incense and, with the distinctly metallic acrid tang, something else he could not identify. He knew the place, even as an incredulous thought crept into his mind: the ancestral hall of the Ye Family.
Yet, something was amiss. The air was charged with an almost palpable tension, the dancing flames of the ceremonial lanterns casting long shadows that seemed to writhe with a life all their own, unnatural and unsettling. And before the ancestral altar stood a figure he would never forget: his father, Ye Batian.
But this was not the imposing, charismatic man Ye Wushang had remembered from his boyhood. This Ye Batian seemed somehow shrunk, slouching over on his shoulders, moving awkwardly. And when he turned, his face was bathed in the dancing flame of the candlelight, and Ye Wushang gave a gasp.
His father's eyes, which had once burned so warmly and brightly with life, now seemed to burn with a cold, malignant light. His features, while unmistakably his own, seemed sharper, more angular, as if carved by some unseen hand. And from him, an aura of threat hung palpable, a squeezing pressure that made it hard for Ye Wushang to breathe.
"Father?" he whispered, his voice quivering.
But the form in front of him did not speak. Instead, it flung up a hand, stiff and spasmodic, and stabbed Ye Wushang with a finger.
**[System alert: Caution. Temporal anomaly identified. The host's continued presence in this time line is ill-advised.]"]
He started seeing the scene before him breaking down, the dark hall shattering into pieces as it became a kaleidoscope of light and darkness. Ye Wushang stumbled backward, his chest thudding as his mind tried to grasp what had just happened.
His father. had been possessed. Of what, he couldn't say for sure, but the system's warning, the chilling aura he had sensed, left no doubt in his mind. Something had gone terribly wrong in that secret realm, something that had followed his father back, twisting him from within, warping his very essence.
And as the final wisps of that vision disappeared, to be replaced by the familiar sights and sounds of the garden, Ye Wushang knew that the whispers he had dismissed as mere rumour held a terrifying truth. He was the last son left behind from a fallen dynasty, but what's worse is that he's the one who stood alone to stop the dark emanation that had already devoured his father from dominating his family further and casting the entire Canglan Domain into darkness.