Days passed without a single word from the young miss, causing worry to spread like wildfire through the estate. The white wolf was deeply concerned, but he knew his cultivation level was still far too low to interfere. The current king of the Tinding Kingdom was rumored to have long surpassed the Body-Forging Realm, which was the first major realm of the human cultivation path. In this domain, the only individuals known to have broken past this first realm were the five patriarchs of the ruling families and the king himself.
The elders of the Huang family debated launching an immediate attack on the royal palace, but calmer minds eventually prevailed. They decided to first send a senior elder to the palace to investigate the situation and attempt to secure the young miss's release through diplomacy. Since relations between the royal family and the five ruling clans had never been amicable, the elders didn't expect to accomplish much through words alone, but they had no other choice. Their only cultivator beyond the Body-Forging Realm, Patriarch Huang, was still away on his journey and not expected back for at least three more days.
The wolf's desperation tasted of bitter irony, a stinging proof that the strong do not merely lead, they systematically extinguish the weak. Driven by this harsh reality, the wolf cultivated with even greater effort, but his cultivation speed had begun to noticeably slow down. He wasn't surprised by this stagnation, as he knew the underlying reason all too well. Since his youth, the white wolf had been aware that he possessed the worst possible innate talent for energy absorption. Despite an unrivaled analytical genius that set him apart from the masses, he was trapped within a physical frame of infuriatingly mediocre aptitude. In fact, he had been thoroughly surprised when he was able to smoothly break into the mid-Bone-Forging stage on that first night. Though that initial success had promised greatness, the wolf soon found his progress frozen in time, devoid of even the faintest glimmer of further improvement. Strangely, he didn't panic; his meticulous mind seemed to have already anticipated and planned for this exact bottleneck.
The following day, the elder who had been dispatched to the palace returned with grim news: the first prince had imprisoned the young miss under the guise of taking her in as a royal concubine. Apparently, the prince had successfully requested a royal decree from his father, the king, officially declaring that the young miss was to become his sixth concubine.
This insulting news greatly angered the Huang family, which immediately began gearing up for an all-out war with the royal family. Though they knew challenging the royal bloodline without their patriarch was highly risky, the elders were entirely committed to a total, blood-soaked crusade should their lady not be restored to them. The first thing the elders did was send an urgent, high-priority message to the patriarch, informing him of the crisis. The second thing they did was request immediate alliance support from the other four ruling families.
Surprisingly, the other ruling families made their stance on the matter devastatingly clear: they wholeheartedly supported the royal family's decree, callously stating that it was Young Miss Huang's great fortune that the first prince had taken a liking to her.
The dismissive response from the other ruling clans pushed the Huang family past the point of no return. Young Miss Huang Biren and her elder sister, Huang Shengyi, were widely known to be the most beautiful women in the entire kingdom, with absolutely no equal. For the rival families to mock her situation in such a manner drove the Huang family to go completely out for blood. The great clan summoned all of its members from the various branches across the kingdom. They threw open the heavy doors of their hidden armories, distributing weapons and armor to every able-bodied fighter.
That night was rapidly shaping up to be a defining moment in the kingdom's history, the night that would decide the ultimate fate of the Tinding Kingdom and the five ruling families. The scent of impending war hung heavily in the air, and absolutely no one could stop the coming slaughter at this point.