Chapter 8: The Price of Being First
The city tried to crown him before he even reached the street.
As Lin Qiu stepped through the arena gates, a golden flying chariot drawn by four qilin-shaped puppets descended from the sky. Banners of the City Lord's mansion snapped in the wind. A fat eunuch in imperial yellow leapt down and attempted to kowtow in mid-air.
"Divine Son Lin! The City Lord invites—"
Lin Qiu kept walking. The chariot veered to follow him like a lost dog.
Next came the merchant clans. Twenty clan heads lined the avenue on their knees, offering spirit stones the size of fists, contracts written in phoenix blood, even daughters and sons wrapped in silk. One old woman from the Pill Cauldron Association tried to stuff a ninth-grade Purple Sun Cauldron into his arms. The thing weighed three thousand jin and was still hot from the forge.
Lin Qiu sidestepped them all.
By the time he reached the Su compound, half the city was trailing behind him like a funeral procession in reverse.
Su Ling waited at the gate, arms folded, trying not to laugh.
"You look like a man walking in front of his own parade."
"I'm hungry," Lin Qiu said.
That was all the warning the kitchen staff got.
He ate three entire tables of food, drank two jars of spirit monkey wine, and then fell asleep sitting upright at the table, cheek on his arm like any exhausted child.
Su Tianhao stood guard personally so no one would dare disturb him.
When he woke four hours later, the sun was setting violet and gold over the city, and Su Ling was sitting across from him reading a jade slip titled "Known Monsters of the Current Generation."
She didn't look up.
"You broke the record board," she said. "The old first place was a direct descendant of the current Blood Flame Holy Son. He reached 8,114 steps at age sixteen. You doubled his score at twelve. They're calling you the Thousand-Year Anomaly."
Lin Qiu rubbed his face. "I was aiming for ten thousand steps. The last one didn't count."
Su Ling finally met his eyes. "You're insane. And everyone wants a piece of you now. The bad kind of piece."
She slid a stack of jade invitation cards across the table. They glittered with sect seals, clan crests, imperial edicts. One even had the personal mark of the Crown Prince of the Great Qian Empire.
"Most of these are poisoned," she said flatly. "Not the cards—the meetings. Half the city wants to bind you with contracts, marriages, soul oaths. The other half wants to dissect you and see how thunder tastes."
Lin Qiu picked up the Violet Heaven Palace card. It was plain black iron, no decoration, only nine lightning-shaped characters burned deep:
Nine days from now.
Nine Tribulations Pagoda.
Come alone or not at all.
—Lei Wujing
He closed his fist. The card melted into slag.
"I'll be there," he said.
Su Ling watched the molten iron drip between his fingers without flinching.
"There's something else." She hesitated. "A death list started circulating an hour ago. Top spot: Lin Qiu, twelve years old, independent. Bounty: one hundred thousand high-grade spirit stones alive, fifty thousand dead. Issued anonymously, but the handwriting matches a steward of the Zhao Imperial Clan."
Lin Qiu's expression didn't change.
"Let them come."
Night fell.
He climbed to the roof again, sat cross-legged under the stars, and began cultivating.
The second silver star grew steadily, now the size of a soybean. Yin thunder gathered above the compound like a silent storm no one else could see.
At midnight, the first assassin arrived.
A shadow slipped over the wall—peak Foundation Establishment, clad in night clothes that devoured light. Invisible to spiritual sense. Poisoned needles between each finger.
He never made it past the courtyard gate.
The moment he crossed the threshold, every talisman in the compound detonated at once. Not the Su Clan's talismans—the ones Lin Qiu had carved into the air itself while eating dinner.
A net of violet lightning snapped shut.
The assassin had time for one choked scream before he was reduced to carbon etched with a perfect nine-petaled lightning flower.
The smell of cooked meat drifted over the walls.
Five more came before dawn.
All of them became charcoal statues in various dramatic poses.
By morning the street outside the Su compound was lined with six perfect lightning-sculpted corpses. Someone had thoughtfully hung a sign around the neck of the first:
Property of Lin Qiu.
Trespassers will be enlightened.
No one else tried that night.
The next eight days passed in a strange calm.
Lin Qiu trained.
He ran laps around the city on bolts of lightning until the city guard stopped trying to chase him for "disturbing the peace."
He sat under the compound's spirit waterfall and let ten thousand jin of water pressure hammer his body until his skin rang like bronze.
He sparred with Su Tianhao—Foundation Establishment peak versus a boy who had never formally cultivated before the pine struck him—and left the older man coughing blood and laughing about "the good old days when monsters were polite."
At night he refined thunder.
The silver star grew to the size of a dragon's eye. A third star—black as the void between constellations—began to form.
Yang thunder. Yin thunder. Annihilation thunder.
Three stars. Three calamities.
On the ninth night, the sky above the Su compound cracked open.
A single bolt of pure tribulation lightning—gold, imperial, furious—descended toward Lin Qiu's head.
Natural heavenly tribulation for forming a forbidden dantian.
Su Tianhao paled and tried to raise the clan's grand array.
Lin Qiu lifted one hand.
"Mine."
He opened his mouth and swallowed the tribulation bolt whole.
The night turned violet for three heartbeats.
When vision returned, Lin Qiu stood untouched, hair floating as though underwater, three stars orbiting slowly inside his transparent dantian like a miniature galaxy.
He exhaled.
The exhaled breath became a violet dragon that circled the compound once and dissolved into sparks.
Somewhere far away, the tribulation clouds that should have persisted for hours simply… gave up and drifted apart.
Lin Qiu opened his eyes.
Violet. Silver. Black.
Three colors. Three dooms.
He looked toward the floating islands of the four sects on the horizon.
"Time to go," he said."
Su Ling was waiting at the gate in traveling robes, a new sword at her hip.
He raised an eyebrow.
"I'm coming with you," she said. "Someone has to keep count of how many immortals you offend."
Lin Qiu considered, then nodded once.
Together they walked out of the compound.
Behind them, every servant, guard, and elder of the Su Clan knelt in the courtyard and kowtowed three times—not to the clan head, but to the barefoot boy who had turned their home into a graveyard for assassins.
The gates closed.
Ahead, the Nine Tribulations Pagoda waited on its floating island, black against the dawn, chains of real heavenly lightning binding it to the earth so it could not escape what was coming.
Lin Qiu cracked his knuckles.
Lightning answered from a clear sky.
"Let's see," he said, voice soft, almost gentle, "how many floors a Thunder Monarch needs to break before the heavens learn to beg."
He took one step.
The city trembled.
And the storm began to walk.
To be continued…