A Phoenix Rising - An Untamed Story (Book 1 In Series)

Chapter 16

Wei Ying slid the door to their room shut. "Lan Zhan," he admonished. "I know you well enough to know the difference between you not talking because you have nothing important to say and you not talking when there's something that needs to be said." Lan Zhan's jaw clenched, but his eyes remained firmly fixed on the floor. "Talk to me," Wei Ying implored. "Whatever it is, I'll fix it. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it."

"I miscalculated," Lan Zhan finally admitted.

"What?" Wei Ying was thoroughly confused. "I thought you were mad at me for ignoring you the last few days...."

"Before we married, I talked to Brother. I asked him for advice on how to make the other Sect leaders take you seriously. It was his idea to have you introduced right before me at the banquet. His idea to reveal the phoenixes on our robes. And once you had my mother's core, he suggested goading someone into someone challenging you to a fight to prove you had a core, to stop the rumors that you gave yours to Jiang Cheng. I agreed. I thought it would protect you."

"That was all planned."

"More or less, yes."

"What was the end goal?" Wei Ying asked flatly.

"XiChen said you would establish the YilingWei Sect sooner or later, so...."

"So you two decided to announce it for me?" Wei Ying stumbled to their bed and sank onto it holding his head in his hands. "Shit, Lan Zhan." If they hated me before for protecting the Wen Clan, how much worse will it be for establishing my own sect and proclaiming it the most powerful? They hated the Wen not only for their arrogance and bullying, but for trying to be overlords of all the cultivation clans. They hated Jin GuangShan and Jin GuangYao for the same reason. I wasn't even trying to proclaim myself anything, and now here I am.... Grandmaster of a huge Sect; there must be more than a thousand of my pretend disciples wandering around. And with me still cultivating resentful energy.... Add Wen Qing returning from the dead.... They're going to want me dead. Again.

"Yes."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I thought you knew!"

Wei Ying looked up through his fingers at his husband. "Do you think I would have taken Li MeiLi on as a disciple if I had known you established the YilingWei Sect for me?"

"That's when I realized you didn't know...."

"And now there's that training ground? Lan Zhan... we can't go on a wedding trip any more...." He flopped onto his back. "How many do you think have figured it out?"

"Not many. I don't think Jiang Cheng has. Nie HuaiSang might have.... I saw him looking at us with a calculating expression during the banquet."

"Shit." Wei Ying sighed. "If Nie HuaiSang knows.... How much of what he did to Jin GuangYao was revenge for his brother? And how much was to keep the Nie relevant after Nie MingJue's death? He's probably going to work against us, you know. We need to do some damage control before he gets everyone worked up...."

"I'm sorry, Wei Ying." Lan Zhan thought about kneeling to his husband.

"It's fine," Wei Ying was thinking furiously. The Nie Clan was not gaining new disciples at the rate needed to keep its numbers up. In a few years at most, one of the smaller clans would overtake the Nie in terms of people and power and Nie HuaiSang would find himself demoted to the Sect leader of a lesser Sect. So it was safe to assume that Nie HuaiSang was fighting to keep the Nie Clan in its precarious position within the major Sects.... He would get to everyone who had previously been against the Yiling Patriarch. It wouldn't take much to reanimate their hostility....