Family Stealing System: your wife, mother, sister, all mine now!
Chapter 25: Power!!

Chapter 25: Power!!

[Qi Sparks: 16,307/10,000.]

[You can break through]

He blinked at the number, then blinked again, eyelids moving slow and gummy like they’d been glued shut and pried open. His throat was sand. His meridians hummed at a frequency that felt like a second heartbeat layered under the first, a bass note his bones were learning anew.

The lamp had died.

The room existed in shades of deep blue and charcoal, the window a grey rectangle where moonlight pushed through cloud cover and fell across the bed in a long slant.

He could taste the stone-ash in his mouth—dry, metallic, faintly sweet like chalk dissolved in copper—and when he ran his tongue over his teeth they felt loose, which was probably just exhaustion but still made him probe each one individually with the tip of his tongue before he was satisfied.

The sisters’ breathing had evened out in the other room. He hadn’t asked to know that. The knowing was just there now, a constant low-pressure awareness at the back of his skull.

’Breakthrough,’ he thought.

The command was barely a thought before his body answered.

The sixteen thousand sparks didn’t just ignite—they detonated. A column of white fire speared up his spine from tailbone to crown, and every tooth in his head vibrated at its own separate frequency, a mouthful of tuning forks all screaming different notes.

His jaw unlocked but no sound came out; the breath had been punched clean out of his lungs and the muscles in his throat had seized into something rigid and uncooperative.

Sweat broke across his forehead in a sheet, not warm but shock-cold, the kind of sweat that comes right before you pass out or throw up or both.

He didn’t pass out.

The white fire reached the top of his skull and burst outward into a corona that he felt rather than saw, a pressure-wave of pure Qi that flattened the ash on the desk into a grey pancake and sent a hairline crack racing across the ceiling plaster.

His fingers dug into his own thighs through the robe, knuckles blanching so hard the skin went translucent and showed the blue veins beneath.

The Qi in his body was no longer so calm—it was churning, thickening, grains of light precipitating out of the current like sugar crystallizing in syrup, until the whole mass had the consistency of honey left in a freezer.

Dense. Cold-burning. Alive.

Then the pressure released, not gradually but all at once, like a held breath finally exhaled.

Kian fell backward onto the mattress with his arms flung wide, chest heaving, the robe plastered to his skin with sweat that had gone lukewarm in the still air.

[Qi Building Stage 5 achieved.]

[Qi Sparks: 16,307/100,000.]

He stared at the requirement for Stage 6 and did not flinch. A hundred thousand sparks. The number was absurd, the kind of number that would have broken the old Kian’s spirit and sent him crawling back to whatever pitiful stone-ration the outer sect allotted its disciples.

But the old Kian hadn’t known about Twin Heart, hadn’t held a high-grade sphere in his palm and felt it dissolve into ninety sparks in three minutes flat.

At that rate—he did the math in his head, the numbers slotting together with a clarity that the breakthrough had sharpened—he needed a little over nine hundred high-grade stones.

Doable.

The real bottleneck was money, not time.

Kian sat up slowly, palms pressing into the mattress.

With a thought, he conjured a sword easily.

With his current QI, he could at least make ten of these swords before he would start to become exhausted.

But that wasn’t all.

If he was right, he should be able to do much more than just this as a stage five.

Kian wanted to try it out, but his head and meridians were aching like crazy. The ache in his skull was no longer a background hum but a throbbing, insistent thing, like someone had driven a hot needle through his temple and left it there to cool.

He pushed himself upright, the mattress shifting under his weight, and the room tilted slightly—just exhaustion, nothing more—before righting itself.

His bare feet found the cold floorboards, and the shock of it was almost pleasant.

The door slid open with a soft scrape, and the hallway beyond was dark except for the grey outline of the living room archway, moonlight pooling on the floor like spilled water.

He moved toward it without conscious decision, his hand trailing the wall for balance, the ancient wood cool and slightly tacky under his fingertips.

Slowly, he pushed open the girls’ door and walked in.

Jia and Mia were curled together on the wide bed—someone had dragged it closer to the window—and the moon had caught them in a long silver stripe that cut across the cushions.

Jia had her back to the room, her left leg hanging all the way up on the window, wearing what looked like white panties under his oversized shirt, too big and bunched at the shoulders.

Mia faced her, one arm draped over Jia’s side, her long hair unbound and spilling across the cushion in a dark wave that tangled with her sister’s shorter strands.

Neither stirred as he approached, their breathing slow and synchronized, two heartbeats ticking at different speeds against the quiet.

The bed groaned under his weight as he lowered himself onto the edge, and Mia’s eyelids fluttered—not opening, but the fine muscles around her mouth twitched, a dream-frown that smoothed when he pressed a hand to the space between them.

She shifted sideways, making room with the instinct of a body that recognized his, and he slid into the gap they’d left for him.

The pillows were warm where they’d been sleeping, an animal heat that soaked through his robe, and Jia’s back pressed against his chest as he settled.

Her body was smaller than he remembered—or maybe he was just more aware of it now, the sharp jut of her shoulder blade against his sternum, the way her spine curved to fit the hollow of his chest like two brackets nesting.

She smelled of the bath they had taken together, something floral and cheap that the sect provided in bulk, but under that was the warmer scent of her skin. He tucked his chin over her neck and gave her a deep kiss before settling back.

She groaned but did not wake up.

Neither did Mia, though her hand found his wrist in the dark and closed around it with a reflexive grip.

Next, he pulled Mia into a hug.

His meridians were still singing, a high thin note at the edge of perception, and the exhaustion in his skull had softened into something almost pleasant.

Yawn.

His hand moved before thought caught up, sliding under the hem of Jia’s oversized shirt to find the elastic of her panties, and then slid into it, palm cupping the soft mound of her.

The skin there was warmer than the rest of her—nested warmth, the kind that made his fingertips tingle after the cold of the spirit stones.

Jia stirred, a small sound at the back of her throat, but her legs parted slightly.

He closed his eyes and let the three heartbeats in the room layer over each other, Jia’s slow and deep, Mia’s quicker and lighter, his own somewhere in between, still thudding hard from the breakthrough.

Kian let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding and closed his eyes for real this time.

In mere seconds, he fell asleep.

Tommorow, I can test out Stage 5’s unique abilities.