Family Stealing System: your wife, mother, sister, all mine now!
Chapter 30: Hua Feimei

Chapter 30: Hua Feimei

The woman inside the villa had not looked up.

She sat on a cushioned mat beside the low tea table, her posture effortless and languid—spine straight as a calligraphy stroke, shoulders relaxed in a way that was unique to her.

Kian observed her.

Her fingers moved over the instrument in her lap: a guqin of dark, oiled wood, its seven strings gleaming. The silk-wrapped tuning pegs were half-undone, and she was replacing one of the strings with a new strand. Her hands were pale. Not the pale of sickness or indoor living, but the pale of something that had never needed blood.

"You are?" the woman looked up, asking softly.

"Kian, the husband of your daughters."

Her hair was black and unbound, falling past her waist in a single sleek curtain that pooled on the mat around her knees. In terms of hair, she resembled Mia a lot.

It caught the light from the paper windows in strands of deep blue, like a raven’s wing held at an angle.

"Husband of my daughters?"

Kian’s throat tightened. Her eyes were red. Not the bloody red of a demon beast or the murky crimson of corrupted Qi, but the clear, luminous red of a fine ruby held up to the sun.

They glowed faintly at the edges, a soft pulse like embers breathing. Her lips matched them—a natural red so vivid it looked painted, but Kian knew with some deep and certain part of his brain that it was not.

"Yes, I am the husband."

The red eyes stared at him silently.

She was beautiful in the way that made the word feel stupid. The sisters, Jia and Mia, carried a lot of her beauty—the high cheekbones, the delicate jaw—but where they were pretty, she was arresting.

"Where are my girls?" she asked.

"In our home, safe, mother in law," he replied. "Hua Feimei."

Hua Feimei raised her sword like eyebrows.

She looked no older than thirty, though Kian knew she was a mother of three grown children, and the smoothness of her skin held a faint translucence, like the inner petal of a lotus held up to the light.

A thin, gauzy outer robe of deep burgundy hung from her shoulders, slipping just enough to show the elegant line of her collarbones and the curve of one bare shoulder. Beneath it, a pale inner robe the color of unbleached silk clung to a figure that time and motherhood had refined rather than diminished.

She sighed. "I am sad. Undeniably, grievously sad."

"Why is it, mother in law?"

"Do you know where you are standing?" she asked.

"In a Hugan Villa?"

"Do you know what a Hugan Villa actually is?"

"A qi hotspot, right?"

"Yes."

A silence stretched between the both of them and Kian frowned. He had a bad feeling.

From his knowledge, coming to this villa shouldn’t be that dangerous. But had he missed something?

"Is a qi hotspot dangerous?"

Hua Feimei shook her head. "Not to the average person. For them, a qi hotspot is very useful even. But to you and me, this QI hotspot is a prison."

Kian frowned as he came close to her and sat down.

She explained. "But for people with special physiques like you and me, qi hotspots are prisons because we cannot leave the premises once we enter."

"I am not special," Kian said, glad. He did not shift away from her. "I awakened no bloodline. The sect gave me no legacy. Nothing, nada. I’m a bare-handed cultivator who crawled up from nothing."

Hua Feimei lifted a single finger from the guqin strings. It pointed at his chest.

"That," she said, "is why you think you can walk out of here?"

Her red eyes caught the light again, and for a moment Kian saw something move in their depths—not a pupil dilating, but a secondary ring, a thin band of darker crimson spiraling inward like wine stirred into water.

"You already slept with one of my daughters, right?" she said. It was not a question.

Kian’s jaw tightened. "That doesn’t—"

"The younger one. Her virgin yin is still rooted in your lower dantian like a thorn. The elder’s breath-marks are scattered through your secondary meridians. You’ve been swallowing their essence and metabolizing it into your own cultivation, know it or not." She paused, sighing at the thought. "Did you think special physiques only came from blood? From birth? You might not get any powers, but your body will have unique markings due to it."

"What?"

"It makes people more handsome. You yourselves must have become more handsome after..."

She shook her head.

Kian said nothing. The bad feeling in his stomach was no longer a feeling. It was an intuition.

Then did the fucker Hua Shulong know that when he sent him here?

Why?

What was the plan?

"I didn’t know my girls were so old already," she said.

"How long?" Kian asked. "How long does it take to wash out?"

"It doesn’t wash out." She looked at him—really looked, with something that might have been pity if it had been gentler. "You are now what this hotspot recognizes as kin to my bloodline. And the hotspot will not let kin leave. That is why my son imprisoned me here. Because he knows I can’t escape."

"But why me? Why would he want me to be trapped with you?"

Wasn’t that literally like sending a wolf to a sheep?

She frowned at the question as well.

Then, she understood.

Soon, Hua Shulong would arrive. A fight between Kian and him would ensue. And in the process, Hua Shulong, her own son, would kill her.

Then, he would blame it on Kian.

Both Kian and Feimei realized the plan at once.

Kian stood. He walked to the door, pushed it open, and stepped across the threshold onto the stone path. He made it three steps before the air thickened. It was subtle at first—a pressure on his skin, like walking through honey. Then his right knee buckled. A sound escaped his throat, then, he slammed back into the room as if he were repelled.

He staggered backward across the threshold and the pressure vanished.

Behind him, Hua Feimei plucked another note on the guqin.

"Your son is too overconfident," Kian said. "I am a Stage 4 cultivator. If he comes, I’ll just kill him. His plans are for moot."

He lied, keeping his real stage a surprise.

She shook her head. "My son is too smart. He would definitely not come alone. We are both done for. Sadly, I couldn’t see my daughters before passing."

Kian’s eyelids twitched. "He doesn’t know that I am a fourth stage just like him, so he wouldn’t come prepared."

"Oh, he would. He has a weapon that is as strong as Stage 5 cultivators, he just keeps it a secret. Nobody knows about it except me. With it, you are not his match."

Kian’s face became grim as he walked upto the woman.

He held both her shoulders, asking: "What else do you know?"