Family Stealing System: your wife, mother, sister, all mine now!
Chapter 34: A Stranger!

Chapter 34: A Stranger!

The spirit’s form solidified in the span of a single heartbeat—green smoke knitting itself into the shape of an old man with hollow eye sockets and a beard of writhing centipedes.

Its mouth opened, and instead of a scream, a jet of white-hot flame poured out, the air around it warping into ripples like glass being melted.

Kian twisted sideways. The fire missed his shoulder by a finger’s width and punched through the villa’s far wall, blasting a hole the size of a door into the afternoon sunlight.

The heat licked at his battle armor, scales glowing faintly blue where the flame had passed closest.

Ice came next—shards the length of his forearm materializing from nothing and launching at his chest, his throat, his eyes.

Kian’s red pupils tracked each one in slow motion, and he swayed through them like a dancer stepping between raindrops, the shards embedding themselves in the stone floor behind him with wet, cracking sounds.

"Stop attacking him! Attack mother!"

The spirit’s third breath was a thunderclap. Lightning arced from its fingertips, forking into three jagged spears of white-hot electricity that smelled of ozone and charred meat.

Kian dropped to one knee, the bolts passing over his head close enough to make his hair stand on end, then rolled left as a follow-up strike tried to nail him to the floor.

That was when the final bolt fell towards Hua Feimei.

Just before it struck through her protective dome, Kian appeared blocking the lightning.

Crack!

His armor cracked in multiple fronts, but the attack was intercepted.

Landing on the floor, Kian looked at Hua Shulong. Even as he did so, his armor kept regenerating.

"Three breaths," Hua Feimei whispered inside her dome, her voice filled with something that might have been confusion. "He’s actually—"

The spirit convulsed, its green form flickering like a candle in a gale, and in desperation it spat a final, mixed element—a sphere of roiling mud and razor wind that expanded as it flew, meant to swallow the room.

Grabbing Hua Feimei, Kian ran under it, twisting in midair to thread the shrinking gap between the sphere and the ceiling, and landed on the far side of the room with a light crunch of broken floor tiles.

BOOM!

Glass cracked, wood splintered.

The spirit dissolved with a sound like tearing silk, its time spent, and Hua Shulong’s jade pendant cracked down the middle. Kian straightened, not even breathing hard, and let the Blood Demon Eyes fix on his enemy with a slow, predatory blink.

His own eyes slowly returned to normal.

Hua Shulong stumbled back, his handsome face twisted into something ugly—fear stripped of all pretense.

"You should have brought more bugs," Kian said.

He moved.

A blue sword spun into his hand, already hissing with Qi. Hua Shulong’s own red blade came up to parry, but Kian didn’t even bother with technique. He simply hammered down with everything his Stage 5 strength could muster.

The red sword shattered on impact.

Fragments of blood-colored steel sprayed across the villa and embedded themselves in the walls, the floor, the broken guqin.

Hua Shulong screamed and threw his remaining insects—a desperate wave of skittering black bodies with mandibles dripping venom.

Kian walked through them.

His battle armor flared blue-white, and the bugs burst against his scales like overripe fruit hitting a hot griddle, their shells popping and the stink of burned chitin filling the air.

"You killed me once," Kian said, grabbing the younger man by the throat and lifting him off the ground.

Hua Shulong’s legs kicked uselessly, his red eyes bulging. "But I came back. Do you know what they call that in my world? A second chance."

He slammed Hua Shulong into the stone floor hard enough to crater it.

The young master coughed blood—black and thick with corrupted Qi—and his fingers scrabbled for something, anything, in the folds of his torn robe.

Kian’s foot came down on his wrist. The bones crunched like dry twigs.

Hua Shulong’s scream was more breath than sound, a wet gurgle that bubbled through the blood already pooling in his throat.

"You’re wondering why I don’t just kill you," Kian said, crouching down until his face was level with the young master’s. "It’s because I want to enjoy this."

Just as he was about to continue though, a trembling figure of Hua Feimei stood beside him. "Please, show mercy. Don’t torture him."

Kian looked at her. The red glow of her eyes had dimmed to something softer—not weak, but wounded, the look of a woman watching her child bleed into the floor and unable to stop caring even after everything.

He exhaled through his nose and nodded once, sharp and final.

His fist came down on Hua Shulong’s temple. The young man’s eyes rolled back and his body went slack in the crater, the tension draining out of him all at once like a puppet with its strings cut. Kian straightened and stepped back, shaking out his hand.

Hua Feimei moved past him before he could speak.

She knelt beside her son’s unconscious form and pressed two fingers to his throat, checking the pulse there with a steadiness that surprised Kian—no trembling, no tears, just the clinical detachment of someone who had already said her goodbyes to this boy long ago.

When she looked up, her expression was unreadable.

"I have an amnesiac pill," she said. "A broken memory pill. It will destroy his cultivation—every spark, every meridian he ever opened—and wipe the last decade from his mind. He will wake up a mortal who does not remember being anyone’s son, or anyone’s monster. Since you see me as your own, can I have this favor?"

"If you promise to do what you did earlier for me, sure. But this time, you have to swallow."

"It is a deal!" she nodded.

Kian raised an eyebrow.

This was the plan all along anyway. Cleaner and crueller in some ways, but Hua Feimei was already pulling a small lacquered box from a hidden compartment in the room, her fingers steady as she opened it.

Inside, nested on black silk, sat a pill the color of old bone with a single crimson vein running through its center like a bloodshot eye.

He took it without argument, pried open Hua Shulong’s slack jaw, and pushed the pill past his teeth. A touch of Qi to his throat forced the swallow reflex, and the pill went down with a wet click.

Almost immediately, the young man’s skin began to steam—a thin, acrid vapor rising from his pores as the cultivation base that had taken decades to build dissolved into nothing.

When it was done, the face on the floor looked younger.

Softer.

A stranger.