Family Stealing System: your wife, mother, sister, all mine now!
Chapter 35: Mystery of Transformation?

Chapter 35: Mystery of Transformation?

Kian watched the steam rise from Hua Shulong’s body until the last wisp faded into the villa’s dust-choked air.

"Done," he said, turning to Hua Feimei. "Now, how do we escape?"

Hua Feimei pointed at her son’s limp hand, where a ring of black iron glinted on his index finger. "That. The key to this prison is bound to my son’s Qi signature. As long as his cultivation existed, the hotspot recognized him as its master and me as its prisoner—and you by extension. But now?" She gestured at the steam still curling from his pores.

"His Qi is evaporating. In a few minutes, the formation woven into the villa’s foundations will register his death—or what looks like death—and enter a dormant cycle. For two, maybe three hours, this place will be nothing but an empty building. No barrier. No prison. We can walk out the front gate."

Kian plucked the ring off Hua Shulong’s finger and turned it over. The metal was cold and unusually heavy for its size, etched with a tight spiral of characters he couldn’t read. "So we just wait?"

She shook her head, and he pocketed the ring with a shrug.

"That’s almost disappointing. I had my armor all charged up for nothing."

"It saved my life. Don’t undersell it." She rose from beside her son’s body, moving to a lacquered cabinet against the far wall. She pulled out a traveling cloak the color of dried blood and swung it over her shoulders. "We’ll take the servants’ path down the back of the ridge. No one uses it because the outer sect assumes this villa is haunted. They’re half right."

She hesitated, glancing back at the unconscious stranger who had once been her son. Then she straightened. "Can you grab him? I want to throw him out to a mortal city."

Kian watched her methodically pack a small satchel—a spare string for her guqin, a jade hairpin, a sealed letter she didn’t explain.

"Sure," he said.

Kian knelt beside Hua Shulong’s crumpled form and slid his arms under the young man’s shoulders and knees.

The body was lighter than he expected—cultivator muscle turned to dead weight without Qi to animate it. He lifted with a grunt, and that was when the wrongness registered.

His forearm pressed against Hua Shulong’s chest, and instead of the flat hardness of a male torso, there was a yielding softness. A curve.

Kian’s brow furrowed.

He adjusted his grip, shifting the body against his chest, and the sensation didn’t go away. If anything, it got worse—hips that flared too wide beneath the torn robe, a waist too narrow, the whole architecture of the frame beneath the clothes reading female to every instinct he had.

He set the body down on the floor again.

His jaw tightened. No way. No fucking way.

He glanced over his shoulder; Hua Feimei was still bent over the cabinet, her back to him, the satchel rustling as she tucked something into it.

Kian turned back to the unconscious stranger and, after a moment’s hesitation, reached down. His hand pressed against the crotch of Hua Shulong’s pants. The fabric was loose, but beneath it there was no bulge, no shaft, nothing but a flatness that made his stomach drop.

What the fuck?

He pushed his palm harder, and the contours that met him were unmistakably female—the soft mound, the cleft he could trace even through silk.

"This can’t be," he breathed, and his fingers hooked into the waistband.

He tugged the pants down just far enough to see, just enough to confirm, and the truth stared back at him in the dim lantern light: a thatch of dark hair, the pink folds beneath, and not a single trace of anything male.

No illusion, no injury. The Hua Shulong that he knew was a woman. Had always been a woman. The rosy-lipped young master who’d tried to kill him, who’d conspired against his mother, who’d cut ties with his sisters—all of it had been built on a lie so fundamental Kian couldn’t even guess at its shape yet.

He pulled the pants back up with a rough jerk and stood, his mind spinning through implications he didn’t have time to parse. The amnesiac pill. The destroyed cultivation. The body now cooling on the floor with a decade of memories gone and a secret it might not even remember keeping. K

Kian looked at Hua Feimei, who had finally turned around, satchel in hand, and the expression on his face must have said something because she stopped mid-step and the red of her eyes sharpened.

"What is it?" she asked, frowning.

"Tell me. Is your son a man or a woman?"

"What the hell sort of question is that?"

Kian pulled Hua Shulong’s pants down, revealing the truth.

At first, Hua Feimei was about to look away, but then, her face changed. "What is this?"

She walked forward and observed with focus.

"A woman? No way. I’d know. My son was always a man."

Kian shook his head. "I don’t understand. Then who is this? Is this not your son?"

"He... She looks just like him."

Suddenly, Hua Shulong’s eyes snapped open.

She said: "It’s the Nadura! The world doesn’t know anything. I must tell you. I must reveal the truth of the glass shadows. Only I know the truth. The Nadura makes cultiv--$748HDhs."

Her eyes snapped back shut.

Kian and Hua Feimei looked at each other.

"Did you understand anything she said?"

"I didn’t..."

They were both unnerved.

Kian stared at the slack face of the person who was not his enemy, not quite a stranger, and for a long moment the only sound in the villa was the drip of water from the broken basin and the distant rustle of plum blossoms in the wind.

Then he bent down, hooked one arm under her knees and the other behind her shoulders, and lifted. Her head lolled against his chest, black hair tumbling over his forearm, and the faint scent of crushed insects and old blood rose from her torn robes.

Hua Feimei was already moving, slinging her satchel across her body and gathering the front of her cloak with quick, efficient fingers.

"The servants’ path," she said, not looking at the unconscious girl in Kian’s arms.

She brushed past him, her shoulder warm through the burgundy silk, and the two of them stepped out of the ruined villa into the honey-gold light of late afternoon.

The stone path descended sharply behind the building, a narrow track half-swallowed by ferns and tangled wisteria, and Kian’s boots crunched over dead leaves as he kept his eyes on the back of Hua Feimei’s head and the straight, unbroken line of her spine.

They moved in silence down the ridge, the air growing cooler and thicker with the smell of damp earth the further they went, until at last the path leveled out and the outer sect’s ring road appeared through the trees like a vein of grey stone.

Hua Feimei paused at the treeline, her red eyes scanning the road for movement, then nodded once. No barrier shimmered, no Qi-shock pushed against Kian’s senses.

The villa was just a building behind them now, and the prison was broken. He shifted the girl’s weight in his arms—her head had tipped back, exposing the pale column of her throat.

What the hell was happening?