Family Stealing System: your wife, mother, sister, all mine now!
Chapter 40: Through a forest, to Lands Unknown

Chapter 40: Through a forest, to Lands Unknown

Morning light slanted through the rice-paper windows in pale gold stripes, catching the dust motes that swirled in the air every time Jia shook out a folded robe.

She had already packed her Moonpetal silks and was now cramming her spare hair ribbons into a lacquered box with more force than was strictly necessary, her jaw set in that stubborn pout.

Mia moved through the room with quieter efficiency, folding her own garments into neat squares and stacking them inside a travel chest.

Jiao Yin, unlike them, didn’t have a lot of things to pack, so she was just observing. But to make her time useful in some way, she sorted through a pile of cultivation notes, her movements slow and deliberate.

Color had crept back into her cheeks overnight, though the shadows under her eyes remained deep.

Hua Shulong watched them from the couch.

She had been moved there sometime during the night, her wrists still bound with a strip of silk even though her cultivation remained shattered.

Her eyes—still that unsettling crimson—tracked every movement in the room with a detached curiosity that made Mia’s shoulders tighten whenever she caught it.

Huuu...

The front door banged open before anyone could comment on the strangeness of the scene.

Kian strode in with a leather sack slung over one shoulder, its weight straining the seams, and dropped it onto the bed with a thump that made the wooden frame groan.

Dust puffed from the leather, and the coins inside clinked with a heavy, satisfying sound.

Jiao Yin lifted her head from the notes, blinking.

"What’s that?"

Kian dusted off his hands and grinned at her.

"Hua Shulong’s life savings. His mother told me where she hid them. I went out and picked them up."

He nudged the sack with his foot, and the coins clinked again, deeper this time. "I haven’t sorted through it yet, though. So don’t know how much is in there."

The sisters looked at their mother with a sigh in their hearts.

Feimei didn’t meet their eyes. She crossed to the sack and loosened the drawstring, peering inside with the resigned air of a woman who had stopped being surprised.

"It should be around eight thousand low-grade stones, or more. He kept it buried beneath the villa’s foundation."

Kian clapped his hands. "Then we’re done here. Everyone grab your things."

Mia, Jia, Feimei, Jiao Yin, and Hua Shulong all followed Kian as he led them through a hidden path of the sect.

Only a handful of servants knew that way. Kian’s host had been one of them previously, and so, he had the memories.

The hidden path ran along the back of the old bathhouse, through a maintenance tunnel the servants used to haul firewood and ash.

After a while, Feimei led them, her eyes piercing the darkness better than any lantern.

The tunnel sloped downward until the stone walls gave way to packed earth and root tendrils.

"Are we entering a forest?" Jia asked.

It had been years since she left the sect. To be honest, leaving the sect felt weird to her.

Once upon a time, she had promised herself that she would not leave the sect without becoming a cultivator. And now, she was doing exactly that.

"We are indeed entering a forest."

Then they were outside—cool morning air, birdsong, the distant rush of a stream.

The sect’s barrier shimmered behind them, and none of them looked back.

Since they were sect members, the barrier did not block them.

"Where are we?" Jia asked.

"We don’t know yet," Kian replied. "Let’s walk for a while."

They walked for an hour through thinning pines until the ground leveled into a clearing where the forest opened its arms.

Jiao Yin stopped at the edge of a moss-covered boulder, her narrow shoulders squaring.

She was so tired. If Kian weren’t holding her with his Qi, she would not have been able to walk so much.

"If we go south," she said, pointing, "straight through the trees, my village is a half day’s walk. The path is hard, but nobody from the sect would follow us there."

Mia shifted her travel chest.

Kian’s Qi was helping her as well.

"What’s the village like?" she asked.

Jiao Yin’s lips pressed thin. "It’s really small. Forty families, maybe less now. The well runs dry half the year, and the soil is too rocky for good crops." She hesitated, then added, "And my brother is still there. I don’t really know how I can face him."

Kian slung the sack of coins higher and started walking south. "Then that’s where we’re going."

The forest swallowed them quickly, underbrush clawing at robes and roots snagging ankles with every other step.

Jiao Yin led, her small frame slipping through gaps in the thornbushes that the rest of us had to fight through.

Kian’s Qi made the walking easier for everyone, a thin shell of support he kept wrapped around the girls so they wouldn’t collapse before midday.

For a stage 5 like him, doing that much was as easy as walking.

Soon, the sun rose to mid noon skies, and then fell a little.

In the distance, Kian saw a small village.

The village was smaller than Kian had imagined, a cluster of mud-brick houses with thatched roofs sagging under their own weight.

A single dirt road ran through the center, rutted from cart wheels and baked hard by the sun.

Chickens scratched in the dust outside a collapsed fence, and somewhere a dog barked as if it had long since stopped believing anyone would listen.

An old man sat on a stump near the village entrance, whittling a stick down to nothing with a knife that had seen better decades.

He looked up when the group approached, his eyes rheumy and squinting, and then they landed on Jiao Yin and stayed there.

"Little Yin?" The knife paused mid-stroke. "That you? We all thought you’d gone and died in that mountain."

Jiao Yin’s steps faltered. She stopped a few paces from the old man and dipped her head in a shallow bow. "Uncle Wen. I’m alive. Just... things happened."

Her voice was steady, but Kian could see her fingers curling into fists at her sides, clearly awkward.

Uncle Wen set his knife down and spat into the dirt. "Your brother was the one who said you died. He stayed in the village for three days, then packed his things and walked east. Two days to the city, he said."