Chapter 49: Four left.

Chapter 49 - Four left.The inn actually didn't have a name. It was around midnight when Lee finally found it hidden in the western suburbs, at the end of a dark alley. Surprisingly, downstairs it had over half a dozen patrons, drinking beer and conversing in hushed voices, and a couple of them being from the city guard.

Under the skeptical eyes of the innkeeper, Lee asked for a room. While doing so he was holding a letter in hands, and pretended to read from it, as if trying to follow instructions to the letter, faking an appearance of a trusted, but not too clever servant.

When the innkeeper went up to the second floor to show him his room, Lee, while being fully immersed in the letter, pulled a chicken feather from his pocket and for a while clumsily tried to somehow stick it in the door.

Basically he was doing his best to leave the impression of a clueless child that was ordered to do a task he had no understanding of.

And it worked. The innkeeper stared in disbelief, observing the little moron following his master's orders, and couldn't remember when was the last time someone tried to order a hit in more awkward way. Fortunately, the kid didn't mess up too much and quickly ran off, leaving behind a pouch with gemstones, and a sealed letter.

Lee expected a situation of someone following him, but was surprised to see the task was entrusted to the two city guards he noticed earlier. Clearly the Red Chicken family was not as simple as he assumed before.

Nevertheless, he happily led them back to the Newman's mansion, and before entering, tore in halves and threw away the letter his master had supposedly given him instructions with.

It was basically impossible to not notice his actions, and he was pretty sure the instructions were picked up by the men tailing him. With that his mission was basically accomplished – all he had to do was wait.

The plan did have a couple of obvious flaws, though. First of all, it was highly likely Helen would want to dispose of him as the only person who could rat her out, and Lee was ready to disappear from the capital at the first sign of any abnormalities in her behavior.



Fortunately it wasn't necessary. As it turns out, he severely overestimated her ability to critically think. After his return, in the following morning Lee reported that he had done everything mistress asked, and she never brought the subject up again.

From then on Helen continued to wash away her imaginary sorrows with large amounts of alcohol, wasting her days either at the lake or passed out in her room.

The second flaw was the unpredictability of the assassins. Lee's chosen method of hiring them was mostly according to the common sense and from what he remembered was the MO of the killers in triads. In addition, he was only a child and any professional should have a decency to have mercy for a kid.

Theoretically they could have chosen the option of silencing the messenger, but luckily they didn't. They could've also misinterpreted Lee's, or rather – Helen's, promise to triple the price if they made Cecil's death look like an accident.

He had no clue what the protocol would be in case they wanted to contact Helen to ask for the promised bonus. But soon he found out.

Three days later, late in the evening, Cecil Ironfist allegedly slipped while walking down the stairs in her own home and fell, breaking her neck. One of her bodyguards was off duty at the time while the other was ordered to bring her food and stepped away for a short moment.

The news spread through Sunwell like a wild fire and nine out of ten citizens celebrated the event as if they had miraculously recovered from a lethal illness. Obviously her death sparkled endless discussions about the all-seeing God and His punishment, and greatly increased the numbers of the Hand of God supporters. The hit was completed so flawlessly, no one actually questioned whether it was an accident.

The next afternoon, out of habit, Lee checked Helen's diary where he found a short note, that said: 'Three days to kill, three days to pay!'. Maybe she didn't realize the Red Chickens gave her a deadline, or thought it was the report on a job well done, or maybe decided to ignore it. Either way she saved the note as a keepsake.

The night passed without incidents and so did the next couple of days. But on the morning of the fourth day the Newman mansion woke up to a scream of a terrified maid who found Helen's bodyguards with slit throats lying right next to her door.

Each of them had chicken feathers planted in their eyes. Needless to say, a short while later Helen was also found, killed the same way. The Red Chickens turned out to be as scary as Logan feared.

No one saw anything or noticed any abnormalities despite the place being relatively well guarded. There was no disturbance during the night, and no one heard an out of place sound. Even Lee had to agree that it wasn't a simple kill – it was work of a master.

While Cecil's death was generally agreed upon to be an accident, Helen's was an obvious hit. For days city guard ran all over the place, asking questions and looking for perpetrators, but it was clear they were bound to have no results.

The deaths of the two girls triggered another chain of events. Not long after Helen died, the emperor gathered the Imperial Council and relieved Kris Ironfist and Bill Newman from their duties.

There was no reason given to the general public, but it was clear that the minister of justice had most likely gone completely insane with the death of her youngest daughter, while the maritime minister has befriended the bottle to the extent it was questionable whether he registered the events transpiring outside his doors.

Thus in few short years barely half of the original council's members were left. This was long awaited and widely celebrated by Sunwell's minor noble families, who were bending over backwards to fill the vacancies and become the new big-shots of the capital.



Being appointed as a minister of the empire guaranteed a bright future for their clan, and allowed to bath in riches and fame for generations, no matter if you were a puny minister of works or the minister of finances who controlled the treasury.

Lee had no clue how the new ministers were chosen and didn't care. Politics were irrelevant to him – what was on his mind was how to complete the revenge. There were only four people left on his list from the original twelve, but these were the most difficult targets.

By now he realized that all the youths that destroyed Pine Village were destined to have a tragic ending sooner or later, and in the grand scheme of things it didn't matter whether he did anything about it. But somewhere deep inside him there was a voice that kept whispering he had to make sure they payed for the murder of his birth parents as soon as possible, and he actually didn't mind.

It gave him a goal in life, at least in this one, in addition to the newfound love for cultivation, or rather – the simple meditation technique Tess taught him.

While he failed to become the superhuman he dreamed of, technically he did have a spark within. It wasn't the destructive red or the speedy green, but it was a spark nevertheless. And while concentrating on it during meditation sessions, Lee felt his energy levels rising to unbelievable heights.

He became something akin to a perpetual motion machine – almost never got tired, could recover from injuries overnight, and, if he had got suicidal, save others from the brink of death.

The life in Newman household was rather boring, thus to make things more interesting, Lee tried to implement the meditation in his other exercises, but focusing on his abdomen while doing anything dynamic like running or walking, or even doing push-ups, turned out to be practically impossible.

Then he came up with another idea – he began to meditate while doing the horse stance and planks. This changed everything. A regular person could do either of the two exercises for at most forty, maybe sixty breaths, but Lee, while concentrating on the blue mist below navel, could easily loose the track of time.

Every morning, before the sunrise, Lee practiced, altering between meditation in horse stance and planks every other day. The rest of the Newman mansion was deep asleep while he, stood in his tiny room, covered in perspiration, but with a barely noticeable smile on his face.

Obviously this couldn't go on forever. The next day after Minister Newman was relieved of his duties, he had to vacate the premises along with his staff, including Lee.