Chapter 62: Supporting character?

The morning of the quarterfinal match arrived with clear skies and the sharp, electric energy of a sect that smelled blood.

The stands were fuller than the previous rounds. Word had spread about Wen Hao. Word always spread. The version circulating among the disciples was split evenly between “Zhao Lingxi is dangerous” and “Zhao Lingxi was set up,” depending on who you asked and which faction they owed favors to. Either way, people wanted to watch.

Lan Yue sat in the front row of the lower stands with Tang Xiaoli on her left and Bai Xuelan on her right. Mo Tian had claimed the seat directly behind her, his fan already open, his expression uncharacteristically focused.

The red thread on Lan Yue’s wrist hummed steadily. Warm. Present. Alive in a way it had not been for days. She pressed her fingers against it and felt an answering pulse, faint but sure, like a hand squeezing back.

Zhao Lingxi was somewhere in the preparation area. They had not spoken since last night in the library, since the laughter and the scroll on the floor and the hand held across the table until the lanterns burned low. But something had shifted between them. A door reopened. A wall taken down brick by careful brick.

It was not fixed. But it was healing.

Lan Yue needed it to hold for one more day. Just one more day, and then the pills would be intercepted, the match would proceed cleanly, and Qin Wen’s trap would collapse before it ever closed.

“Incoming,” Tang Xiaoli muttered.

Lan Yue followed her gaze and saw three figures descending the stands toward them with the deliberate swagger of people who believed the world existed for their entertainment.

The leader was a young woman. Tall. Sharp featured. Hair pulled back in an elaborate arrangement of gold pins that probably cost more than most disciples earned in a year. She wore her tournament spectator robes like they were a throne, shoulders back, chin elevated, each step placed with the precision of someone who had practiced walking in front of a mirror.

Her name was Sun Meihua, and Lan Yue recognized her immediately. Outer sect elite. Daughter of the Sun family, minor nobility with major ambitions who had spent three generations trying to marry into a major clan. She cultivated alliances the way other people cultivated spiritual energy, relentlessly and without shame.

Flanking her were two disciples who moved like accessories. On her left, a boy with a permanent smirk and heavy lidded eyes who went by Wei Dong. He was the kind of person who repeated whatever the last powerful person in the room said and called it his own opinion. On her right, a girl named Hu Lian, small and sharp eyed, who smiled constantly and never meant it. She carried a fan painted with orchids and used it to hide her mouth when she whispered.

They were, in Tang Xiaoli’s immortal words from a previous encounter, professionally unpleasant.

Sun Meihua stopped at the end of their row. She looked at Lan Yue the way a cat looks at something too small to be a real threat but too interesting to ignore entirely.

“Lan Yue,” she said. “I almost did not recognize you without blood on your face. Or was that Zhao Lingxi’s specialty?”

Wei Dong snickered. Hu Lian hid her smile behind her fan.

“Sun Meihua,” Lan Yue replied evenly. “I almost did not recognize you without someone else’s accomplishments coming out of your mouth. Quiet morning?”

Tang Xiaoli made a noise that might have been a cough or might have been a laugh pressed through clenched teeth.

Sun Meihua’s smile thinned. She sat down one row ahead of them, close enough to be irritating, angled just enough to keep Lan Yue in her peripheral vision. Wei Dong and Hu Lian arranged themselves on either side like bookends.

“Such a shame about Wen Hao,” Sun Meihua said, loudly enough for the surrounding disciples to hear. “A promising young cultivator, destroyed in a match against the First Miss. One has to wonder what kind of techniques require that level of collateral damage.”

“The pills destroyed his meridians, not Zhao Lingxi,” Lan Yue said. “The healers confirmed that publicly.”

“Oh, the pills. Yes.” Sun Meihua examined her nails. “Modified pills from the Zhao family dispensary. Fascinating how that works. The family’s own medicine somehow ends up destroying a student, and somehow the family’s most controversial daughter just happens to be standing three feet away.”

“Somehow,” Hu Lian echoed behind her fan.

“Fascinating,” Wei Dong added, half a beat late.

Bai Xuelan leaned forward. “The investigation is ongoing. Perhaps you should wait for the results before performing your analysis, Sun Meihua. Unless you have evidence the committee does not?”

Sun Meihua turned to look at Bai Xuelan with the measured patience of someone addressing a particularly slow child. “I have eyes, Bai Xuelan. Everyone in this sect has eyes. And what our eyes saw was a boy bleeding on the arena floor while Zhao Lingxi stood over him without a scratch.”

“She stopped attacking him,” Lan Yue said. Her voice was harder now. The easy banter was gone. “She told him to forfeit. She tried to save him.”

“How noble. And yet.” Sun Meihua spread her hands. “Here we are.”

The first bell rang. The crowd stirred. In the arena below, the formation barriers activated, shimmering blue and gold around the combat platform.

Sun Meihua stood and smoothed her robes. “I do hope today’s match is less eventful. It would be terrible if another promising disciple ended up in the medical pavilion.” She paused, letting the implication settle like dust. “Though I suppose some people attract disaster wherever they go.”

She glided away with Wei Dong and Hu Lian trailing behind her. Hu Lian glanced back once, her fan half raised, her sharp eyes cataloguing their reactions like a shopkeeper taking inventory.

“I hate her,” Tang Xiaoli said flatly.

“She is not the problem,” Bai Xuelan said. “She is the amplifier. Sun Meihua does not create narratives. She finds existing ones and makes them louder. Someone fed her the talking points about Wen Hao.”

“Qin Wen?” Lan Yue asked.

“Not directly. He is too careful for that. But Zhao Ruoqing has tea with Sun Meihua’s mother every second week. The information flows through social channels, not operational ones. Impossible to trace.”

Mo Tian leaned forward from behind them. “Sun Meihua has been campaigning to position herself as a neutral voice in sect politics. She calls it concerned citizenship. Everyone else calls it social climbing with extra steps.”

“She wants something,” Lan Yue said.

“She wants relevance. The Sun family has no inherent power, so they generate influence through reputation management. If she can establish herself as the voice that warned everyone about Zhao Lingxi before something terrible happened, she gains standing regardless of the outcome.”

“So she wins if Lingxi fails and she wins if Lingxi succeeds but looks dangerous doing it.”

“She wins any time people are talking about her opinions instead of forming their own.” Mo Tian closed his fan. “Sound familiar?”

It did. It sounded exactly like a smaller, pettier version of what Qin Wen was doing. Building systems where every outcome fed into advantage. Sun Meihua was not in Qin Wen’s network. She did not need to be. She was a natural parasite who attached herself to whatever controversy generated the most attention.

Which made her unpredictable. Qin Wen was methodical. Sun Meihua was opportunistic. You could map one. You could not map the other.

The second bell rang. Zhao Lingxi’s match was next.

Lan Yue’s attention snapped to the preparation entrance. Zhao Lingxi emerged in clean white robes, her hair tied back with a simple silver ribbon, her expression composed. She walked to the platform with the same unhurried grace she brought to everything, and the crowd noise shifted. Louder on one side. Quieter on the other. The sect was choosing sides in real time.

Shen Zhiran entered from the opposite side. He looked different. Sharper. His eyes had the glazed intensity of someone whose spiritual energy was running hotter than natural, and Lan Yue felt her stomach clench.

The pills. Had Jiang Yi intercepted them? Had Tang Xiaoli had time to analyze them? The plan required ten minutes with the package before delivery. Ten minutes they might or might not have gotten.

She looked at Tang Xiaoli. Tang Xiaoli gave the smallest nod.

They had the sample. The pills had been documented, analyzed, and resealed. The evidence existed.

But Shen Zhiran had still taken them. The trap was still live.

“She can handle him,” Mo Tian said quietly from behind her. It was not his theatrical voice. It was the real one. The one that belonged to a prince who understood what was at stake.

Lan Yue gripped the edge of her seat. The red thread burned warm on her wrist. Across the arena, Zhao Lingxi stepped onto the platform and turned to face her opponent. Her gaze swept the crowd once, briefly, and found Lan Yue in the front row.

She did not smile. She did not nod. But her eyes held steady on Lan Yue’s for one heartbeat, and in that heartbeat was everything they had said in the library and everything they had not yet found words for.

I see you. I am here. Watch me.

The bell rang. The match began.

And in the stands, three rows above Lan Yue, Sun Meihua leaned forward with hungry eyes, her fan poised at her lips, already composing the story she would tell no matter who won.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep