Feng Shui magic

**Chapter 28: The Heretical Sect of Feng Shui**

The Ye family's collateral branches spiraled into panic. Having tasted the intoxicating nectar of power, they refused to relinquish control back to the suddenly revitalized main lineage.

Ye Beiquan—patriarch of the third branch—lay snoring in bed, a voluptuous young woman curled beside him. The peace shattered as his grandson Ye Wugang burst into the room. "Grandfather! Disaster!"

Ye Beiquan jolted awake, fury darkening his features. "Who gave you permission to barge in? Whatever it is, wait until—"

"It can't wait!" Ye Wugang blurted. "Old Ye Qingtian's eyes—they're healed! All the main family's sickly heirs… they've recovered overnight!"

"*What?*" Ye Beiquan shot upright, sheets pooling around him. The news was unthinkable. Ye Qingtian, on death's doorstep for years. The main lineage's heirs—blind, mute, bedridden—now whole?

"Repeat yourself!" he barked.

As Ye Wugang obeyed, dread coiled in Ye Beiquan's gut. *Their ancestral graves—someone tampered with them.* Snatching his phone, he dialed Ye Wuming, the incompetent fool he'd sent to guard Qingzhou's burial grounds.

---

In a hospital room, Ye Wuming answered groggily. "Grandfather, wh—"

"Idiot!" Ye Beiquan roared. "Did someone desecrate the Ye graves?!"

"I… I don't think so—"

"*Think?* I want certainty!"

Ye Wuming quivered. He'd been too busy scheming—and recovering from a "mysterious" poisoning—to monitor the tombs.

"Useless!" Ye Beiquan hurled the phone across the room. "Wugang! Fetch the car. We visit Master Sato *now*."

---

Sato Kenichi's mansion loomed like a specter, its black gates etched with chrysanthemums—the sigil of Japan's *Kikuryū* sect. A fusion of stolen Daoist rites, Buddhist tantra, and corrupted feng shui, the Kikuryū (Nine Chrysanthemums) were alchemists of malice, their "art" a cancer metastasizing across Asia.

Inside, the air reeked of copper. Sato knelt on bloodstained tatami, pallid as a corpse.

"Master Sato!" Ye Beiquan gasped. "What—"

"Silence." Sato's voice rasped like wind through dry bones. "The Ghost Acacia Coffin Piercing array… it's broken. *Who. Moved. The Tree?*"

Last night, Sato had retched black bile—a backlash from the shattered curse. Three years prior, he'd buried that acacia himself, its roots designed to strangle Ye Qingtian's lineage. Now, the counterflow had cost him a decade of life.

Ye Beiquan groveled. "A oversight, Master! But the main family's resurgence—"

"*Fool!*" Sato's fist cracked the floor. "Without that array, their qi rebounds. All our work—*ruined*."

---

Plans crystallized. Sato would go to Qingzhou—to find whoever unraveled his hex, and to plant something far worse in the Ye ancestral soil. Ye Wugang would accompany him, while Ye Beiquan stalled the reinvigorated main family.

As they departed, Sato eyed the chrysanthemum crest above the gate. *Let the petals fall where they may. This time, I'll salt the earth itself.*

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