Chapitre 8: A Volcano Ready To Erupt
The sleek town car glided through the city streets, cutting a streamlined path amidst the congested flow of evening traffic. Within its luxuriously appointed interior, an air of palpable tension hung thick and decidedly at odds with the vehicle's refined opulence.
Chang Wei's eyes remained fixed studiously ahead, expertly navigating the dizzying maze of roadways with an economical expertise speaking to his years of dedicated service. Still, the stalwart aide's throat bobbed perceptibly as he struggled to find the proper words to broach the topic so clearly weighing upon them both.
At length, he could remain silent no longer. "If I may be so bold, Young Master..." Chang Wei began in a measured tone, risking a furtive sideways glance at his aristocratic charge. "Your decision regarding the Feng girl was rather...unanticipated, given the extensively documented dossiers."
A protracted silence lingered, thick and pregnant with unspoken implications. Just when Chang Wei began resigning himself to tactful silence, Jiang Yukang's deep baritone sliced through the strained hush with surprising alacrity.
"I am well aware of the portrait those dossiers painted - a timid, unremarkable waif bred to be little more than a wide-eyed ornament for whichever bachelor proved susceptible to her underwhelming charms." A wry, closed lip smile ghosted across the imposing heir's features as obsidian eyes glinted with traces of some indescribable amusement. "A rather pitiable existence, really..."
Trailing off, Jiang Yukang leaned back into the buttery embrace of the tan leather upholstery, steepling his fingers beneath his chiseled jaw as if considering how best to articulate whatever revelations burned behind that penetrating, obsidian stare.
"Yet from the moment that girl swept into the receiving hall, I perceived...undercurrents. Eddies of defiance and tempered steel lurking beneath a surface of exquisite, practiced banality." A low, rumbling chuckle escaped his lips, tinted with the faintest traces of mordant irony. "Tell me, Chang Wei - what accomplished courtier would dare attend such a pivotal familial summit in a state of blatant undress and unkemptness? With not even the pretense of cosmetics or adornments to burnish her youthful allure?"
Spearing his retainer with a sidelong look of knowing amusement, Jiang Yukang arched a sculpted brow in silent challenge. For his part, Chang Wei felt heat coloring his weathered features as words of appropriately measured reply escaped him in a swirl of bewildered consternation.
At last recovering his composure, the bodyguard cleared his throat with an emphatic rumble. "An...unconventional gambit, to be sure," he managed in a tone that strove for diplomacy yet fell somewhat short of the desired mark. "Though I cannot fathom the wisdom of openly courting insult from such esteemed clients as the Feng elders. Surely her Reputation-"
"Her Reputation is precisely the masterstroke that drew me in like a moth to the searing fury of her flame," Jiang Yukang cut him off, leaning forward with an intense gleam flickering to lurid life in those depthless obsidian pools. "Can you not perceive the brilliance of her ploy, Chang Wei? To present herself as the quintessence of willful defiance, demolishing every preconception by which her prospects might be measured?"
Slashing his hand through the air in a visceral display of finality, the powerful young heir forged onward in tones of hushed, rapturous awe.
"The others fawned at my feet like simpering sycophants as their twisted projections assured them was expected. Yet this Feng Ruoxi dared to sweep aside the curtain and extend two proverbial fingers to the entire notion of propriety and convention!" He barked out a sharp peal of laughter edged with appreciative relish. "This girl was delivering a silent decree couched behind the facade of bored indifference and subtle mockery – that she would accept her so-called 'fate' solely on her own indomitable terms! Not as some hollow trophy or chattel to be bartered, but a willful, unapologetic force of nature unto herself!"
Jiang Yukang's words gathered in rapid, feverish momentum, his powerful frame practically vibrating with the irrepressible undercurrents of visceral exhilaration roaring through his veins. Chang Wei had seldom seen his young charge so thoroughly unbound, so utterly transfixed by the void scorching embers of...obsession? Revelation? The seasoned bodyguard's brows knitted as he struggled to parse the lightning storm of mercurial intensity swirling within those volcanic depths.
"From the moment our eyes met and her obsidian gaze crashed against my own in sweeping dismissal, I perceived the soul of an indomitable conqueror lurking behind that fragile facade," Jiang Yukang continued in reverent tones edged with a hint of rapture. "A new genesis waiting to be unleashed upon whichever world proved foolish enough to underestimate her simmering potential!"
At last the potent riptide of ardor seemed to crest as the young heir slumped back once more, his expression settling into a mask of resolute, implacable certainty etched across those aristocratic features. Silence reigned for several pregnant heartbeats before Chang Wei allowed himself to cautiously venture further inquiry.
"And her reputed...erratic temperament and disruptive histrionics?" The bodyguard's tones remained neutral, though the underlying skepticism was unmistakable. "Our projections from Torrinese operatives painted her in quite an...unrestrained light."
Undaunted, a genuine smile curved Jiang Yukang's lips as something feverish and rapacious danced behind the scorching cindered depths of his gaze.
"On the contrary, Chang Wei," he murmured in tones edged with iron certainty and perhaps a hint of barely leashed...Anticipation? "I cannot help but perceive her penultimate exhibition of restraint amidst such barefaced provocations and hostility. A truly lesser spirit would have spiraled into histrionics or meek self-pity long before that glacial retort at the end."
Slowly, inexorably, the young heir allowed his burning stare to sweep over his aide in silent, unflinching challenge. Even Chang Wei felt a tremor of instinctive apprehension lance through him before that unyielding regard.
"No, my friend," Jiang Yukang's jaw clenched with iron certitude. "What we bore witness to today was no unbridled dervish of chaos and abject abandon. Rather, we were granted an exquisitely rare glimpse behind the veil at a simmering volcano of conviction and mettle - one exerting every fiber of unfathomable will to remain tempered...for now."
A low chuckle of hushed, exhilarated awe slipped past the young heir's lips as a speculative gleam danced behind his eyes.
"But make no mistake - absent the threat of consequences, I have no doubt that girl would have scoured everything and everyone around her to cinders without a whisper of mercy or forethought. Her will is simply too potent, too utterly transcendent to be suffered beneath another's petty conventions."
Shifting forward in his seat, Jiang Yukang trained his mesmerizing stare fully upon his aide's suddenly apprehensive features.
"Which is precisely why I selected her, Chang Wei. Because only one forged in the crucibles of life's most searing agonies could ever hope to weather the maelstrom that lies in our future's path." His smile gleamed with an edge of dark, anticipatory relish. "The dynasties and false idols of the past shall be reduced to smoldering ruins from which only one immutable truth will rise, reforged and eternal."
Chang Wei's throat constricted with a confounding swirl of exhilaration and primal wariness as realization blossomed lurid within his breast. This was no mere marital consideration or dalliance to be weighed and measured through pragmatic calculations. No, Jiang Yukang's fixation upon this Feng Ruoxi extended far beyond the physical or temporal realms into something... transcendent.
Obsidian and simmering embers had locked in an instant of eternal, cosmic recognition. Two halves of the same scorching supernova granted mortal form, destined to scour creation's canvas utterly blank in order to author an entirely new genesis from the ashes of obsolescence.
Chang Wei felt himself gripped by a sense of breathless vertigo as these stark implications washed over him in cascading waves. The enormity of the epochal shift being ushered in by his young charge's meteoric ascension was too vast, too utterly cataclysmic to permit full comprehension in that suspended instant.
Steeling himself against the creeping intimations of existential disquiet, the seasoned bodyguard rallied his composure with an indrawn fortifying breath.
"Then...I am to presume the alliance with the Feng family shall proceed as planned?" he ventured, struggling to keep his tone steady and deferential despite the roiling uncertainties churning in his breast. "The proper overtures for an expedited union must be assembled and submitted posthaste, I would imagine?"
Jiang Yukang's lips quirked in a thin, humorless facsimile of a smile as his gaze bored into the other man with scorching intensity. "The ties I bind myself to shall be of my own weaving, not dictated by the feckless delusions of scurrying, obsolescent bloodlines," he intoned, each syllable carved with adamantine finality. "If and when this Feng Ruoxi proves herself worthy of standing as my inviolable prime in the crucible to come, then and only then shall any thought of formal rites be entertained."
Chang Wei felt his throat constrict with a confounding swirl of primal trepidation and electric exhilaration as those depthless obsidian pools seemed to bore straight into his very essence. In that suspended breath, he perceived the cosmic vastness of the epochal convulsions being ushered in by the meteoric force before him - a figurehead destined to author a new age of upheaval from the smoldering ashes of willful obsolescence.
And at the vanguard of this searing revelation strode not merely one unshakable pillar of conviction, but an inseparable dyad - a unified celestial tempest comprised of seemingly fragile adamant and simmering, infinite resolve.
Jiang Yukang and the enigmatic Feng Ruoxi were but opposing poles of the same irresistible, all-consuming vortex. One which would sunder the very foundations of the world in order to reduce it to a scorched, purified canvas from which an entirely new paradigm could be woven in the searing image of their combined, transcendent visions.
The age of upheaval had arrived. And Chang Wei found himself an unlikely foot soldier conscripted into the vanguard of its cataclysmic unveiling whether he wished it or not. For in that glacial, unflinching stare, the depths of macrocosmic inevitability raged with the scorching intensity of a supernova's irresistible gravitic embrace.
All that remained was to either surrender himself to its unyielding riptides...or be atomized into the radiant oblivion heralded by its incandescent unveiling.
As the sleek town car continued its measured glide through the sundered arteries of a world teetering on the precipice of seismic upheaval, Chang Wei felt the thunderous cadences of inevitability echoing through to his very marrow.
A reckoning unlike any witnessed in the hallowed chronicles of mortal existence was rapidly coalescing on the horizon. And at its vanguard strode two titans irrevocably bound by the fires of shared, indomitable conviction - ones which would burn away the hollow artifices of the past in order to clear an inviolable foothold for the new genesis to come.
The age of upheaval was nigh. All that remained was to bear witness to its earth-shattering unveiling, and persevere in the smoldering crucible of tribulation that would forge its aftermath.
Cadeaux
-- Cadeau
reçu État de l’alimentation hebdomadaire
-- Classement
Power Stone 
-- Power
stone