The Ancestral Home

Hammer and Butcher Knife!

Enzo followed Lin Qi and the other two through the gates of the Lin family's ancestral home. He had been curious about Lin Qi for three whole years. What kind of family could raise someone as exceptional as Lin Qi?

Enzo couldn't help recalling the first time he'd met Lin Qi, three years ago. The Round Table Knights had been pressuring him: four of their members had surrounded Enzo and tried to force him to join. Knowing their leader, Black Horse House, had powerful connections, Enzo hadn't wanted to fall out with them. So, despite being far stronger than the four swordsmen, he'd been driven back step by step and stabbed more than a dozen times.

Just as Enzo was about to be overwhelmed, Lin Qi suddenly appeared with several towering, burly men with grim faces. They'd grabbed bricks from a nearby alley wall and smashed them into the four swordsmen from behind, leaving them bleeding from the head. Then they'd beaten the four unconscious with iron-shod oak clubs, and finished by using the clubs to inflict hidden injuries on their wrists and elbows.

From then on, those four could never wield swords again. They could just about manage ordinary work, but as soon as they tried to use a sword, their injured wrists and elbows threw their swordsmanship into disarray. Four Army Academy students who could no longer wield swords were useless to the army after graduation.

Enzo still remembered how decisively, ruthlessly, and mercilessly Lin Qi had acted.

Now he'd finally come to Lin Qi's home. He was curious: what kind of family, what kind of parents, could raise someone like Lin Qi? At fifteen, Lin Qi had founded a student gang like the Iron Fist Brotherhood in Berely University City, and built it up until it now had more than three hundred hired thugs and hard cases on the outskirts. Was that something an ordinary person could—or would—do?

How could a child from a common, conventional family ever do such a thing?

The Lin family's ancestral home gave off an unusually deep, solid impression. A vast courtyard stretched before it, nearly fifty acres in size. If Enzo wasn't mistaken, the ground was paved with black volcanic steelstone, formed when lava cooled and hardened.

Black volcanic steelstone was volcanic rock with a metal content above seventy percent. It was extraordinarily hard and highly resistant to every kind of magic except lightning spells. Mining it was brutally difficult; even ordinary workers risking their lives could extract no more than two or three cubic meters in a year.

The exceedingly hard, incredibly tough black volcanic steelstone had been cut into massive paving slabs, each a meter square. The slabs interlocked through elaborate mortise joints, making the courtyard floor one seamless whole. What shocked Enzo even more was the faint metallic sheen between the slabs. Clearly, molten metal had been poured into the gaps to make the ground even stronger.

The cost of the courtyard floor alone was staggering, but the surrounding walls were just as alarming.

To an ordinary person, the walls looked like nothing more than common stone walls, albeit three meters taller than those around most homes. But to Enzo, a top student at the Army Academy, the walls—hidden beneath thick ivy—looked like a small fortress. From the outside, they seemed perfectly ordinary, but the tops were wide enough for four people to walk abreast. The parapets had arrow slits bricked up, lookout holes, protective crenellations, and all manner of other defenses.

Yet the dense ivy concealed all these fortifications, making the murderous military structures seem completely harmless.

Like the courtyard floor, the walls were made of black volcanic steelstone, with molten metal poured between the blocks. The entire wall was one indestructible mass of metal. Unless the Empire's main field army surrounded it with heavy siege equipment, even a legion of ten thousand men would be unable to breach it.

Thinking back to the snow piled at the foot of the outer wall, which had seemed strangely deep, Enzo suddenly recalled a familiar defensive feature: a moat. There had to be one outside the Lin family's ancestral home, and a broad one at that—at least five meters across.

Then there were the two rows of outbuildings, set far apart on either side of the ancestral home and meant to house servants. The dark buildings were clearly made from the same materials as the walls and courtyard. Their long, crooked shapes looked as if the builders hadn't bothered to straighten the walls. But those irregular, angular buildings would become two spiky bastions if an enemy ever breached the courtyard.

The outbuildings' narrow windows, and the steel bars as thick as a child's arm set into their frames, were plainly arrow slits for archers and crossbowmen.

What left Enzo speechless was that near the two outbuildings stood stables, granaries, a small mill, and all the other facilities a great family needed. Every one of them was built from black volcanic steelstone, and every one followed the principles of military fortress construction.

There was another wall inside the courtyard, enclosing the Lin family's main fortress. The main structure had a lookout tower nearly a hundred meters tall and a dozen or more decorative spires that could serve as arrow towers in wartime.

The fortress covered a vast area. Even from the outside, the six-story structure looked large enough to house two or three thousand people. If unrest broke out, it could just as easily hold that many for a prolonged siege.

It would have to be a prolonged siege, because a ring of twenty-four deep wells had been dug around the fortress!

Enzo's fingers went numb just looking at them. Even the Empire's army regulations required only three deep wells to provide water for a frontline defensive fort. The Lin family's ancestors had truly planned ahead: they'd dug twenty-four, eight times the required number!

Enzo glanced at Lin Qi without thinking. Lin Qi was chattering away to Iron Hammer and Butcher Knife about his exciting adventures over the past three years. Iron Hammer and Butcher Knife listened with smiles that were almost childlike, their faces filled with affection and tenderness.

These two thugs were showing such affection and tenderness? Enzo felt a chill creep over his scalp.

As they drew closer to the Lin family's fortress, more and more people appeared around them. Every one of them was a burly man with a thick neck and bulging eyes, arms as thick as an ordinary man's thigh. Even the old men who tended the horses had faces crisscrossed with scars, each one hideously fierce.

A few servant women came out of the cowshed carrying milk buckets. In the dead of winter, they wore nothing but short-sleeved shirts, and their exposed arms were knotted with bulging muscles! The calluses on their hands made it clear that these muscular women were skilled with weapons, too.

Enzo suddenly understood. Only a family like this could raise someone as exceptional as Lin Qi!