Increasingly Unmanageable

The iron-gray little building stood utterly unmoved amid the raging storm. Inside, a middle-aged man clad in a king's robes sat upright beside a square table, holding black and white stones in either hand as he leisurely played Go, a game passed down on the Eastern Continent since antiquity and long beloved by Blood Qin Empire scholars, refined gentlemen, high officials, and nobles.

Compared to the various war chess games popular on the Western Continent, Go was infinitely more complex and ever-changing, containing boundless profound principles. It was a wondrous art truly capable of cultivating one's mind and character. The black and white stones in the middle-aged man's hands continued to fall, and the chessboard gradually revealed the brutal spectacle of two great dragons twisting together in a fight to the death.

An elderly man with clear, lean features sat nonchalantly beside a small window, quietly watching the torrential rain outside.

A small folding fan swayed gently in the old man's hand. A few pale ink strokes upon it formed a painting of orchids and bamboo. Beside a cluster of orchids, beneath a stalk of green bamboo, a little fox sprawled lazily atop a strangely shaped rock.

Sha Qiandao slowly waved his fan, bringing himself a negligible wisp of breeze in the stifling night. Every now and then, he glanced at the middle-aged man in king's robes, wishing he could grab a fruit knife and stab a hundred and eighty holes through that indecisive bastard.

Damn bad luck. Sha Qiandao was one of the standouts among his Sand Family peers, yet to cooperate with the family's plans, he could only throw in his lot with King Jinhu, Ying Pan. After struggling and scheming for more than a decade, he had finally driven away all the strategists and advisers around Ying