There was blood splattered on the pavement leading up to the mansion in which the Feng clan made their home. Afternoon rolled in and now the courtyard was quiet, peaceful in the hours after so much noise and a night’s worth of ragged howling. It was bare except for that tell-tale evidence of lashings left behind, spring flowers swaying lazily in the breeze, birdsong warbling from branches distorted by nature. All remained unconcerned with the past or future. There was only now, the present moment of their harmonious existences.

Feng Quan hid himself away in his large room, wounded from his culmination of wrongdoing and spite, his hardheadedness that always seemed to make his problems much worse than they should have been. Oftentimes, when Quan sat quietly by himself, back sobbing red from punishment administered by his teacher, he would tell himself that this was just his personality. He was stubborn because life required it. It was not his fault that people didn’t understand his machinations, it was their own for being so daft, so blind to the brilliance of his guile.

He leaned forward into his cupped palms, head suspended partially above a half-eaten bowl of lukewarm broth. Quan’s platinum hair was gathered into a haphazard ball at the base of his skull, still wet from the bath he forced himself to endure while the skin of his back was flayed to fresh shreds. He sighed and briefly closed his eyes, willing his thoughts away from himself and to matters much larger: the arena, the legendary artifact up in next week’s contest.

The whole city would try for it. It was inevitable. The best from every clan would be out there to snag that valuable piece, from Zhenxi to Luanshi, wealthy teams and poor teams. The Tians would likely have their current staples: the Crown Prince and all his hangers on. And he, Feng Quan would have—

Opening his eyes, the blond’s chin turned at the rustling of movement.

“Oof—how many strokes even is that? It’s like Ban painted a royal walkway straight through the gardens and you were the mop.” The newcomer cast a long shadow from where he darkened Quan’s open door. Ma Yixun was a strong looking boy, broad shouldered and just a breath shorter than the blonde he observed. He shook his head, amused at his own observations as he entered the room and slid the door shut behind him. Quan’s pariah of a friend, ever loyal, knelt next to his friend full of future scars, black and blonde hair falling into his bloodmist eyes. “What was it this time?”

“Same thing it always is: disobedience. You know Ban and I don’t see eye to eye on many things. I’m not sure if he was even counting this time, just reasonably sure that he just wanted to get his anger out. You know, be rough with someone other than daddy.” Quan sneered, sitting up straighter at his friend’s entrance and following him with eyes that were so adept at masking the truth of his emotions. “What’re you doing?”

“Looking at your fucked up back,” Yixun replied, leaning forward onto the table with one elbow and glancing up at his friend. “Bringing you some news that’s gonna make you so happy you’re gonna break your face.”

“Oh yeah? Try me.” The challenge made the Feng son somehow more stern, eyebrows passing into the softest shades of severity, lips drawn into a challenging tight line.

“So this morning, I was passing through the Zhao district and guess who I saw on his knees getting slapped around by his dad?” That black and white boy, always and ever at Feng Quan’s side, had the air of a man who knew exactly how his dice were weighted.

Quan only thought on the question for a moment before throwing in the towel, expression a hard stare that focused on the man beside him. He would have shrugged if he felt like sending a brand new wave of pain down the ladder of his spine. “Fuck if I know, I don’t keep up with those people down there.”

“Ren fucking Li.” Yixun barely let his friend finish issuing the haughty, better-than-the-poors statement tumbling out of his face. “I saw Ren fucking Li getting shame slapped in his underwear out front of that poor boy tattoo shop Tian Xiaoxu got his pearl set at, Quan.”

“Are you fucking joking? Yixun, you better not be joking, I swear to every single god—” The Ma boy was right, he knew his friend too well. Any trouble brought to the ruling clan and their associates was cause for celebration. Quan’s eyebrows lifted in surprise, his gaze was sharpened with delight. “What the fuck happened? Do you know what happened?”

“Of course I know what happened.” That tricky piranha-mouthed boy was a slow drawl, withholding the full story behind flushed lips, behind sharp teeth. He was so adept at taking over everything and everyone he touched, it was no wonder that, though he’d never turn his ability on Feng Quan properly, he still had his way of getting that vicious blonde on the hook. He lounged then, looking toward the window as he leaned back with a sigh. “I don’t want to get you too excited—it might mess up your back even more.”

“Wha—UGH. Don’t be a fucking dick, Yixun,” Quan scolded, dropped off the cliff of his anticipation so carelessly, all that joy, that delight lost to the scorn of his persistent, sour attitude. “Tell me everything. Come on, I deserve it after the fucking day I had.”

“Oh, so you deserve it now~” Yixun teased, leaning forward again now that Quan was fully engaged. “A minute ago it was like you didn’t even want to hear this story…”

All Yixun wanted to hear was please.

“NO, that’s not true. You weren’t paying attention.” The blond boy lifted his chin high, better than this whole argument, lidded gaze looking down his nose at nothing. “I always wanted to hear the story, I was just doubtful that it would make my day better. I’ve always deserved it, Yixun, so fucking give it to me.”

“Say it.” Yixun grinned. “Say it, Quan.”

“Gods, fuck you,” Quan huffed under his breath, turning back to his friend to look him in that smug face. He inhaled deep, let it go, then finally said, so daintily and disingenuous: “Please.”

That second-son ally to Quan’s better-than-everyone airs beamed, proud of his best friend’s breakdown.

“Okay SO,” he began. “From what I gather, this inlayer ripped up all of Ren Li’s tracers and his dad’s men drug him out of the guy’s bed—man you shoulda heard Ren Qihua calling his son a whore, Quan, it was glorious.”

“Oh my fucking gods, I can’t believe this,” Quan said easily recovering his earlier glee, flip switch boy always an easy turncoat. “This is so unlike Ren Li! So what happened then? Did his father disown him? Did he get demoted from his position at the palace? Did they drag him and the poor through the streets? All the way back to the Ren Manor?”

“No, it’s better.” Yixun leaned toward his friend as though the rest of his tale was best confided close, to deliver his un-fucking-believable story where it didn’t have the room to reverberate before it reached Quan’s waiting ear. “Tian Xiaoxu showed up with that little dipshit brother of his in tow and he made a wager with Li’s dad. Quan, are you ready? Are you ready to hear this fucking bet??”

“Fuck, Yixun, I don’t even know anymore.” The blond was totally buying into the hype. The first part was so good already that he didn’t even know how this could get any better. “Am I ready?”

“You better be ‘cause I’m about to drop it on your chest like a big pile of freshly minted gold ingots, so get ready to become wreckage my friend—” Yixun sat up straight. He wanted to see Quan get rocked by the next turn in his tale of many woes. “Tian Xiaoxu gave his word that if his team didn’t win the Millipede in arena next week, he’d cede his claim to the throne. Both he and Ren Li will banish themselves to Yunji.”

“W H A T!” Quan shouted the question that wasn’t so much a question as it was a confirmation of reality dotted with the excitement he felt at the Crown Prince’s potential fall, his precarious future like a shot of adrenaline straight to the wicked center of that severely jealous boy’s heart. “That can’t be true. Is that true? Yixun, please, you cannot be fucking lying to me right now. Swear it on your handicapped brother’s life that you’re not just pulling my fucking leg here.”

“Xushu isn’t handicapped, he’s perfectly normal—plenty of people can’t use artifacts,” Yixun patiently clarified, terse before he fully untethered his excited response. It brought Yixun great joy to see Quan so animated when he’d been so depressed and angry just moments before. “If I wanted to fuck with you, I wouldn’t make a story like this. This is TOO MUCH to be a lie, Quan—they’re heading up to Yunji to train for the week: Both Tians, both Rens, and that poorboy inlayer who caused all their grief, Hua Jin.”

“So obviously the next step for us is to make an unbeatable team. If they’re going to dedicate a whole week to training, then we need to do the same. We need to get the best people to ally with us.” Quan turned back to his table, looked down over his soup growing colder and colder as if it had all the answers he was looking for. “Ren Fei is a wildcard—since he has the ability to mimic anyone’s gift we’ll need to take him out first. Ugh, gods, I hate that brat so much but his skill is so fucking useful.” The Feng son looked back to his accomplice. “Who else can we get to do this with us? We have to make sure they lose, Yixun, we have to. The Guis should be back in Fanxing today. I can make daddy make them help us…”

“Or you could just ask them yourself.” Yixun made a face. “Your dad’s got them accruing interest so hard I think they’d throw it to spite him if he was the one asking.”

The more able-bodied of the pair rose and slid open the door, sticking his head out to shout down one of the Feng clan’s numerous servants, sharply demanding a bowl of fresh water, a clean towel, fresh bindings for their master’s many, many wounds.

“You think they would? I’m not sure. They’re both so nice. They wouldn’t betray blood like that. Besides, they look up to us, you know? We practically took them in after their dad was murdered.” The Guis were blood cousins of the Feng children, left to fend for themselves after their mother purportedly killed their father. In the absence of their parents, the patriarch of the Feng clan ushered the pair under his wing. He gave them a business loan to get them on their feet and set the interest impossibly high to teach the pair some obtuse lesson in finance or trust or some bastard mixture of the two.

Quan carried on his scheming even when Yixun stepped away from him. Truthfully, the blond boy’s asking was usually delivered with the cadence of a demand, but perhaps this time he could manage a more genial tone. He did really want this, after all, it wouldn’t be so hard to be authentic for once, would it?

Yixun returned to Quan once his requested items were delivered and knelt at his friend’s back.

“You’re right,” the Feng boy decided, “I suppose I could ask them.”

“If we’re gonna do this, we need to get you fixed up,” the black-and-blonde headed boy chided, putting the towel in the water before he wrung it out, dabbing at Quan’s shredded back. “I’ll get it cleaned up then let’s go see a healer. We got work to do.”

“Alright,” Quan agreed with a nod, pain evinced by the furrow of his brows, his wincing features unseen except for in the pale reflection of himself in the long window before his table and the gentle shudder shaking his strong shoulders.

“Thank you, Yixun,” the wealthy boy dressed in painful red said after a moment. It was both for his attention to the wounds left cut into his skin and for thinking of him when he came upon the best information in Fanxing’s noisy streets—for knowing exactly what misery to bring back to the Feng’s mansion to make that malicious creature the happiest.