CHAPTER 142: GENERAL LAN’S WISDOM

The hall smelled faintly of lacquer and old paper, a scent that belonged to places where decisions were made and things were kept secret. Sunlight slanted through the high windows, cutting light bars across the polished floor and catching dust motes that drifted like tiny planets around the polished legs of chairs. The room itself had the hush of a museum and the charge of a battlefield briefing; both reverence and readiness lived in its bones.

General Lan entered as if he owned the architecture itself — not with the arrogance of someone who had earned power, but with the calm of a man who had learned to live under it. He greeted the gathered officials with an affable nod and, in one startlingly human gesture, reached across the carpeted space and smacked his insolent grandson on the head. The slap landed with a soft, almost affectionate crack that made the boy scowl and grin sheepishly, as if the world’s oldest rules were still in play in this room: respect, a little pain, and then the performance of duty.

The old general slid into the seat beside Sian with an ease that looked casual only to the untrained eye. His movements were measured, economical — the kind that comes from years of practice where every motion is moderated against consequences. His thin white beard trembled as he adjusted his posture. Up close, Lan Qisheng could see the map of a life etched into the old man’s face: faint scars of worry, the deep hollows of sleepless nights, edges softened by time but not by regret.

No wonder, Sian thought. A general’s calm was not born of apathy but of having made peace with outcomes no one else could accept.

Minister Wei approached with the kind of smile that had been tailored for diplomacy. His practiced politeness ribboned around his words like silk as he began to speak, reciting the facts of the incident with the economy of a man trained to make truth safe for public ears. He spoke of the medical institute’s entanglement with Sian and his daughter, of the elaborate setup and exploitation that had tried to strip them of agency and dignity. He spoke clearly, and in under three minutes, he wove a narrative that painted Sian not as a troublemaker but as a man trapped by other people’s ambitions.

Sian listened without moving more than a muscle. The words sank into the quiet of the hall like stones into a still pond. He felt the pressure of dozens of gazes — investigative, speculative, sympathetic, skeptical — but none of them truly pierced him. He had been placed on display before, measured and catalogued like an oddity at an exhibition, and he had learned how to stand still and let others try on their assumptions.

General Lan did not react at first. His face was a flat plane of composed neutrality, as if he had heard it all before and the details were only variations on an old tune. Only a tiny twitch at the corner of one broad eyebrow betrayed any disturbance. It was not a great motion; it was a whisper of muscle. But for anyone who knew how to read the old man’s quiet, the twitch was a continent of meaning.

When the minister finished, the hall inhaled and waited.

A silence settled like dust at the edge of a tablecloth.

Then the general let out a deep, long sigh — not of fatigue, but of someone carrying the weight of the world in his chest and setting it down long enough to speak.

Sian found himself watching the old man’s hands. They were large and knuckled, the fingers like old oak branches around a thought. He stroked his beard and clasped his hands together as if wrapping them around the next sentence.

"What did he once think of me? Aah, a person from the phantom squad," Sian wondered, not aloud, but with the kind of curiosity that never flowered into hope.

Since the rumors had begun — Phantom Squad, unsanctioned feats, rumors of violence — people had made up stories that suited them. General Lan had been one of the few who had acted without waiting for the rumor mill to grind out a verdict.

The old man’s voice, when it came, was quiet and unadorned. "I once thought you were a weapon, a person who guards the people and protects them," he said, and the words had no reproach, only the matter-of-fact quality of someone cataloging evidence. "A dangerous one. A man who could—by accident or design—tilt the scales."

That certainty had been why he had ordered his grandson to shadow Sian, he had explained, to keep watch and to, if necessary, redirect the boy from ruin. It had an odd, paternal logic to it, the kind bred of military minds: contain the unknown by inserting one of your own.

Sian’s own memories of those days were not cinematic heroics but small, stubborn acts. He remembered the concrete smell after the hotel rescues, the metallic tang of adrenaline in his mouth, the faces of people who had not yet learned to be grateful but had survived anyway.

He remembered a day from his old world, being alone in an operating room while Scientists talked in rooms, being watched and found useful, and then found expendable.

When he saved those lives — twice, three times — he did not think of recognition. He had only wanted to move through the chaos and keep it from crawling into people’s chests.

General Lan did not feign ignorance of that past. He let the facts stand like stones on the table. "You saved many," the general acknowledged at last. "You have done what others could not. It is not something our nation will forget. Nor should it."

The minister’s relief showed for a heartbeat — as if praise from a man of Lan’s rank could sew back a fraying seam — then hardened into a combative edge. "All the same," Minister Wei said, his voice rising a degree, "a man with such power has obligations to the state. You cannot simply—"

"Obligations," General Lan repeated softly, and the word fell into the room like a dropped coin. He shook his head minutely. "Do not confuse what a state demands with what a person can bear."

Kira, who had been standing close enough to the conversation to feel its gravity like heat, cut in with bristling indignation. Her voice was sharp, edged with a protection that went past protocol into fierce, personal territory. "If you had witnessed even a fraction of his strength, you would know how much he really bore," she snapped, and the finality of the sentence made Minister Wei’s lips tighten.

Across the room, the minister’s wife paled at Kira’s tone. The little boy in the corner — a child who played with a carved wooden soldier and seemed to exist in a world apart — thumped his small figure into an imaginary battle, blissfully indifferent to the debate that could determine nations.

The contrast between that innocence and the adult quarrel made blood move faster through Sian’s veins; there was a cruelty in grown people turning a young man’s life into a ledger.

General Lan’s hands moved again, not to strike but to emphasize a truth. "A clever man thinks two steps ahead," he said, tapping a forefinger against the armrest, "a cautious man thinks three. A wise man thinks a hundred."

His eyes, small and dark under heavy lids, fixed on Minister Wei with a solemnity that seemed to stretch the room taut. "Loyalty and respect can only be demanded so far. They must be earned."

He bent forward then, his voice lowering to a cadence that forced listeners to lean in. "Sian has offered you more than you ever expected. He does not have to. He answers to no one’s petition. So tell me: why does he remain here? Why has he not risen and torn the roof from this place? Is it cowardice you imagine? Or fear?"

The arrogance in Kira’s reply — the immediate, protective denial — was almost violent. "If you had seen him fight—" She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to.

The room understood: for Kira, Sian was not merely strong; he was a force too exacting to trust. That declaration sent a cold current through Minister Wei’s face.

Minister Wei opened his mouth, closed it, and then tried again, choosing argument over outrage. "He demands Kira’s resignation from the superhuman team. Is that not interference? Can a single man set conditions on those who serve the nation?"

General Lan’s smile had in it neither warmth nor mockery, only the long patience of someone who had watched the folly of certainty countless times. He folded his hands and rested them on his knees as if closing a book between careful fingers. "A nation that believes it can dictate the desires of the extraordinary without consequence is a nation that courts disaster," he said. "If you try to force a being such as Sian into service by fiat, you will set in motion consequences you cannot foresee." His voice did not threaten; it simply narrated a truth.

Sian felt the room weigh itself around those words. There was a kind of justice in the old man’s refusal to coerce; it recognized the sanctity of a person’s limits and the hubris of institutions that thought themselves greater than the souls they governed.

Yet even as that recognition warmed something in him, Sian could sense the vast machinery of politics grinding at the edges of the argument.

People would not easily accept that a person like him could be beyond a nation’s reach. It threatened too many plans, too many ego-driven strategies.

General Lan’s face changed then — a small shift, a shadow passing under his eyes. It was the look of a man remembering hard things: past betrayals, the taste of promises turned to poison.

"I, too, have seen our state demand much," he said quietly. "I have watched men disappear for lesser offenses, I have seen the noblest ideals hollowed out by power. But I am not blind. I understand the bitterness in some hearts. I will not tell you to forget."

He looked at Sian with something almost like kinship — not sentimental, but recognizing of a fellow traveler who had known loss and carried it like a weight. "You owe nothing to this world," he said plainly. "No duty. No apologies. Not unless you choose them."