Chapter 1358: The Dead Dragon and Phoenix!

The Lord’s gaze shifted away for the smallest moment.

Marcus noticed—

So did everyone else.

Grandpa Maxton’s expression sharpened immediately. "Exactly. At the time, Seiryu’s death mattered more to you than anything that might follow. You don’t get to stand there now and behave as though the Maxtons dragged the unwilling Heavenchild family into something you all celebrated when it benefited you."

The Lord’s wings moved faintly, but before he could answer, Grandpa Maxton continued. "And since apparently everyone develops selective hearing whenever Danny’s name comes up, let me repeat this one final time. He was going to die. Someone saved him before he could take the poison. I didn’t suddenly decide that fatherhood mattered more than everything we’ve spent centuries building."

Marcus scoffed loudly enough that half the room turned toward him.

Grandpa Maxton’s eyes narrowed. "Something funny?"

Marcus slowly sat forward: "Yes, actually. All of it!"

Elliot glanced at his son and immediately recognized the expression on his face.

Marcus had been holding this in for far too long.

"I am so fucking tired of listening to everyone here pretend that sentence solves the problem," Marcus said, his tone strangely calm at first. "Maybe someone saved Danny. Fine. Maybe the poison would have killed him. Fine. But don’t sit there and act confused about why everyone thinks you went soft when we all remember exactly what happened to Pemberton."

The Maxton side of the hall became visibly more uncomfortable.

Marcus saw it and smiled:

"It isn’t like I cared about Pemberton. I didn’t. But when he became inconvenient, nobody offered him poison, no. Nobody gave him something painless and called it efficiency. Danton’s stolen flames burned him until there was nothing left, and because apparently destroying his body wasn’t enough, your grandson burned Pemberton’s very soul too. You erased the bastard so thoroughly that reincarnation wasn’t even an option."

The words stolen flames landed exactly where Marcus intended them to.

Several Maxtons shifted... one elder’s jaw tightened.

Elliot slowly nodded beside his son, and a few Heavenchilds followed; a rare occurrence.

Marcus leaned back comfortably now that the room belonged to him. "Then Danny becomes the next inconvenience that should be removed and suddenly poison is the clever choice. Clean. Quiet. Graceful death, huh? How loving!"

More Heavenchilds nodded this time.

Nobody on the Maxton side answered because any explanation they offered now would sound defensive, and Marcus knew it.

His smile widened slightly: "That silence is beautiful."

"Marcus—" Grandpa Maxton warned.

"No, no, you’ve had centuries to talk. Now enjoy five minutes of silence!"

The Lord’s eyes sharpened, but Marcus barely glanced at him before continuing. "And Danny is the reason the Lins are here. You can dress it up however you want, but his mess is one of the threads that pulled all of this back into the open, and somehow the rest of us are supposed to sit here pretending the Maxtons haven’t spent generations dragging this alliance from one disaster into another."

One of the Maxton elders bristled. "Watch your mouth!"

Marcus looked toward him with almost delighted disbelief. "That’s your answer? After everything I just said, you’re going with ’watch your mouth’?"

The elder’s face darkened.

Marcus laughed and turned back toward Grandpa Maxton. "Let’s review this properly since everyone apparently enjoys selective history. Your family killed that woman and made a mistake big enough that half the consequences are still crawling after us decades later. Yet who got the spoils from everything that followed? It was the Maxtons!"

Grandpa Maxton’s expression hardened.

Marcus continued with increasing confidence. "I kill one girl and suddenly I’m the greatest idiot this alliance has ever produced. I’m reckless, I’m incompetent, I’m the embarrassing Angel Progenitor who can’t follow instructions. Fine. But tell me the difference between Mei Lin and some Selenenobody."

The Lin name changed the atmosphere instantly.

Marcus saw several faces tighten and pressed harder: "Exactly! Selene was a nobody. Yet I kill her and I’m treated like the fucking collapse of civilization. You people killed a fucking Phoenix and somehow walked around afterward as heroes because enough a Dragon Heart Scale fell into your laps and everyone forgot how badly you fucked up to get to it."

"Enough!" one Maxton growled.

Marcus turned toward him. "Or what?"

Essence flickered around the elder.

The change in the Heavenchild side was immediate.

Several people rose halfway from their seats, others simply straightened, and a pressure of their own began gathering through the hall. Elliot did not even need to give an order. The family reaction came naturally now, which said more about how far the alliance had deteriorated than any speech could have.

Across from them, Maxton cultivators responded in kind.

The room tightened.

The Lord’s aura descended before either side made the mistake of moving first, forcing the gathering back beneath his presence, but even he could not erase the hostility anymore.

Marcus looked around with a smile that had become openly cruel: "Would you look at that! One little question and suddenly we’re all ready to murder each other. Maybe this alliance was healthier than I thought."

Grandpa Maxton’s voice dropped. "You are forgetting what the Maxtons sacrificed."

Marcus turned toward him immediately. "I’m not forgetting anything. That’s the whole fucking point. For once, I’m remembering all of it."

That shut several people up.

Marcus rose from his seat.

He did not need to shout now to be heard; the hall was already waiting for him.

"For centuries, every bad decision was swallowed because we were told the end would justify it all once we got the Coffer. That was always the answer, wasn’t it? Someone dies, someone loses something important, one family has to tolerate another’s insult, but it’s fine because eventually we’ll get the Coffer and everyone will receive their share."

He spread his hands: "So... where is it?"

Nobody answered.

Marcus nodded slowly as though the silence had given him exactly what he wanted. "Right. Let’s do a little time skip, shall we?"

He turned and pointed toward the throne-like seat where Danton should have been sitting: "You handed the entire retrieval plan to your beloved Progenitor."

The Lord’s expression immediately changed.

Marcus looked straight at him now. "Oh, don’t you look offended. You made your preference very clear." The old resentment sharpened his grin. "You stood in front of everyone and said you’d rather have Danton as a grandson than me. Remember that?"

The Lord said nothing.

Marcus gave a tiny nod. "Good. I do too."

Elliot’s expression hardened beside him, but Marcus did not look away from the Lord.

"So let’s talk about your preferred grandson." He gestured toward the empty throne. "He was entrusted with retrieving the thing our families spent centuries preparing and doing whatever was possible to obtain going as far as betraying other Legacies, and now guess what? We don’t have the fucking Coffer."

His eyes swept around the hall.

Nobody interrupted: "He lost it."

The Maxton side bristled again.