After Murong Huang passed away, Murong Chuyi became even more taciturn. He often locked himself in the artifact workshop, and the only person in the entire Yue residence who could easily see him was Jiang Yexue.
During the mourning period, Murong Chuyi silently sculpted many clay figures, infused them with spiritual power, and slowly adjusted them, teaching them to imitate Murong Huang’s expressions, mannerisms, and speech. He let them wander around his small courtyard.
Jiang Yexue understood the grief in his heart and did not say much. He took the blueprints for the little clay figurines and made them according to the designs as well.
However, he did not only make figures resembling Murong Huang.
Some of the clay figures he sculpted looked like Murong Chuyi, some looked like himself, and some were even made to resemble the newborn child who had been named Yue Chenqing.
Those noisy little clay figures wandered around the small courtyard, chattering and bustling about, breaking up the oppressive atmosphere that had originally filled the place.
Murong Chuyi looked at him darkly. “What exactly are you trying to do? Looking for a fight?”
Jiang Yexue walked over to him and wanted to take his hand, but in the end he only grasped his sleeve.
“Chuyi, you can’t live only in Aunt Huang’s shadow.”
Murong Chuyi abruptly pulled his sleeve away and stubbornly said, “I’m not.”
He clearly did not want to say anything more to Jiang Yexue. He simply turned around and walked alone to the mechanical armor worktable, looking at the scraps of porcelain left behind from making the clay figures.
Slowly, he closed his eyes.
But beside him came that gentle voice, accompanied by something lightly tugging at his sleeve, persistent and unwilling to stop.
“Chuyi, Chuyi…”
“I already said I’m not! Can you stop—”
He turned his head, only to discover that the one speaking was a tiny clay figurine.
Its features resembled Jiang Yexue’s, and it was clumsily trying to coax him into feeling better.
“Don’t be sad. Don’t be sad.”
Murong Chuyi:
“…”
“It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.”
Murong Chuyi silently glared at it.
After staring for a while, the corners of his eyes slowly reddened.
He turned his head and saw Jiang Yexue standing beneath the broad eaves of the house. Behind him was a leaden-gray sky and fallen blossoms drifting through the air like snow, while his lotus-white sleeves fluttered in the wind.
The two of them stood some distance apart, looking at each other from afar.
Murong Chuyi tried several times to speak, but each time the words stopped at his lips.
In the end, he could only say bitterly in a low voice,
“…You made it way too ugly.”
Jiang Yexue burst out laughing, as though some kind of restriction had finally broken and melted away.
He walked toward Murong Chuyi and, after thinking for a moment, gently embraced him in a gesture of comfort.
“You’re right.” Jiang Yexue coaxed him gently. “How about my little uncle teaches me personally how to sculpt them?”
Murong Chuyi:
“…”
Their relationship at that time truly was the most comfortable it had ever been.
Jiang Yexue was still able to restrain his desires, and Murong Chuyi was also very close to him.
Actually, Jiang Yexue would often think later: if he had not stopped what happened afterward, would everything have turned out differently?
Inside Huntian Cave, Jiang Yexue raised his hand and clamped it around Yue Chenqing’s throat.
His touch was slightly cool, yet it inexplicably gave Yue Chenqing the bone-chilling sensation of being constricted by a snake.
Jiang Yexue leaned down, his eyes narrowing dangerously as he stared at him.
“Yue Chenqing, do you know that if I hadn’t helped you back then, you would have died at my mother’s hands?”
Yue Chenqing shuddered.
Jiang Yexue’s brown pupils were so close to him that it seemed the light and shadows scattered by the years were still shifting within them.
——
Not long after Murong Huang passed away, one day Jiang Yexue took a small wooden toy that Murong Chuyi had made for the child and intended to go to the side room to play with Yue Chenqing.
Although he knew that many people in the residence had changed their attitude toward him precisely because of Yue Chenqing’s birth, he had never harbored any hostility or malice toward the swaddled infant.
Murong Chuyi, on the other hand, felt affection for the child, but because of his pride, he never took the initiative to visit him.
Instead, he would casually hand Jiang Yexue the carefully polished toys and have him deliver them to Yue Chenqing.
As time passed, little wooden men, wooden horses, wooden fish, rabbits with perked-up ears…
A whole assortment of scattered little things made by Murong Chuyi filled Yue Chenqing’s cradle.
Looking at the wooden squirrel in his hand, Jiang Yexue sighed with both amusement and helplessness.
He thought that he really ought to make Murong Chuyi come and take a look himself.
If he kept sending things over like this, where would little Chenqing even have room to sleep?
Lost in thought, he walked to Yue Chenqing’s room.
But when he pushed open the door, he suddenly heard a loud crash.
The nanny caring for Yue Chenqing abruptly turned around like a startled bird.
The overturned medicine bowl shattered on the floor, and the medicinal liquid flowed across the stone surface with a hissing sound.
“Y-Young Master Yexue!”
Jiang Yexue immediately recognized that what had been in the bowl was originally a poison capable of rotting the intestines and destroying the soul.
Enraged and shocked, he grabbed the panicked nanny.
“What’s going on?! What are you doing?!”
The nanny was someone who feared death above all else.
She immediately knocked her head repeatedly against the floor, kneeling before Jiang Yexue and weeping as she told him the truth.
Lady Xie had forced her to secretly pour the poison into Yue Chenqing’s mouth when no one was paying attention.
If she refused, her entire family’s lives would not be spared.
Listening to what his mother had done, Jiang Yexue felt as though he had fallen into an icy abyss.
No matter what, he could not believe that his own mother could become so cruel for the sake of power.
So he brought the nanny with him to confront Lady Xie.
The result, however, was a hysterical torrent of abuse and curses from Lady Xie.
“What right do you have to criticize me? I’m clearing away the obstacles on your path for the future! You useless coward who refuses to fight for anything!”
“Morality? Conscience? This world has always been about the survival of the fittest! You’re simply too naive, Yue Yexue! Do you know how I climbed step by step to where I am today? You’ve never struggled in the mud, so you have no idea what it feels like to be someone’s slave!”
“Just wait. Twenty years from now… no, you won’t even need twenty years. Ten years from now, you’ll know that everything I did, no matter how ruthless, was for your sake!”
“This is the Yue residence, not some home for cats and dogs! It’s either him or you, or you or him! Do you understand?!”
“Yue Yexue, how did I give birth to such a softhearted bastard like you?!”
At the time, he was both heartbroken and furious.
“Mother, that’s a human life! How could you have become like this…?”
“If you can even ask such a question, then it proves you don’t understand what a princely household is! Yue Yexue, who I am today is exactly what you will be in the future!! Just wait and see! If you keep him alive, everything that belongs to you will eventually become his, piece by piece. By then…”
The woman’s shrill laughter seemed to come from that night years ago, her long fingernails scraping against the bottom of a pot, sending chills through the air.
“You will definitely regret stopping your mother today…”
“You will regret it!”
You will regret it…
The woman’s eyes were bloodshot, as though spiderwebs had spread across her pupils.
She grew increasingly deranged, eventually developing paranoia.
In the end, she even spoke disrespectfully to Yue Juntian, publicly insulting him as a cold and ungrateful man.
The result was naturally self-evident.
Yue Juntian had originally favored her precisely because she was obedient, gentle, and knew how to conduct herself properly.
She had allowed him to experience an infinite softness that could never be found in the women of noble families.
But now, that gentle nest had turned into a vinegar jar.
What reason did he have left to remain attached to her?
Lady Xie’s favor withered away overnight.
When everyone saw that she had disgusted Yue Juntian and would never have a chance to rise again, they scattered one after another.
Even the medicine cultivators treating her no longer put their hearts into her care.
Jiang Yexue saw all of this.
After all, they were mother and son. How could he, as her son, not be distressed by seeing his mother become so completely deranged?
He went to care for her at her sickbed and tried to bring in other medicine practitioners from outside the residence to treat her.
But whenever Lady Xie saw him, she would shriek and curse at him, scratching and biting him.
She even nearly stabbed him in the throat with a pair of scissors.
She no longer recognized anyone and would listen to no one.
Not long afterward, Lady Xie hanged herself from a beam.
When the servants discovered her body, she had dressed herself in her finest clothes.
She had somehow managed to pin all the most expensive and splendid jewels she had ever received into her black hair.
Her arms and neck were covered in glittering gold bracelets, necklaces, pendant chains, and precious gems.
She had even put on, completely against protocol, the multicolored pheasant robe that only the wife of a duke or marquis was permitted to wear.
She had stolen it from Murong Huang’s belongings.
She had even written a final letter.
The entire thing was absurd, and every line seemed to suggest that she was the true mistress of this household, possessing an exalted status and immense power…
The ambitions and delusions of this woman remained in this world in an extraordinarily tragic yet ridiculous manner.
Her final letter caused the last shred of sympathy Yue Juntian had for her to disappear.
She had been right about one thing:
Yue Juntian truly was a heartless, faithless man.
He ordered people to hastily handle her funeral arrangements and did not even go to see her one last time.
The magnificent robes of a noblewoman she had worn were replaced with plain mourning clothes.
The dazzling, splendid dream became a cold, shabby tombstone.
And because Lady Xie’s final letter had feverishly written things such as “My son, the heir of the Yue household, Yue Yexue,” and even, “My son will surely take Yue Juntian’s position and replace him,” Yue Juntian, despite knowing that these were the ravings of a madwoman, still developed a knot in his heart toward Jiang Yexue.
His attitude influenced the rest of the Yue family’s attitude toward Jiang Yexue.
The faint, subtle distance that had once existed between them became, overnight, undisguised mockery and contempt.
“Son of a madwoman.”
“That mother and son have such huge ambitions. Hahahaha.”
Jiang Yexue had lost a family member, so his mood was already poor, and he did not want to associate with anyone.
Besides, he had always carried himself with grace and had read extensively in the books of the sages.
He was a gentleman who wanted no part in muddying himself in the mire.
So, despite suffering all these grievances, he said nothing.
When others assumed that he and Lady Xie were cut from the same cloth, he did not argue.
What could he possibly argue?
Could he tell them that he had once stopped his mother from poisoning his younger brother to death?
Even if she had been cruel and vicious, she had once treated him well.
Now that she was dead, how could he bear to add another stain to her coffin?
Forget it.
He swallowed all that bitterness alone.
Yet Lady Xie’s curse was like a white funeral banner, constantly drifting before his eyes, lingering with a mournful resentment.
“Everything that belongs to you will sooner or later become his…”
“You will regret it…”
“The person I am today will be you in the future. You simply don’t understand what a princely household is yet.”
Countless times, he would wake from midnight dreams drenched in sweat.
He would look outside in panic.
Murong Chuyi would still be beneath the lamplight, concentrating on adjusting the wooden armor.
He would breathe heavily and lie back down.
Thankfully.
At least Murong Chuyi still believed him.
He did not think that Jiang Yexue coveted power or secretly hated Yue Chenqing.
At least he could still remain in Murong Chuyi’s separate courtyard.
When he woke, he could still see the person he loved right beside him.
Because of this, Jiang Yexue did not harbor too much resentment.
In fact, once Yue Chenqing learned to speak, whenever the child would babble happily, drooling as he reached out his hands toward Jiang Yexue and called, “Big brother, big brother,” Jiang Yexue genuinely felt that this soft little life was adorable.
It was worth protecting.
Worth caring for.
He did not want him to suffer the same hardships he had.
And so, Yue Chenqing gradually grew up.
Soon, it was once again time for him to enter the academy for cultivation.
Because he was Murong Huang’s son and carried royal blood, Yue Juntian, in an effort to curry favor with the sovereign, gave Yue Chenqing the very best of everything and reserved every opportunity for him.
He even found roundabout ways to take back some of the magical artifacts he had previously given Jiang Yexue.
“Your younger brother lost his mother when he was little. He’s very pitiful. As his older brother, you should give in to him a little.”
“Your younger brother needs more care. You’re sensible, so don’t fight with your brother over things.”
“You’ve read many books of the sages since you were young. You should understand what it means to be courteous and yield to others.”
Some shameless servants who relied on the power of others even mocked him sarcastically.
“Young Master Yexue, knowing how to yield to others is what makes a true gentleman.”
Master Song could not stand it and was about to reprimand them, but Jiang Yexue stopped him.
Jiang Yexue shook his head.
“Forget it. There’s no need to stoop to their level.”
But as the things around him were gradually moved away, a hole was slowly eaten out in his heart.
That hole grew larger and larger.
Disappointment, fear, and resentment all lingered and circled inside it.
Until one day, Yue Juntian summoned him.
“Yexue, you’ve cultivated with Chuyi for so long, and you’ve already learned everything you need to. From now on, let Chenqing spend more time learning from Chuyi.”
Jiang Yexue froze.
“What?”
“I mean, when a child is first beginning his education, he needs a better teacher to guide him. You’re sensible. Today, clean out your room and let your younger brother move in. He also likes sticking close to Chuyi. The two of you really are brothers—you’re alike in everything.”
Jiang Yexue slowly recovered from his shock.
But he did not move.
His reaction surprised Yue Juntian.
Yue Juntian had long been accustomed to Jiang Yexue agreeing to everything and saying that nothing mattered.
So when he did not immediately agree, Yue Juntian found it strange.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Father.” Jiang Yexue narrowed his eyes, suppressing his anger. “Am I still not sensible enough?”
“…”
“Then what do you think I have left? Why don’t you just drive me out of this family? Wouldn’t that make you happier? Would Chenqing feel that he had an even more spacious place to play?”
Yue Juntian had never been spoken to so disrespectfully by him before.
He became furious and slammed his hand on the table.
“How dare you!”
“It’s not that I’m being insolent. It’s that what you’re doing has gone too far! What exactly am I in your eyes?!”
“Yue Yexue!! How dare you spout such nonsense!!”
That day, Jiang Yexue and Yue Juntian had a huge argument.
Jiang Yexue merely had a good temper and conducted himself properly; he was not a coward.
When he truly lost his temper, the situation could become completely uncontrollable.
Yue Juntian was so furious that he was left gasping for breath, his face completely disgraced.
In the end, he pointed at Jiang Yexue’s nose and cursed,
“You ungrateful beast! Your mother said you wanted to take my place, and now I see that you really do have such ambitions! You’ve hidden them too well!! You simply don’t wish me well! You don’t wish your younger brother well either!! You and your mother are exactly the same!!”
By the end of the argument, the entire residence knew.
The father and son had both harbored grievances against each other for a long time, and their argument eventually escalated into a physical fight.
But Jiang Yexue was young and had no one to help him.
He was quickly subdued by Yue Juntian.
The whip and cane came down like a violent storm, lashing him mercilessly as blood flowed freely.
Yue Chenqing came running when he heard the news.
He was terrified by what he saw and hurriedly begged for mercy.
“Father, stop hitting him! Don’t hit Big Brother…”
“What do you know?! His mother was a certain kind of person, and he’s exactly the same!”
As he spoke, the whip was about to come down again on Jiang Yexue’s stubborn, unbowed face—
“Stop.”
A streak of light flashed.
An extremely powerful talisman expanded into a barrier in front of Jiang Yexue.
Caught off guard, Yue Juntian’s arm suddenly went numb, and the whip was knocked from his hand.
He turned around in shock and fury.
Murong Chuyi was walking in from outside the door, a horsetail whisk hooked over his arm, his fingers forming a spell seal as he stared coldly at him.
“Yue Juntian, have you had enough?!”
“…You?”
Yue Juntian’s lips trembled.
“You… You actually helped this ungrateful beast…”
Murong Chuyi helped Jiang Yexue to his feet and turned around, his voice cold and menacing.
“He is my nephew.”
“Try laying another finger on him and see whether I’ll let you off.”
Because Murong Chuyi stepped in, the matter ultimately did not escalate any further.
Late that night, in the quiet separate courtyard, the two of them sat beneath the eaves, on the steps.
Murong Chuyi wrapped the wounds on Jiang Yexue’s hand.
The wound was deeper than the marks left by the whip.
It had been inflicted by his father’s divine weapon during the struggle between Jiang Yexue and Yue Juntian.
A father using a divine weapon against his own son during an argument was simply unbelievable.
Murong Chuyi remained silent for a while before finally asking, unusually,
“Does it still hurt?”
Jiang Yexue did not answer.
After a long silence, he said in a low, heavy voice,
“Before my mother died, she once told me that within twenty years, everything I had would become Chenqing’s.”
“…”
“But if I tell you that I have never wanted to compete with Chenqing for the Yue family, would you believe me?”
Murong Chuyi said, “I believe you.”
Jiang Yexue had not expected him to answer so quickly.
There had not even been a moment of hesitation.
He had not originally intended to cry.
But hearing Murong Chuyi say those two words so firmly suddenly made him feel so sad, so wronged.
He immediately buried his face against his knees and sobbed uncontrollably.
He said, I never wanted to fight for anything.
He said, I truly never wanted to become the master of the Yue household. I have no such ambition.
He said, I have given up everything I could give. Why do you still have to take away the only thing I have left that I cannot give?
Murong Chuyi stayed beside him.
In the end, he sighed softly and patted Jiang Yexue on the shoulder.
At that time, Jiang Yexue’s mind was probably in complete chaos.
The suppression he had endured for so many years had finally torn open an outlet.
He had lost control.
He looked up at Murong Chuyi as he comforted him, emotions surging through his heart like a rising tide, impossible to suppress.
He did not know what he was thinking.
Or perhaps, at that moment, he was not thinking at all.
By the time he realized what he had done, he was already pressing against Murong Chuyi, lowering his head and kissing his lips.
It was only a light touch, like a dragonfly skimming the surface of water.
Yet inside his head, it was as though fireworks had exploded with a deafening roar.
Both their minds went completely blank in an instant.
No one knew how much time passed before Murong Chuyi finally recovered from his utter shock.
As though he had been stung by a scorpion, he suddenly shoved Jiang Yexue away and sprang to his feet.
The blood had drained completely from his handsome face.
“What are you doing—?!”
When Jiang Yexue saw Murong Chuyi’s expression, clarity finally returned to his dizzy mind.
He immediately became flustered, his face turning bright red as he hurriedly said,
“Chuyi, I…”
But before Jiang Yexue could even try to stand and explain himself, Murong Chuyi retreated several steps.
He stared at him in shock and fury.
“Little uncle, I’m sorry. I—I just… I…”
The address “little uncle” struck Murong Chuyi even more painfully.
A storm seemed to rage through his eyes, filled with utter confusion.
He pressed his lips together several times, wanting to speak, yet feeling that the entire situation was simply too absurd.
He had always been accustomed to treating Jiang Yexue from the position of an elder.
Who could have imagined that Jiang Yexue harbored such feelings toward him?
For a moment, he felt cold all over, cold sweat pouring down his back.
But for someone who had just been forcibly kissed, to then lecture the other person about anything would hardly carry much authority.
Murong Chuyi’s face shifted between pale and flushed.
In the end, before Jiang Yexue could say another word, he swept his sleeve around, turned, and fled.