Ten years ago, Zong Yue was betrayed, and forced to escape and hide, and his loyal servant was skinned alive. The guard that resulted in all of these “accidentally” died because of a snake’s bite. One of his children was raised by an old widow. After the child grew up, he entered the palace as a eunuch to make ends meet.
Because of this background, the department in charge of manpower did not doubt him and let him enter, despite having a reputation of being very strict with background checks. Afterward, because of his loyalty and shrewdness, he was even chosen to serve beside the Emperor.
When the child was adopted by the old widow, he “met” a thief who was especially skilled in digging tunnels and the child learned the skill from him. After finishing learning the technique, he continuously tried to use this skill to earn more, but every time, he would fail and be heavily beaten. He also tried to start a small business and do manual labor to sustain his livelihood and his mother’s. However, he was strangely unlucky. Every business would end in deficit, and every labor work he did would result in people picking fights with him. In the end, he was forced to have no other choice but to become a eunuch.
After becoming a close attendant of the Emperor, there were still people who continued to check on his background, until they could confirm that he was indeed an average and pitiful child who was unlucky. It was only then that he was allowed to stay by Xuanyuan Min.
This child was none other than Little An.
The manipulated life of this child was one of the largest plans than Zong Yue formulated in the past 10 years to defeat Xuanyuan Cheng.
Little An worked hard his whole life for his “adoptive mother,” and his “adoptive mother” used her entire lifetime to request that he succeeded well in one thing.
It was digging tunnels.
In the morning, he would attend to the Emperor. At night, he would secretly dig tunnels. The front stages of the work were still smooth. However, towards the later stages of digging the tunnel towards the Regent King’s residence, Little An became even more silent and less noticeable than ever. Almost every shovel he took would take about eight minutes to complete. Sometimes, he could dig the distance of half a finger in one night.
He took three years to dig this tunnel, and he had just finished the mission when he went to receive Meng Fuyao in the palace the previous time.
As for the concretizing of the tunnel to prevent leakage, or stuffing the tunnel with explosives, these were left for other people to do.
There was a whole bunch of people, with stories similar to Little An, that Zong Yue “raised.”
Those who worsened Prince Wen Yi’s circumstances back then, or the betrayers who turned to support the Regent King quickly, were already noticed by him. However, he did not kill them and only controlled them over the long term. They would be left as passes for him to infiltrate into Xuanyuan Cheng’s inner circle.
Xuanyuan Cheng could doubt everything else, but he definitely would not have thought that Zong Yue would use people in his own camp to defeat him.
Indeed, it was a choice that people in power would choose; long term benefits always prevailed over short-term exhilarations.
As long as he could kill Xuanyuan Cheng, how major could the crimes that these sinners committed be?
As such, Zong Yue smiled calmly. Blood and fire were all over the place, but he remained uncontaminated and composed.
He had enough of blood and the life of switching identities between day and night. He thought that after tonight, he could truly become that clean-freak doctor who loved flowers and healed people, and stop staining his hands with blood and just spend his life worrying for that woman who loved to fight. Yet she pushed him onto another road, and from then on, he still had to continue killing others.
So be it.
Slightly exhausted and annoyed, he raised his head and looked at the viewing gallery, which was engulfed in smoke and red flames. He looked at how Xuanyuan Cheng decided on flying down the viewing gallery that was about to collapse, and he smiled.
He rolled his sleeves and counted internally. ‘One, two, three…’
Ping!
Xuanyuan Cheng, who was jumping halfway out of the window, suddenly dropped hard towards the ground. However, when he reached the corner of the fourth level, he hung on the brick roof.
That level was filled with thunder crash bombs, and the explosion was the most aggressive one. The flames approached him like shooting stars and quickly lit his robes on fire. The thick black smoke caused him to cough continuously, and he could not open his eyes no matter how hard he tried.
Even though a chill went down his spine, Xuanyuan Cheng tried hard to calm his breath. To his horror, he realized that his stomach area was airy, as though there was nothing inside.
Where was his inner energy? What about his martial arts? Why was his inner energy suddenly sucked away even before he had time to shoot the ‘Spirit Shocking Arrow’?
And when did all of these start?
The flames quickly spread on his body, and it burned his skin such that there were sizzling sounds. It was an extremely unbearable level of heat, and the patch of burned skin looked so bad that everyone in the universe would even feel pity for… In his sub-consciousness, he thought of someone similar. He had ordered for that person’s skin to be cut off, and when the scorching metal touched the skin, it sizzled in the same way. Even the smell of burned stuff was also like that… Oh… No, not right. It was not this way. The sound was similar, but the smell… the smell was different!
In an instant, he opened his eyes that were blinded by the burn. In the awkward posture, he tried to raise his head and look towards Zong Yue’s face.
It was the fake Xuanyuan Yue who was already sentenced to death!
They were so alike… it was a face that the exact replica of Prince Wen Yi’s. He had always thought that it was really Xuanyuan Yue and no one else could be so alike. In spite of this, he continued being cautious and never stood close to that person. He stood far on the steps in the jail and looked at his subordinates execute the punishments.
So… So it could happen in this way too…
Xuanyuan Cheng twisted on the roof and turned into a pile of charred flesh that could not be distinguished as human. Zong Yue looked up at him calmly. Did anyone hear of the term ‘Human Medicine’? A person would have to be chosen to eat special medicine for every meal and be soaked in a tub full of herbs every day and night. Even when asleep, he or she would have to be fumigated by the aroma of medicine, until every part of the body, skin, flesh, and fingernails were all infiltrated. In these long days, he also used his nimble hands to keep adjusting that person’s face who was already very similar, using his own face as a reference. In this slow manner, he used years to quietly change that person’s face.
He knew that Xuanyuan Cheng would definitely use harsh tools on him and could not help but watch the process. As long as that person’s skin was broken, the rancid smell of his blood would slowly seep into the organs of whoever was watching. The higher the level of the victim’s martial arts, the greater the damage done. Whoever was affected would suddenly explode the next time they tried to use their inner energy.
Zong Yue’s prediction that Xuanyuan Cheng would go up to the viewing gallery was as accurate as his prediction that Xuanyuan Cheng would eventually collapse from the highest point of that building.
‘Perfectly in this way. I want you to die in this way, to fall miserably and die in an ugly fashion. It is the same as how you personally killed Prince Wen Yi back then,’ he thought.
“Dad-”
A shrill scream suddenly sounded, and the voice was so powerful that it was louder than the chaotic crowd. Instantly, Zong Yue’s smile froze.
Yun Er!
He had already instructed people to enter the residence, knock her out, and send her to her grandfather’s house. Why would she appear at the bottom of the viewing gallery?
Hurriedly, Zong Yue pointed towards the viewing gallery. “Dash in and stop her!”
The black-clothed subordinates quickly jumped over the wall, but they were still one step too late. That small figure had already wielded away some of the guards who tried to block her, and she stepped on the corpses on the floor as momentum to fly up. A second later, she reached the fourth level, and among all the blood and fire, she hugged the half-burned, wriggling and indistinguishable father.
Immediately, her body was also lighting up in fire. Her black hair turned into ash, and her skin turned to blood. As the tongues of the flame flickered, she also rolled up in pain, but she never let go of her father’s dead body.
At that moment, only the flames could hear her say, “Dad, I was wrong.”
13 years of vengeance ended up as this massive fire that fell upon Kunjing. The complicated feelings of love, hatred, greed, and misery were all burned to nothingness. And the child that shyly smiled in this journey forever disappeared without a trace.
About three streets away, a woman who was hurriedly galloping on her horse suddenly stopped. Then, she slowly shut her eyes.
Her body trembled in the same way as the girl on the gallery. Subsequently, she lowered her head silently into her palms.
Behind her, a man who was dressed in purple robes gently pulled her into his embrace. He turned around, blocking that intensely grim scene.
Caringly, he patted the woman in his hands. Looking back, he saw the white-clothed man shoot up from the back of the horse and fly towards the top of the viewing gallery. In his eyes, there was a small sigh that signaled helplessness.
On that day, the Regent King, who had enjoyed superior authority for 13 years did not manage to finish the last new year in his life.
In the end, Xuanyuan Yun was saved by Zong Yue and did not die. However, she would forever lose her skin, which resembled the texture of jade, and she also lost her own voice.
No one knew if she became mute because of the burn, or because she was no longer to speak in this polluted world after that fire completely burned away the beautiful things in her life.
Meng Fuyao felt very guilty for this. She rushed down to personally send Xuanyuan Yun away, but she was too late. She was even more repentant for manipulating Xuanyuan Yun to get that map from her, which dealt Xuanyuan Yun so much hurt. Sinful people should be punished, but what right did she have to harm the innocent?
But Zong Yue told her that he did not use that map at all. By analyzing his route of attack, it was indeed true that there was no relation with Xuanyuan Yun.
Meng Fuyao understood that this was Zong Yue’s way of protecting her. He was not willing to let her bear the guilt of involving the innocent, and he would rather choose that he bore the consequences of all these evil deeds himself.
The 12th year of the Zhaoning era in Xuanyuan ended in a night of blood and fire, and it would forever go down in history.
On the day that Xuanyuan Cheng died, Xuanyuan Min left the palace to become the idle Prince in a rural city. When he stepped out of the palace, he slowly turned around and gazed at the walls that had locked him up for 12 whole years. In that instant, there was a mix of emotions in his eyes, but a peaceful expression was eventually restored.
In front of the palace door, the white parade square made of jade extended in front of him like a pond, under the reflection of the cold moonlight. That was a clear and magnificent mirror that reflected the rebirth of the Xuanyuan court.
In the cold weather, the man who no longer had his makeup on suddenly rolled up his sleeves gently. Pinching his fingers, his lips widened, and he sang in the lonely and windy night, which still smelled of gunpowder, “The rivers and the mountains remain the same, but where did the ambitions of the young lad go? It has disappeared into dust unknowingly! The river still feels warm, and that pains my heart! Wait, this is not the water of the river… it is the blood of heroes that even a duration of 20 years would not be sufficient for it to finish flowing!”
Beside him, a small girl held on to his sleeve tightly and raised her head in admiration. Her eyes were bright and gleaming. “Brother Ah Liu, you sing so well.”
“Really?” Xuanyuan Min paused and went into a daze for a while. Then, he smiled, picked up the child’s hand, and walked away.
“But I will never again sing in my life.”
In the spring of the next year, the new Emperor succeeded the throne and unveiled the era of Cheng Qing.
Before the new Emperor ascended the throne, he tried to gift the 600-mile land on the borders of Xuanyuan and Dahan to Meng Fuyao, but Meng Fuyao politely rejected it. “Don’t worry, the rabbit of King Meng of Dahan will never run to your house again.”
Zong Yue stayed quiet. Seconds later, he smiled. He said, “But what if the head of Xuanyuan has the intention to invite Master Nine Heavens to be the Protector and Teacher of the nation, and be crowned as a noble?”
Ten years ago, Zong Yue was betrayed, and forced to escape and hide, and his loyal servant was skinned alive. The guard that resulted in all of these “accidentally” died because of a snake’s bite. One of his children was raised by an old widow. After the child grew up, he entered the palace as a eunuch to make ends meet.
Because of this background, the department in charge of manpower did not doubt him and let him enter, despite having a reputation of being very strict with background checks. Afterward, because of his loyalty and shrewdness, he was even chosen to serve beside the Emperor.
When the child was adopted by the old widow, he “met” a thief who was especially skilled in digging tunnels and the child learned the skill from him. After finishing learning the technique, he continuously tried to use this skill to earn more, but every time, he would fail and be heavily beaten. He also tried to start a small business and do manual labor to sustain his livelihood and his mother’s. However, he was strangely unlucky. Every business would end in deficit, and every labor work he did would result in people picking fights with him. In the end, he was forced to have no other choice but to become a eunuch.
After becoming a close attendant of the Emperor, there were still people who continued to check on his background, until they could confirm that he was indeed an average and pitiful child who was unlucky. It was only then that he was allowed to stay by Xuanyuan Min.
This child was none other than Little An.
The manipulated life of this child was one of the largest plans than Zong Yue formulated in the past 10 years to defeat Xuanyuan Cheng.
Little An worked hard his whole life for his “adoptive mother,” and his “adoptive mother” used her entire lifetime to request that he succeeded well in one thing.
It was digging tunnels.
In the morning, he would attend to the Emperor. At night, he would secretly dig tunnels. The front stages of the work were still smooth. However, towards the later stages of digging the tunnel towards the Regent King’s residence, Little An became even more silent and less noticeable than ever. Almost every shovel he took would take about eight minutes to complete. Sometimes, he could dig the distance of half a finger in one night.
He took three years to dig this tunnel, and he had just finished the mission when he went to receive Meng Fuyao in the palace the previous time.
As for the concretizing of the tunnel to prevent leakage, or stuffing the tunnel with explosives, these were left for other people to do.
There was a whole bunch of people, with stories similar to Little An, that Zong Yue “raised.”
Those who worsened Prince Wen Yi’s circumstances back then, or the betrayers who turned to support the Regent King quickly, were already noticed by him. However, he did not kill them and only controlled them over the long term. They would be left as passes for him to infiltrate into Xuanyuan Cheng’s inner circle.
Xuanyuan Cheng could doubt everything else, but he definitely would not have thought that Zong Yue would use people in his own camp to defeat him.
Indeed, it was a choice that people in power would choose; long term benefits always prevailed over short-term exhilarations.
As long as he could kill Xuanyuan Cheng, how major could the crimes that these sinners committed be?
As such, Zong Yue smiled calmly. Blood and fire were all over the place, but he remained uncontaminated and composed.
He had enough of blood and the life of switching identities between day and night. He thought that after tonight, he could truly become that clean-freak doctor who loved flowers and healed people, and stop staining his hands with blood and just spend his life worrying for that woman who loved to fight. Yet she pushed him onto another road, and from then on, he still had to continue killing others.
So be it.
Slightly exhausted and annoyed, he raised his head and looked at the viewing gallery, which was engulfed in smoke and red flames. He looked at how Xuanyuan Cheng decided on flying down the viewing gallery that was about to collapse, and he smiled.
He rolled his sleeves and counted internally. ‘One, two, three…’
Ping!
Xuanyuan Cheng, who was jumping halfway out of the window, suddenly dropped hard towards the ground. However, when he reached the corner of the fourth level, he hung on the brick roof.
That level was filled with thunder crash bombs, and the explosion was the most aggressive one. The flames approached him like shooting stars and quickly lit his robes on fire. The thick black smoke caused him to cough continuously, and he could not open his eyes no matter how hard he tried.
Even though a chill went down his spine, Xuanyuan Cheng tried hard to calm his breath. To his horror, he realized that his stomach area was airy, as though there was nothing inside.
Where was his inner energy? What about his martial arts? Why was his inner energy suddenly sucked away even before he had time to shoot the ‘Spirit Shocking Arrow’?
And when did all of these start?
The flames quickly spread on his body, and it burned his skin such that there were sizzling sounds. It was an extremely unbearable level of heat, and the patch of burned skin looked so bad that everyone in the universe would even feel pity for… In his sub-consciousness, he thought of someone similar. He had ordered for that person’s skin to be cut off, and when the scorching metal touched the skin, it sizzled in the same way. Even the smell of burned stuff was also like that… Oh… No, not right. It was not this way. The sound was similar, but the smell… the smell was different!
In an instant, he opened his eyes that were blinded by the burn. In the awkward posture, he tried to raise his head and look towards Zong Yue’s face.
It was the fake Xuanyuan Yue who was already sentenced to death!
They were so alike… it was a face that the exact replica of Prince Wen Yi’s. He had always thought that it was really Xuanyuan Yue and no one else could be so alike. In spite of this, he continued being cautious and never stood close to that person. He stood far on the steps in the jail and looked at his subordinates execute the punishments.
So… So it could happen in this way too…
Xuanyuan Cheng twisted on the roof and turned into a pile of charred flesh that could not be distinguished as human. Zong Yue looked up at him calmly. Did anyone hear of the term ‘Human Medicine’? A person would have to be chosen to eat special medicine for every meal and be soaked in a tub full of herbs every day and night. Even when asleep, he or she would have to be fumigated by the aroma of medicine, until every part of the body, skin, flesh, and fingernails were all infiltrated. In these long days, he also used his nimble hands to keep adjusting that person’s face who was already very similar, using his own face as a reference. In this slow manner, he used years to quietly change that person’s face.
He knew that Xuanyuan Cheng would definitely use harsh tools on him and could not help but watch the process. As long as that person’s skin was broken, the rancid smell of his blood would slowly seep into the organs of whoever was watching. The higher the level of the victim’s martial arts, the greater the damage done. Whoever was affected would suddenly explode the next time they tried to use their inner energy.
Zong Yue’s prediction that Xuanyuan Cheng would go up to the viewing gallery was as accurate as his prediction that Xuanyuan Cheng would eventually collapse from the highest point of that building.
‘Perfectly in this way. I want you to die in this way, to fall miserably and die in an ugly fashion. It is the same as how you personally killed Prince Wen Yi back then,’ he thought.
“Dad-”
A shrill scream suddenly sounded, and the voice was so powerful that it was louder than the chaotic crowd. Instantly, Zong Yue’s smile froze.
Yun Er!
He had already instructed people to enter the residence, knock her out, and send her to her grandfather’s house. Why would she appear at the bottom of the viewing gallery?
Hurriedly, Zong Yue pointed towards the viewing gallery. “Dash in and stop her!”
The black-clothed subordinates quickly jumped over the wall, but they were still one step too late. That small figure had already wielded away some of the guards who tried to block her, and she stepped on the corpses on the floor as momentum to fly up. A second later, she reached the fourth level, and among all the blood and fire, she hugged the half-burned, wriggling and indistinguishable father.
Immediately, her body was also lighting up in fire. Her black hair turned into ash, and her skin turned to blood. As the tongues of the flame flickered, she also rolled up in pain, but she never let go of her father’s dead body.
At that moment, only the flames could hear her say, “Dad, I was wrong.”
13 years of vengeance ended up as this massive fire that fell upon Kunjing. The complicated feelings of love, hatred, greed, and misery were all burned to nothingness. And the child that shyly smiled in this journey forever disappeared without a trace.
About three streets away, a woman who was hurriedly galloping on her horse suddenly stopped. Then, she slowly shut her eyes.
Her body trembled in the same way as the girl on the gallery. Subsequently, she lowered her head silently into her palms.
Behind her, a man who was dressed in purple robes gently pulled her into his embrace. He turned around, blocking that intensely grim scene.
Caringly, he patted the woman in his hands. Looking back, he saw the white-clothed man shoot up from the back of the horse and fly towards the top of the viewing gallery. In his eyes, there was a small sigh that signaled helplessness.
On that day, the Regent King, who had enjoyed superior authority for 13 years did not manage to finish the last new year in his life.
In the end, Xuanyuan Yun was saved by Zong Yue and did not die. However, she would forever lose her skin, which resembled the texture of jade, and she also lost her own voice.
No one knew if she became mute because of the burn, or because she was no longer to speak in this polluted world after that fire completely burned away the beautiful things in her life.
Meng Fuyao felt very guilty for this. She rushed down to personally send Xuanyuan Yun away, but she was too late. She was even more repentant for manipulating Xuanyuan Yun to get that map from her, which dealt Xuanyuan Yun so much hurt. Sinful people should be punished, but what right did she have to harm the innocent?
But Zong Yue told her that he did not use that map at all. By analyzing his route of attack, it was indeed true that there was no relation with Xuanyuan Yun.
Meng Fuyao understood that this was Zong Yue’s way of protecting her. He was not willing to let her bear the guilt of involving the innocent, and he would rather choose that he bore the consequences of all these evil deeds himself.
The 12th year of the Zhaoning era in Xuanyuan ended in a night of blood and fire, and it would forever go down in history.
On the day that Xuanyuan Cheng died, Xuanyuan Min left the palace to become the idle Prince in a rural city. When he stepped out of the palace, he slowly turned around and gazed at the walls that had locked him up for 12 whole years. In that instant, there was a mix of emotions in his eyes, but a peaceful expression was eventually restored.
In front of the palace door, the white parade square made of jade extended in front of him like a pond, under the reflection of the cold moonlight. That was a clear and magnificent mirror that reflected the rebirth of the Xuanyuan court.
In the cold weather, the man who no longer had his makeup on suddenly rolled up his sleeves gently. Pinching his fingers, his lips widened, and he sang in the lonely and windy night, which still smelled of gunpowder, “The rivers and the mountains remain the same, but where did the ambitions of the young lad go? It has disappeared into dust unknowingly! The river still feels warm, and that pains my heart! Wait, this is not the water of the river… it is the blood of heroes that even a duration of 20 years would not be sufficient for it to finish flowing!”
Beside him, a small girl held on to his sleeve tightly and raised her head in admiration. Her eyes were bright and gleaming. “Brother Ah Liu, you sing so well.”
“Really?” Xuanyuan Min paused and went into a daze for a while. Then, he smiled, picked up the child’s hand, and walked away.
“But I will never again sing in my life.”
In the spring of the next year, the new Emperor succeeded the throne and unveiled the era of Cheng Qing.
Before the new Emperor ascended the throne, he tried to gift the 600-mile land on the borders of Xuanyuan and Dahan to Meng Fuyao, but Meng Fuyao politely rejected it. “Don’t worry, the rabbit of King Meng of Dahan will never run to your house again.”
Zong Yue stayed quiet. Seconds later, he smiled. He said, “But what if the head of Xuanyuan has the intention to invite Master Nine Heavens to be the Protector and Teacher of the nation, and be crowned as a noble?”
