He Was Different

That's where the problem lies.

Once someone labels another person as a symbol, they will no longer try to understand the other person's situation.

Why didn't Dai Hao know of his existence? It was because Dai Hao was away fighting battles for many years, and the Duchess kept the information under wraps.

Did Dai Hao have his own difficulties? Of course he did.

But Huo Yuhao wouldn't think about these things, because in his heart, Dai Hao was no longer a person of flesh and blood, but a "bastard who abandoned his wife." What's the point of empathizing with a symbol?

But when symbolic thinking is used against an enemy, it becomes a fighting force; when used against a loved one, it becomes a tragedy.

Huo Yuhao used this mindset to treat Dai Hao his whole life, and when he became a father himself, he used the same mindset to treat his own son.

This time, however, he symbolized the Ju Zi, turning it into "the woman who schemed against me," and Xu Yunhan, as the Ju Zi's son, was consequently excluded from his empathy.

In Huo Yuhao Huo Yuhao's heart, Dai Hao is a symbol, and so is Xu Yunhan. One is "the father who abandoned me," and the other is "evidence of his scheming against me."

Huo Yuhao never truly understood Dai Hao's situation, nor did he ever truly care about Xu Yunhan's feelings.

In his eyes, these two people were first and foremost symbols, and only secondarily people.

This is Huo Yuhao's tragedy; the thing he hated his whole life eventually became his own shadow.

He judged Dai Hao using symbolic thinking, unaware that he himself had become an object of judgment within this same logic.

The boy who slayed the dragon eventually grew dragon scales, without even realizing it.

Shrek City, Inner Court Office.

On the table in front of Zhang Lexuan, besides the mountain of scrolls, she would stop to read a passage from her diary after finishing each report.

Zhang Lexuan was already very skilled at handling these matters, but today her efficiency was noticeably lower than usual.

Because Lin Ye's analysis was so captivating, she often found herself lost in thought while critiquing it, her pen hovering in mid-air for a long time before finally falling.

"Symbolization..."

She repeated the word softly, lost in thought.

Zhang Lexuan doesn't follow the conventional, forceful path of Soul Master; her understanding of people's hearts and emotions is more delicate than most Soul Master.

The more she thought about Lin Ye's theory of "symbolization," the more reasonable it seemed to her.

When faced with complex emotional issues, it is indeed easy for people to simplify the other person into a single label.

Good people, bad people, benefactors, enemies.

Because labels are easier to manipulate than the truth.

The truth is too complicated, so complicated that it's hard to know whether to hate or forgive, so let's just label it to save trouble.

That's how Huo Yuhao treated Dai Hao.

Dai Hao certainly made a mistake, but how big was his mistake? Was it negligence due to lack of knowledge, or was it intentional abandonment? There is a fundamental difference between the two.

But Huo Yuhao didn't bother to distinguish; he directly labeled Dai Hao as an "abandoner" and then spent half his life hating that label.

For him, this was a form of self-protection; hating a label was much easier than facing a "father with grievances but who did make a mistake."

However, the side effects of this way of thinking are also obvious.

When you get used to labeling others, you will unknowingly lose the ability to truly understand a person.

Huo Yuhao couldn't understand Dai Hao, so he didn't know how to be a father.

Because "father" is not a warm concept to him, but a cold label.

You are either the "abandoner" or the "abandoned"; there is no middle ground.

Zhang Lexuan sighed softly, picked up her pen and wrote a comment at the end of the report, then continued reading her diary.

She felt that Lin Ye's analysis was much more informative than the pile of reports she had criticized.

What did Huo Yuhao's mother say to Huo Yuhao before she died?

She didn't make Huo Yuhao hate Dai Hao; on the contrary, she told Huo Yuhao not to hate him.

She told Huo Yuhao that Dai Hao was unaware of their existence, and that it wasn't Dai Hao's fault.

With her last breath, she tried to dispel the hatred her son felt for his father.

This is the gentlest and most rational last words a mother could give before she passed away.

She knew that there was a fire burning in her son's heart, and if that fire wasn't extinguished, it would burn him to ashes.

So she desperately tried to extinguish that fire, wanting to tell her son: Your father isn't what you think; don't fill your life with hatred.

Did Huo Yuhao listen? Obviously not. He verbally agreed to his mother's request, but the hatred in his heart didn't lessen at all.

He remembered his mother's words, but did not put them into practice.

He kept his mother's last words hidden in a corner of his heart, letting them gather dust, and then showed everyone through his actions.

I will still hate Dai Hao, and no one can stop me.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this. Whether a person hates their father or not is their own business, and others have no right to interfere.

However, if we compare this incident with Huo Yuhao's later attitude towards Xu Yunhan, we will find an extremely ironic contrast.

[Huo Yuhao's mother, on her deathbed, spoke up for Dai Hao, advising her son not to hate his father. Did Huo Yuhao listen to his mother? No.]

How would Ju Zi describe Huo Yuhao to Xu Yunhan? We don't know.

But what we do know is that Ju Zi did not speak ill of Huo Yuhao in front of Xu Yunhan.

Given Ju Zi's personality, if she wanted to take revenge on Huo Yuhao, she could easily portray him as a Huo Yuhao who seduced and abandoned his wife in front of her son, making her son hate him for the rest of his life.

But the Ju Zi didn't do that.

She didn't transfer her resentment onto her child, nor did she use Xu Yunhan as a tool for her revenge against Huo Yuhao.

[Both are mothers, Huo Yuhao's mother advised her son not to hate his father, Ju Zi did not teach her son to hate his father.]

Both mothers are protecting their children in their own ways, preventing them from being consumed by the grudges of the previous generation. This demonstrates a mother's broad-mindedness.

What about Huo Yuhao's father? What did he do? He didn't protect Xu Yunhan, and he didn't even give Xu Yunhan a reason to hate him.

He chose the cruelest method.

Disappear, never appear, offer no explanation, utter no emotion, leaving the child to wander alone in the void of whether the father truly exists.

Hating someone at least proves that person existed, but Xu Yunhan didn't even have anything to hate.

All he knew was that his father was a very important person, so important that even his mother, who had become the Marshal and Empress of the Sun Moon Empire, dared not say so.

His father had never been a part of his life, and this emptiness and resentment were suffocating.

This is the difference between Huo Yuhao and his two mothers.

Both women were using love to resolve their hatred, while he, a grown man, remained trapped in resentment for decades, ultimately transferring that resentment onto the next generation.

To put it bluntly, Huo Yuhao isn't even as good as two women.