"Child, you are truly good."
A muddled voice suddenly appeared in Wen Xu's mind, both childish and ancient, deeply contradictory yet somehow perfectly fitting.
"You call me child?"
"Yes, yes. I saw you when you were no bigger than this. You don't believe me?"
At once, Wen Xu felt himself falling into the long river of time's memories. He had once fallen into a chaotic dream when the Demon Seed attacked him. Now the dream came again, yet it shattered the haze and brushed away the dust, appearing before his eyes with true clarity.
Wen Xu saw himself—his infant self, still swaddled in blankets.
Glazed tiles, emerald-gold rooftops. The old folks said newborn children could see nothing, but Wen Xu had seen it, and now he remembered.
He remembered the resplendent splendor of the Empress's palace, her heart-rending cries of pain, the hurried footsteps of palace maids rushing back and forth, and beside him... another infant just like him.
That was the Crown Prince, Zhou Jia.
But before long, someone wrapped him tightly from head to toe and carried him away. The person holding him used tremendous force, as though intending to strangle him alive in his swaddling clothes. The tiny infant turned blue and purple all over. The palace servant's harsh panting sounded like a broken bellows being pulled apart, and Wen Xu watched himself, like a wad of cotton, being handed over to the young Scholar Lu.
At the time, Scholar Lu was in the prime of life, yet the hands holding the infant would not stop trembling. The infant was finally able to breathe, spared from being strangled by the swaddling clothes. But after raising him for barely two days, Scholar Lu secretly entrusted him to a trusted servant of the Lu Household and sent him out