His name was Xia Jue. Born precocious, he had vaguely known even as a very young child that he was different from others. But back then, he lacked the ability to understand anything so profound as exactly how he was different.
He could clearly sense his clansmen's rejection and malice. They treated him like rubbish, with nothing but disdain and contempt... Sometimes, they even deliberately withheld his food. Going hungry one meal and eating his fill the next was commonplace.
The Xia Household was actually a fairly sizable lineage, but its internal affairs were a tangled mess. Disputes over power often brought its members to blows with swords drawn.
His father had been the previous family head. Yet... after his birth, his so-called mother had inexplicably disappeared. By coincidence, on the very day he was born, his father had also died in one of his concubines' beds.
The former family head's death plunged the already unstable Xia Household into even greater turmoil. Everyone eyed that position with burning ambition. But their first priority was not infighting-it was finding a legitimate pretext to disqualify Xia Jue, the former family head's only son.
Then the Xia Household hired a fraud, who pointed at him and declared that he had been born inauspicious, doomed to bring death to his parents and other relatives...
It was probably then that he lost his right to inherit the Xia Household completely and became utterly invisible.
He was dumped in a secluded courtyard. As though bestowing some extraordinary favor, the lineage casually assigned an old servant to look after him. But the old servant was already ill and clearly near death. How could he possibly take care of Xia Jue?
And so, after clinging to life by his side for a few years, the old servant died.