He was, after all, a crown prince who had received the finest education since childhood.
After the sudden, "enormous" workload caught Zhao Hong utterly off guard, he wallowed in despair for less than an hour before getting up from the ground and silently beginning to clear the clutter from the courtyard.
The enormous workload might have been a joke, but the tedious, grinding little tasks were certainly plentiful.
First, deciding which things needed putting away and which needed throwing out was a problem.
Then, figuring out how to put away the things worth keeping was another problem.
Among them were heavy, hard objects such as millstones and stone rollers...
Yang Ge had forbidden him from asking anyone else for help.
Zhao Hong stubbornly held his breath and refused to ask anyone for assistance, battling that modest courtyard alone, day and night.
For three whole days, he even gritted his teeth and smashed the millstones and rollers he could not move with a hammer and iron chisel, then carried them out of the inn one fragment at a time...
Then he fell ill. He lay in his little dark room with a high fever, vomiting and suffering from diarrhea, both arms swollen like pork hocks.
And Yang Ge kept his word. Having said he would not concern himself with anything Zhao Hong did for a month, he never once asked about him.
Whether Zhao Hong was swinging his hammer and iron pincers in the courtyard with a tremendous clatter,
Or howling like wailing ghosts and wolves when he wore the skin off his hands...
He never asked a single question.
Even when Zhao Hong fell ill afterward, sending Zhao Miao scurrying in circles like an ant on a hot pan, Yang Ge turned a blind eye.
It was as though no