Later, the various families made different arrangements for their children, and Yue Yuan and his two close friends could no longer stay so closely together.
Social media was not as developed then as it was now, and they mostly kept in touch by phone. As a result, the three of them contacted one another less and less.
When Yue Yuan was eighteen, he joined the Anomalous Affairs Bureau with the Yue family's approval. After years of diligent training, his abilities ranked among the best of the new recruits, and he soon had a chance to go on a mission.
On his very first mission, he witnessed an extremely bloody scene. He exchanged a glance with the teammates who had joined the bureau at the same time as him, and they all threw up.
Through that shared understanding born of vomiting together, Yue Yuan gradually grew closer to some of his teammates, people he could drink and sit around doing nothing with.
Once, after they got drunk, his teammates drunkenly demonstrated their respective families' signature techniques, then asked Yue Yuan to show them one too.
Yue Yuan felt they were already friends, and they were no longer children, so he told them outright that he was an illegitimate son and had yet to formally receive his family's legacy, so he had not been taught its signature techniques.
But after that, his teammates distanced themselves from him.
Yue Yuan caught snatches of the gossip going around. People said his mother had been a mistress, and he was a homewrecker's child. Naturally, those rumors had come from the nephews and younger relatives of the Yue family's first madam-his father's wife-on her side of the family.
It was not the first time he had heard such things. Yue Yuan was not even surprised, just