Shang Qinghua was growing concerned about his twisted standards as to what constituted a fortunate lifestyle.
What would happen if he really returned home and Mobei-Jun suddenly wanted to find someone to beat up, but Shang Qinghua was nowhere to be found? When he thought about that happenstance, he felt a pang of sorrow, like the melancholy of an actor leaving after a play was complete, all the props in place but the people long gone.
Suddenly, a bone-deep chill returned to his body.
“Return where?” Mobei-Jun said icily.
Shang Qinghua finally realized that in his sorrow, he had actually spoken his internal dialogue out loud verbatim. Now was the real time to be “sorrowful”!
Mobei-Jun’s fingers tightened like he was about to snap Shang Qinghua’s index finger in half. “Now you’re saying you want to leave?”
Shang Qinghua’s face pinched in pain. “No, no, not right now!”
“Not right now?” Mobei-Jun pressed. “What is it you always say to me?”
I’ll follow my king for the rest of my life. He had said this phrase countless times. But he’d thought no one was taking it seriously!
After a stretch of silence, Mobei-Jun said, “If you want to leave, then leave right now. You don’t need to wait seven days.”
Shang Qinghua started. “My king, if I really leave, from this point forth, we’ll never see each other again.”
Mobei-Jun looked at him with the gaze of someone peering at an ant from nine million feet above it. “What makes you think I would care about that?”
Although over the years, Shang Qinghua had trained his face to be impervious to sword or spear, these words made his expression pinch. He still wanted to explain a bit, but the situation had played out beyond his expectations.
“Get out.”
His body suddenly flew backward, and he crashed into an ice wall, which was as solid as steel. The stab of pain only numbed his back for a moment before it spread through his guts.
Mobei-Jun didn’t even lift a hand, didn’t even spare a glance in his direction. Shang Qinghua’s throat rapidly filled with a gush of warm, rusty-flavored liquid.
Mobei-Jun beating him up was nearly a daily occurrence, and he often told him to “get out”; Shang Qinghua should have been used to it. But at no other time had he been subjected to such an intense fury and loathing.
Like countless times before, he crawled up from the ground, silently wiped away the blood at the side of his mouth, and gave Mobei-Jun’s back a subservient smile that no one could see.
After standing there for a while, he tried to speak again, but Mobei-Jun impatiently snarled, “Get out of here!”
So, Shang Qinghua hurriedly got out.
Honestly speaking, though no one could have known what he was thinking in the privacy of his mind, he still felt a bit embarrassed—specifically about that fleeting thought from before, concerning “Mobei-Jun” and “a friend.”
Shang Qinghua trudged up the stairs. The guards and demon maids he had seen earlier had been driven away, and they ran even faster than him, darting out of the ice fortress like a swarm of bees. The chill remained the same, but the situation as he left was completely different from how it had been on his arrival.
At this time, a slanted silhouette approached, coming down the stairs. Shang Qinghua turned his head, gaze briefly flitting across a pair of peach-blossom eyes full of frosty light.
Though this pair of eyes didn’t land on him, they sent Shang Qinghua into a fit of shudders, his heels gluing themselves to the steps.
Then, furtively, he turned around and followed.
Once the guards had been sent out of the underground ice fortress, it had been emptied of all demons. Mobei-Jun doubtless thought Shang Qinghua had obediently “gotten out” and thus didn’t expect him to turn back. So, by the time Shang Qinghua returned to the hall in front of that sleeping chamber, he had not yet been discovered. He stopped there and shimmied up a pillar so giant it could be encircled by three people, onto the ceiling rafters, and found a spot from which he definitely wouldn’t be seen, where he sat down.
However, though he definitely couldn’t be seen by the people below him, he couldn’t see them either.
“What are you doing here?” Mobei-Jun asked in his cold and placid voice; he sounded like he was forcibly suppressing his anger.
The next voice was that of an unfamiliar young man, who spoke with a smile in his tone. “My nephew is ascending to the throne; I came for a cup of celebratory wine. Is there something unacceptable about that?”
Mobei-Jun didn’t answer the question. He snorted once and replied only after a long pause. “What celebratory wine is there to drink?”
“After these seven days, you’ll be the real Mobei-Jun,” said the other voice. “Isn’t that something worth celebrating?”
Shang Qinghua knew both who this was and which plot arc—delayed, after the original plot had been thrown into disarray—was now unfolding.
Oh, shit. Mobei-Jun’s in trouble.
This uninvited guest was Mobei-Jun’s uncle, Linguang-Jun.
And the one who lay in the sleeping chambers ahead was, without a doubt, the father whom Mobei-Jun had seen only a handful of times since his birth—his body, that was.
According to the original outline, after the reigning head of each generation of the Mobei clan died, they passed seven-tenths of their martial aspect to their next-generation successor. Mobei-Jun was at an extremely critical juncture.
But, as Shang Qinghua had written in the original work, Linguang-Jun was using this precise occasion, the most critical and final day on which Mobei-Jun was digesting the martial aspect, to launch a sneak attack. Because Mobei-Jun had been lawfully determined to be first in the line of succession, Linguang-Jun had no claim to the martial aspect, and stealing it outright would have been useless. Illegal was illegal; the ancestral lines wouldn’t acknowledge him. However, if Mobei-Jun died after he officially ascended to the throne, Linguang-Jun would be the only remaining descendant of the Mobei bloodline. So when that scheduled time came, the recipient of this seven-tenths of martial aspect couldn’t just kick back and relax.
In the original work, Bing-ge was by Mobei-Jun’s side during this, acting the part of the wolf in sheep’s clothing and lending him a hand along the way—then undercutting the Mobei clan after Mobei-Jun ascended to the throne, as was only to be expected. But now Bing-ge had hared off to shamelessly torment his shizun. Come on, how could he have the time to bother with this? So the person Mobei-Jun had brought to help him was Shang Qinghua’s useless-ass self!