Mu Liang was a considerate employer.
The room was illuminated by a soft bedside light and the bed was clean and comfortable yet he lay there staring at the ceiling, completely unable to fall asleep.
Outside the window, the gentle patter of rain could be heard.
At first, Anci didn’t notice it.
Then the rain began beating violently against the windows and a thunderclap loud enough to shake the heavens suddenly exploded through the night.
Anci abruptly sat upright.
He was afraid of rain.
He covered his ears and shut his eyes, desperately curling his body into a tight ball, as though making himself smaller could protect him from whatever unknown harm might come.
But before long, through the sounds of wind and rain, he clearly heard a single cry.
“Meow!”
It was Momo’s voice. He couldn’t possibly have mistaken it.
His muddled mind was incapable of thinking things through, so Anci didn’t understand why, despite his poor hearing, he could still hear a cat’s cry through the rain.
He couldn’t distinguish reality from illusion.
He only knew that a small life was waiting for him.
The corridors, stairways and even the living room of the villa were illuminated by soft, gentle lights. Following the faint traces of memory, Anci ran toward the flower room.
But while descending the stairs, he accidentally missed a step.
Before he could even let out a cry of alarm, he fell heavily onto the staircase, then tumbled down the steps.
There was a small room beneath the staircase. Its door had been secured with a padlock.
Dizzy and disoriented, Anci slowly sat up but the moment he saw the locked door, he felt as though every drop of blood in his body had frozen solid.
It wasn’t until the servant responsible for looking after Anci discovered that the person who should have been in bed was missing that the situation came to light.
The villa, which had finally settled into silence, erupted into chaos once again.
The servants hurriedly threw on their clothes and rushed out in a panic. They ran through the house, calling out his name, searching everywhere.
At last, they found the figure curled into a small ball outside the door of the room at the end of the basement staircase, softly whimpering.
The patient, whose consciousness had already become muddled and unstable, still retained the good manners he had possessed in the past.
Even though he was trembling violently with fear, he never once cried out for help or let out a scream.
Although the servants had recently gone through a major “purge,” several of them had been allowed to stay because they had once shown kindness toward the other master of the house.
Xiao Yuan, in particular, was one of them.
Because of the employer’s coldness and neglect toward Xu Anci, she had once stood up for the kindhearted young man who had never fought with anyone.
Her employer, furious at the time, had fired her on the spot.
But two months later, she had seen her former employer on the university campus.
He looked utterly lost, as though his soul had been torn away.
The man she had once feared and disliked had changed completely. He had gone from being impeccably dressed to looking haggard and worn out. In just a few short months, more than half of his formerly black hair had turned gray.
Her former employer had gotten straight to the point and told her without hesitation that Xu Anci had fallen from a cliff.
There is no one who wouldn’t love Xu Anci, Xiao Yuan thought.
He was gentle and intelligent and his smile made people feel as though they were basking in the warmth of a spring breeze. He came from a humble background and after taking on the identity of Mrs. Mu, he had inevitably attracted curious as well as disdainful attention.
Yet he had always managed to remain calm and composed, unmoved by either honor or disgrace.
Even when faced with her husband’s sudden cold treatment, he had merely swallowed his sadness in silence, breaking it down into pieces and forcing it down his throat.
From beginning to end, he had never once taken his anger out on the servants.
In her own youthful and inexperienced years, Xiao Yuan had once found herself falling for the young man who quietly read books in the flower room, bathed in the gentle light of day.
She had never imagined that the next news she would receive about him would be news of his death.
Xiao Yuan, unusually, managed to remain calm.
She gave her instructions at once.
“Quickly, take Mr. Anci back to his room. Xiao Zhang, Xiao Yang, don’t clean this basement level anymore. Seal it off. Under no circumstances can we let him see it again.”
……
When Mu Liang hurried back, Anci had already calmed down.
The soft, thin quilt on the bed rose slightly where the frightened young man had curled himself into a protective ball once again. His dim, dark eyes were half open and Mu Liang couldn’t tell whether he was awake or not.
The maid named Xiao Yuan sat on a chair beside the bed. The quiet room was filled only with the girl’s gentle reading voice. Mu Liang’s gaze swept across the cover of the book in her hands.
The Little Prince.
Anci was afraid of the dark, so every corner of the room within his line of sight was illuminated by the soft glow of night lights.
Mu Liang stood stiffly at the doorway, looking like an outsider who didn’t belong there. He didn’t dare intrude upon that peaceful little world in the slightest.
Anci hadn’t been afraid of the dark in the beginning.
Mu Liang still remembered the first time he had seen Xu Anci.
The impoverished country boy had stood awkwardly in the principal’s office, dressed in simple clothes. At Mu Liang’s instruction, the school administrators had heaped praise upon Xu Anci, patting him on the shoulder and offering him words of encouragement.
The young boy’s face had flushed crimson. His clear, pleasant voice trembled slightly with nervousness as he said, “Thank you. I definitely won’t let you or the Mu family’s expectations down. I’ll get into Huada University and give back to society.”
Behind the thin folding screen, Mu Liang had nearly burst out laughing.
Barren soil can only grow poisonous flowers.
Someone who had killed his own business partner for money could only have a son who was equally hypocritical and despicable.
A cigarette butt burned a small hole into the documents carelessly scattered across the table, the smoldering ember burning straight through the blurred photograph until it was punctured.
Mu Liang raised his eyes and cast a casual glance beyond the screen. Sunlight fell over the young boy’s body. His clothes were simple yet they couldn’t conceal his natural talent.
In the end, Mu Liang’s gaze settled on Xu Anci’s eyelashes.
The boy had long eyelashes that trembled ever so slightly, like the wings of a butterfly, revealing a pair of deep, dark, lustrous eyes.
With the support of the Mu Foundation’s charitable fund, Anci was admitted to a renowned private school in Haishi after leaving the impoverished county middle school where he had studied.
Of course, this was also part of Mu Liang’s revenge.
At first, the bullying consisted of nothing more than verbal abuse. During Xu Anci’s second week at school, his nickname, Bug, had already spread throughout the class. The boys fabricated rumors about him, claiming that he carried the shabby, impoverished smell of the countryside.
They mocked him for always eating plain white steamed buns for lunch, while also deliberately provoking several girls who couldn’t stand by and watch Anci being bullied until they burst into tears.
Mu Liang watched coldly from the sidelines, keeping his hands out of it as he observed the once straight back, as upright as bamboo, slowly bend under the weight of humiliation.
He watched the boy who had initially been awkward but determined to fit into the class gradually grow silent.
The bullying became more blatant as time went on.
Basketballs were repeatedly hurled at him during physical education classes. His homework and textbooks were torn to shreds. Insulting graffiti suddenly appeared across his desk, scrawled there for everyone to see.
Mu Liang enjoyed how easily these little acts of torment could make his enemy’s son suffer and feel miserable.
For a period of time, his interest in Anci reached its peak. Every morning, the first thing he did upon opening his eyes was admire the miserable state Anci had been reduced to by the bullying.
He had become a parasite, barely surviving by feeding on the suffering of his enemy.
Until the school’s centennial anniversary celebration.
Looking back now, it had been nothing more than an ordinary afternoon.
As a member of the school’s board of directors, Mu Liang had grown tired of the endless exchanging of toasts and the noisy social gatherings. He had gone up to the rooftop of the teaching building to smoke and enjoy some peace and quiet.
Then, all of a sudden, he heard someone crying.
The sound came from a small building on the rooftop. It had originally been an equipment room but after the electrical renovations, it had been converted into a storage room for cleaning supplies.
Driven by curiosity, Mu Liang kicked open the door, which had been locked from the outside.
The door crashed to the ground with a loud bang, sending clouds of dust into the air so thick that he could barely open his eyes.
When the dust finally settled, it revealed a frightened face.
Xu Anci’s face was deathly pale, his eyes swollen like peaches. No one knew how long he had been locked inside and freezing, or how long he had been crying.
When Mu Liang carried him out, he realized how light the boy was.
He weighed far less than a boy his age should have.
The boy named Xu Anci curled up in his arms like a frightened kitten, his cold cheek pressed against Mu Liang’s chest. A moment later, warm, wet tears seeped into his shirt, almost as if they were going to penetrate straight into his flesh and bones.
At that moment, Mu Liang had been overcome by a strange sense of curiosity.
How could the child of his enemy have such scorching tears?
He lowered his head, meeting the boy’s eyes.
The young boy was pale, with only a faint flush of red showing through his earlobes. He didn’t look away from Mu Liang’s gaze out of embarrassment.
Instead, Xu Anci spoke earnestly.
“Thank you.”
The boy had been weakened by the prolonged torment of fear. As soon as he finished speaking, his strength gave out and his head drooped.
His pale face rested against Mu Liang’s chest.
It was an utterly simple gesture, entirely devoid of any desire or ulterior motive.
Yet, in that instant, a strange sensation rose within Mu Liang’s heart.
The soul that had been weighed down by hatred seemed to relax for a brief moment.
His mind went blank for an instant.
For a long time afterward, he remained curious about what that sudden flutter in his heart had meant.
It wasn’t hatred.
It wasn’t satisfaction.
It was a faint, aching pain hidden within a feeling of bitterness.
Love always arrived accompanied by heartache and tenderness.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t understood that at the time.
A thought suddenly took shape in Mu Liang’s mind.
Compared with tormenting someone through petty schemes like these, there was another, far more appropriate way to exact revenge.
What better revenge could there be than raising someone to heights they had never been meant to reach, only to let them fall mercilessly from that position?
Compared with his original revenge plan, this new strategy would require much more time and patience. It would even demand that he personally step into the game, sacrificing a portion of his emotions to put on a performance.
Mu Liang didn’t care.
During the difficult years when he had struggled to survive, he had once been driven into a corner and tried his luck at gambling tables.
Fate had favored him.
He had obtained enough chips to take back what his enemies had stolen from his father and he had dealt with every one of the traitors from the past cleanly and decisively.
He had won without shedding blood, planning everything from behind the scenes.
He didn’t mind playing a small game of chance with Xu Anci for the sake of revenge.
For him, all that was needed was a small amount of chips.
And what he wanted was Xu Anci’s body and heart.
It was only much later that he learned Xu Anci had been locked inside that pitch black storage room for a full twenty four hours.
From that day onward, Anci had developed a fear of the dark.
…….
The girl’s voice eventually fell silent and the young man on the bed finally closed his eyes.
However, his sleep remained restless and he continued to maintain the same curled up posture.
Mu Liang sat down beside Anci as gently as he could.
The body beneath the thin quilt was shockingly thin.
The temperature in the room was consistently maintained at the most comfortable level yet it still couldn’t warm Anci’s hands and feet, which had been cold for years.
The places where he had fallen earlier had already turned purple with bruising. Along with the areas he had twisted during the day, they were badly swollen, though fortunately, nothing had been dislocated.
Mu Liang applied safflower oil to the injured areas to help promote blood circulation and reduce bruising. He rubbed his palms together until they were warm, then gently massaged the injuries using the softest part of his palms.
The young man’s brows gradually relaxed.
A little relief settled in Mu Liang’s heart but exhaustion began to overwhelm him.
An entire afternoon of transcontinental meetings with medical institutions had drained him mentally and physically. He had finally finalized a treatment plan for Anci yet he hadn’t even had the energy left to deal with the company’s routine affairs.
The moment he received news that something had happened to Anci, he had rushed back immediately.
Working without sleep or rest, on top of the bleeding wound on his forehead that he hadn’t yet had time to treat, was enough to exhaust even a man made of iron.
Mu Liang rubbed his sore, swollen eyes.
When he raised his head, he found himself meeting a pair of eyes.
The maid named Xiao Yuan was standing nearby, staring at him coldly.
She smiled faintly.
“What are you pretending for?”
“If you really cherish him, then why did you lock him in the basement?”
Mu Liang’s heart suddenly twisted with pain.
The maid took two steps backward, a cold smile lingering on her lips as she turned and walked away.
He covered his chest, gasping heavily for breath.
It took a long time before he finally managed to endure the sudden attack of angina.
He buried his face in his palms. Large tears rolled down one after another, slipping through the gaps between his fingers and falling onto the floor. They spread into dark, damp patches across the pale colored carpet.
The strands of hair that had already turned mostly white trembled faintly.
Afraid of disturbing the sleeping patient, he ultimately didn’t allow himself to cry out loud.
This made me emotional! How can Mu Liang be so cruel?? 😭
