Chapter 80

Chapter 80

Moon-Gazing Tower owed its name to the Moon-Gazing Terrace, a splendid place for admiring the moon. Once night fell, one needed only to look up to see the bright moon hanging high overhead. Sipping tea beneath it possessed a charm all its own.

This was Xie Chengze’s first visit, so naturally he had to admire the moon and indulge his poetic pretensions. Carrying the redwood food box, he climbed to the top floor, which he had already reserved in its entirety. With no one to disturb him, he could sit quietly on the viewing terrace and enjoy the moon.

“Wuhen. Wuji.” At his call, two figures dropped abruptly onto the outer terrace. Wuji approached first and took the food box from his hand. “What are Your Highness’s orders?”

Wuhen, meanwhile, pulled out a wooden chair at the terrace tea table and began brewing tea with smooth, practiced movements.

“Hurry and try these. They’re delicious. I saved them especially for you two.” Xie Chengze sat down eagerly and motioned for Wuji to open the box.

Wuji cheerfully lifted the lid and picked up a pastry to taste. His eyes immediately lit up. “It truly is delicious.”

Then he picked up another and offered it to Wuhen. “You try one too.”

Wuhen lifted his head and seemed to give him a sidelong look before lowering it again and continuing to brew the tea.

“Doesn’t he like sweets?” Xie Chengze asked in confusion.

Wuji chuckled. “No. He wants Your Highness to feed him personally.”

The teacup in Wuhen’s hand jerked and nearly fell onto the table. His quick reflexes saved it just in time. Beneath the black cloth, his eyes glared fiercely at Wuji.

Wuji: ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Xie Chengze laughed and actually picked up a pastry, holding it to Wuhen’s lips.

Wuhen lowered his gaze. Through the layer of black gauze over his eyes, several long, pale fingers hovered indistinctly in his vision. Moonlight spilled over them, lending them a soft, lustrous glow. They looked even more appetizing than the exquisitely shaped pastry, enough to make one’s mouth water.

The sight brought him back to his childhood, to the first time he had met His Highness.

Back then, he and Wuji had not yet been called Wuhen and Wuji. Distant relatives had sold them to a male brothel as child courtesans. Because they refused to submit, they were often beaten savagely. At night, they could only curl together for warmth in a corner of the brothel’s woodshed, their bodies beneath torn hempen clothes covered in bruises and wood ash.

They endured abuse for two years. The older courtesans tried to coax them into obedience, while others forced them to learn how to serve patrons. Then a new group of child courtesans arrived. While their keepers were busy breaking in the fresh bones, he and Wuji finally found a chance to escape.

Snow fell thickly. The footprints they left in the soft white ground, one deep and one shallow, made their trail impossible to hide. Neither dared stop. They ran aimlessly through the streets while thugs from the brothel pursued them, clubs swinging like blades in their hands as though ready to crash down on their bodies again at any moment.

Their feet grew colder and more numb until all feeling seemed to vanish. The warm breath leaving their mouths gradually faded. The small hand clasped in his went cold, then warm, then cold again. At last, that hand was suddenly torn from his grasp. Wuji could no longer endure and collapsed into the snow. Both ankles, already injured in an earlier beating, had swollen high and purple. Wuji could not rise no matter how he tried.

The thugs caught up and brought their clubs down viciously on Wuji’s legs, snarling for him to keep running. Wuji screamed at him to flee, but he did not know where to go, nor whether Wuji could survive alone if he escaped by himself.

He stared blankly around him. People walked the street, but not one was willing to help. They gave the boys either indifferent or helpless glances before hurrying away, afraid of becoming entangled in trouble.

He wanted to grasp even the flimsiest straw, but not one would pause for him.

Only when Wuji roared at him to get lost did he finally snap back to his senses. He charged into a restaurant and, amid the chaos of overturned people and furniture, fled blindly into a private room.

Inside sat a stunning woman in magnificent dress and a delicately beautiful little boy. The child was plainly well cared for, his plump, fair cheeks glowing with healthy color and his watery eyes pure and innocent. Even when a ragged “brat” burst into the room, his gaze held neither panic nor disgust. He had no idea danger was about to descend.
The woman’s face, meanwhile, showed only surprise.

She looked like a good person.

But he had seen too much human wickedness in the male brothel. He could not gamble on someone switching from good to evil in a single instant. All he understood was that evil might not be good, but it could certainly help a person survive.

He did not hesitate. Desperate to live, he darted to the little boy, seized him as a hostage, snatched the chopstick from the child’s hand, and thrust it viciously before his eye.

“Save me, or I’ll put out his eye!”

That was what he said, his bloodshot gaze fixed on the richly dressed woman.

“I will save you. Let him go first!” The woman apparently thought him easy to deceive, actually imagining he would surrender his bargaining chip. He shoved the pointed chopstick even closer to those innocent eyes. “They still have my little brother. Save him first!”

Chaos erupted. The richly dressed woman shouted furiously for her people to deal with the situation, while the warmth of the private room slowly thawed his frozen hands and feet, making them burn and itch.

Every pain in his body intensified tenfold in the warm room. He lost all sense of time. His itching left hand rubbed ceaselessly against the little boy’s shoulder. Only when Wuji’s struggling cries rang out from downstairs did his taut nerves abruptly slacken.

But the instant he relaxed, blankness and swelling pressure surged through his mind like a tide. His starved, frozen body had long since reached its limit. His right hand, clenched around the chopstick, began to tremble so badly that he could scarcely keep it aimed at the child’s eye.

Across from him, predatory eyes watched without blinking, all waiting for him to expose a weakness.

If he collapsed, both he and Wuji were finished.

The more he panicked, the harder his hand shook; the harder it shook, the more he panicked.

Then a small, warm, pale hand closed over his filthy, swollen, cracked one. A young, soft voice sounded, utterly breaking through his last defenses.

The child said, “Big brother, line it up properly.”

“Wuhen, line it up properly.”

Xie Chengze’s gentle, soft voice sounded beside his ear. The hand that had appeared countless times in his memories and sustained him through all his grueling years of training now placed the pastry lightly before his lips. Those same innocent, harmless eyes brimmed with an affectionate smile.

Beneath the black gauze, Wuhen’s lashes trembled, and profound yearning flooded his eyes. He leaned closer to the pastry. His thin lips lightly closed around the young man’s fingertip, touching only briefly before withdrawing. He bit off just half the pastry, pressed his lips together, and lowered his head to continue brewing the white-leaf tea.

Xie Chengze looked at him, then at the half pastry left in his hand.

Why had he only eaten half?

So he really did not like sweets?

Wuji clicked his tongue at the side, his gaze a little sour. “What a waste.”

True. Throwing it away would be a waste.

Unbothered, Xie Chengze tossed the remaining half into his own mouth, then went to choose other pastries from the box.

He did not notice the tips of Wuhen’s ears quietly turning red as he brewed the tea.

The night deepened. Pale moonlight spread over the Moon-Gazing Terrace, laying a thin frost of silver across the ground. Xie Chengze cradled a cup of hot white-leaf tea, which washed away the cloying sweetness of the pastries and left only the faint, warming fragrance of tea.

He tilted his head back to admire the sliver of moon veiled by thin clouds. Then something icy brushed his eyelid and suddenly dampened his lashes.

A few wisps of snow drifted down. Gradually, more and more snowflakes descended from the heavens, wrapped in night like silver gravel pouring from the sky.

The capital’s first snowfall had arrived.

The bright moon still hung high in the night sky. The first snow falling beneath a visible moon was a rare wonder, yet no one knew that a cold wind was about to sweep north. When winter thunder shook the snow, white graves would rise across the land.