LWSL Chapter 45

In the horse carriage, Wu Ruo first fed Ling Mohan a dan pill, then checked Ling Mohan’s pulse. Wu Ruo only relaxed when he confirmed that Ling Mohan had not been injured too severely.

Once back at Hei Manor, the blood from Ling Mohan’s arm had already been staunched and his face was slowly regaining some colour.

Hei Gan carried him onto the guest room’s bed. Not long after, Ling Mohan woke up. Seeing that a bunch of strangers stood by his bedside, he hastily got up and backed away to a safe distance. He glared at them with a cold and guarded expression: “Who are all of you?”

“We’re the ones who saved you and brought you here. You can remain here and rest assured as you recuperate. If there’s anything you need, you can instruct the servants in the manor to get it done. Of course, you can also leave at any time.” Wu Ruo had not saved him to curry favour with the crown prince. He took out a bottle of wound medicine and placed it on the table, then he got Shi Yuan and the rest to help him out of the guest room.

Ling Mohan sighed in relief and stared at the small white medicine bottle on the table for a long while. He thought inwardly that if the other person had wanted to kill him, then they would’ve taken the opportunity earlier on when he was still unconscious to do it. There was no need at all to let him live or mess around with him by giving him the chance to escape.

He clutched his injured arm, walking weakly towards the entrance of the room, and opened the room’s door to check the environment around him. There were no guards standing by the door. In the yard, there was only just one male servant slowly clearing away the yard’s white snow.

Just a while later, another male servant walking with a slow gait, brought a food box to his room. With a simple instruction to ‘eat’, he turned around and left¹If you didn’t get why Ling Mohan keeps noticing that they’re very slow, it’s because most servants move purposefully and are very diligent (or feign it, anyway). He doesn’t know that the servants are actually corpse servants and that’s just the norm in Hei Manor, so it probably stands out to Ling Mohan. Also, he probably expected at least someone pretending to be a servant but actually being there to surveil his actions..

Ling Mohan looked at the piping hot food and hesitated for a moment before picking up the chopsticks.

Right now, on the surface, he only seemed to have injured his arm. However, his internal injuries were still quite severe. In this circumstance with no one to escort him, there was no way for him to make it back to the capital city on his own. Moreover, on the road back to the capital city there would still be a lot of people waiting secretly in ambush for him to fall into their traps himself. So, leaving this place was no different than simply sending himself to the gallows. Why wouldn’t he stay here and recuperate properly?

When Ling Mohan thought of the people who wanted his life, his dark black eyes oozed with cold killing intent. When he returned to the capital city, he would definitely have their bodies shredded to thousands of pieces.

When Wu Ruo came over to the main hall for breakfast from the side gardens, he saw Hei Xuanyi who was watching Hei Xin divine something using a copper coin.

He raised his eyebrows, he’d never known before that Hei Xin knew divination.

Wu Ruo soundlessly walked closer and sat down, and waited for the divination to be finished before asking: “What are you trying to divine?”

He was also just casually asking, not thinking that they would reply to him, but Hei Xin unexpectedly said instead: “Master asked this old one to divine the result from the Wu family’s sacrificial rites today.”

Wu Ruo was surprised that Hei Xuanyi was still lingering on this matter: “Have you managed to divine anything?”

Hei Xin shook his head: “I was not able to divine anything, nor any method to solve it.”

Hei Xuanyi narrowed his eyes.

Wu Ruo couldn’t wait for the whole Wu family to meet with failure, he couldn’t care less about whether the Wu family had a solution.

Hei Xuanyi suddenly spoke up: “Separate the family.”

Wu Ruo was dumbfounded, staring blankly at Hei Xuanyi: “Separate the family?”

He very quickly understood the meaning behind Hei Xuanyi’s words: “You’re worried my family will get into trouble, right?”

Hei Xuanyi nodded his head.

Seeing that Hei Xuanyi was concerned about his family, Wu Ruo was a little touched.

Before, when he’d found out about the Wu family’s great calamity, he’d only thought that it would be great if the Wu family got into some big trouble, yet he hadn’t thought carefully about the fact that his family²Wu Ruo is referring to his direct family members here, a.k.a Wu Qianqing, Guan Tong, Wu Zhu and Wu Xi. would also be implicated in it.

However, it wouldn’t be easy to separate the family. Without even thinking about whether Wu Bofang would agree to the Wu family’s descendants leaving the Wu estate, just from the degree of his dad’s filial piety, there was no way Wu Qianqing would separate the family for no apparent reason and he wouldn’t be the first to bring it up³If this sentence is super long and windy with too many commas and not enough periods, I do apologise. The author does tend to write one whole paragraph as one sentence. When it’s possible without altering the nuance/meaning of the text, I do try to split them up into smaller sentences. But sometimes, it’s just way too difficult without changing the nuance/meaning of the text..

After Wu Ruo finished his meal, he returned to the residential quarters.

Hei Xin hurriedly said to Hei Xuanyi, who was just preparing to return to the study: “Master, Madam’s fate has changed.”

Hei Xuanyi frowned: “Changed?”

“Yes, his fate has become extremely chaotic, making it impossible for anyone to divine his destiny anymore.”

“How could this be?”

“I’m not clear, but there’s one thing I can be sure of.” Hei Xin gave a slight smile: “Madam’s fate is no longer the unchangeable short destiny it was before.”

Notes: a general footnote for this chapter, there are a lot of things about fate and destiny mentioned in this chapter that are hard to translate without a lot of context. In general, there’s a Chinese cultural belief in your ‘eight characters’. In Western culture, the closest thing is astrology.

Basically, the precise date and time of your birth make up your ‘eight characters’ and determine a lot about how your life will play out. These things are not set in stone and often can be mitigated by fengshui or by taking some ‘preventative’ actions. According to the practice, it is very possible to read when someone might die. This is a current practice even till today and the English name that has been adopted for it is ‘metaphysics’.

There are many different branches to ‘metaphysics’, although in modern day, no one thinks you’re able to practice to the point where you can read people’s minds or control their will. Nowadays, people cultivate their spirituality and mentality, and masters of metaphysics function more like life coaches.

In any case, because everyone has their unique ‘eight characters’ and how the ‘eight characters’ interact differently with like… elements of the universe(?), Chinese people do believe a lot in how that affects someone’s ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ or general ‘lot in life’. I think people who are familiar with astrology may understand this better, but there’s a lot of spirituality tangled up in this rather than like a secular, fantasy sort of take on fates and destinies.

I might not be 100% accurate about this, since I’m still Chinese diaspora and don’t have completely accurate China Chinese cultural context for all of this. But hopefully it’s enough to give context to understand the story. In any case, even without the context, it’s alright to rely on the usual meaning of fate as a sort of “predetermined storyline” in a person’s life to interpret the story.

For anyone who is looking for some richer, more nuanced context, feel free to read up on Chinese metaphysics or ‘bazi’. There’s a lot of content out there and modern day masters/practitioners.

Chapter 46 will be a longer one, so it will only be up on Friday!

• 1
  If you didn’t get why Ling Mohan keeps noticing that they’re very slow, it’s because most servants move purposefully and are very diligent (or feign it, anyway). He doesn’t know that the servants are actually corpse servants and that’s just the norm in Hei Manor, so it probably stands out to Ling Mohan. Also, he probably expected at least someone pretending to be a servant but actually being there to surveil his actions.
• 2
  Wu Ruo is referring to his direct family members here, a.k.a Wu Qianqing, Guan Tong, Wu Zhu and Wu Xi.
• 3
  If this sentence is super long and windy with too many commas and not enough periods, I do apologise. The author does tend to write one whole paragraph as one sentence. When it’s possible without altering the nuance/meaning of the text, I do try to split them up into smaller sentences. But sometimes, it’s just way too difficult without changing the nuance/meaning of the text.