Dowager Shen stood there, suddenly rigid, as though her very soul had been wrenched from her body.
After a long while, she took a step as if to leave.
“Mother,” Shen Xiabai said, propping himself up.
“Are you going to destroy your own family and our bond as mother and son for the sake of a dead man?” Dowager Shen suddenly raised her voice.
“He was my father. I have the right to know the truth!”
One stood while the other sat. Their eyes met, and the room fell into an extraordinary silence. Even their breathing could be heard clearly.
“Mother, did you have something to do with what happened back then?” Shen Xiabai asked hoarsely.
Dowager Shen stood motionless as tears streamed down her face.
“Are you interrogating your own mother?”
Shen Xiabai threw off the covers and dragged his injured body out of bed. Ignoring Dowager Shen’s frantic attempt to support him, he stubbornly knelt on the floor and struck his forehead heavily against it.
“This matter has haunted me for more than a decade. I can find no peace. I beg you, Mother—give me the truth.”
Tears coursed down Dowager Shen’s face. Grabbing him by the shoulders, she struck him hard twice on the back. “Are you trying to anger me to death?”
The force drove Shen Xiabai forward, and pain flashed across his face. Dowager Shen hurriedly let go. “Get up. You’re covered in serious injuries. Are you trying to break my heart?”
With Dowager Shen’s help, Shen Xiabai rose and sat down beside the bed, his gaze fixed on her.
“What happened back then had nothing to do with the Cui family,” Dowager Shen said softly.
“You must have guessed by now. I was the one who hired those assassins from Jiangnan.”
Shen Xiabai stared at her. His lips parted, but not a sound came out, as though he had suddenly lost the ability to form words.
The mother who had depended on him and whom he had depended on was the one who had hired the assassins who killed his father and elder brother. All these years, she had watched him suffer.
She had watched him struggle in agony over the deaths of his father and brother. Before his wings had fully grown, he had often wondered whether everything would have been different if they were still alive. Whenever he looked at Zilan, it was as though he saw the man he himself might have become had his father and brother survived.
He tilted his head back slightly, his brows drawn tightly together, as if he could barely breathe. A tear slid from the corner of his eye to the bridge of his nose.
“Why?”
His voice was hoarse. “Mother, why? Was it simply because the two of you had fallen out?”
The mention of the past seemed to shatter Dowager Shen. She hurried forward and wrapped her arms around Shen Xiabai.
“Xiabai, I once thought of enduring it all for your sake. But your father was utterly ruthless. He actually wanted to kill us—his own wife and son—for the sake of another woman.”
“You only knew that we were at odds, but you never knew why.”
For the first time, Shen Xiabai felt his mind grind to a halt, as though he had suddenly lost the ability to think.
“The man you remember was always a loving father,” Dowager Shen said with a mocking smile. “He used you to threaten me.”
She sat down beside Shen Xiabai, sobbing uncontrollably.
“When he was sent to Jiangnan as an official, that was where we met. He pursued me relentlessly. Later, we fell deeply in love, and it was his repeated vows that persuaded me to leave my parents and marry him in the capital.”
“Xiabai, your father and I were young spouses once. If he hadn’t pushed me beyond all limits, how could your mother have done such a thing?”
Shen Xiabai remembered that his mother had always been a gentle woman from Jiangnan, kindhearted to the point that she could not bear to harm even a bird. The thought of her killing anyone was simply impossible for him to accept.
He said nothing. His hand clenched tightly inside his sleeve as he listened in silence.
“For the first two years, your father and I were truly happy together. But after those two years passed, I still had not conceived. Your grandmother used that as an excuse to send me back to the capital to attend to her, leaving your father alone in Jiangnan.”
“He returned to the capital every year to report on his duties. Then, one year, he suddenly brought another woman home.”
“Xiabai, it’s not that I was incapable of tolerating another woman. But your father actually wanted to take her as his secondary wife. I refused, and so the matter was delayed for some time. Until later…”
Dowager Shen made no mention of the years of torment she had endured before Grand Madam Shen.
Just thinking about them made her grit her teeth, her eyes reddening with hatred.
“Your father loved that woman beyond reason. I had planned to agree to it, until I learned something.”
“No.” Shen Xiabai shook his head. “You said you had never conceived. Then what about Eldest Brother? Where did he come from?”
“If you hated Father, why did you—why did you kill Eldest Brother as well?”
Tears poured down Dowager Shen’s face.
“I never intended to kill him. After all, I had raised him for so many years. It was only because he desperately tried to protect that beast that the accident happened.”
“Xiabai, he wasn’t your brother.”
“Not long after I returned to the capital that year, your father sent word that he had happened to rescue an orphaned child who had neither father nor mother. There was a folk belief that if the child was destined to have siblings, he might bring us children of our own. So I took your elder brother in and raised him for more than a decade.”
“Your father returned to the capital once every year to report on his duties. Later, I had you. I truly believed that child was a blessing sent to us, and treated him as my own son. But… he was not an orphan.”
Dowager Shen gripped Shen Xiabai tightly.
“He was the son of the woman your father brought home. She had borne him with her first husband, who had already died. While she and your father carried on their affair, they gave their son to me to raise.”
“That woman was several years older than your father. She was the daughter of an old frontier soldier. Your father said he admired her forthright, flamboyant nature.”
Dowager Shen laughed bitterly. Back then, what the late Master Shen had loved about her was her gentleness and grace.
His fickleness was laughable.
“When I overheard the truth, do you know what kind of raging fire engulfed my heart? I wanted nothing more than to…”
Dowager Shen clutched her chest.
“I raised that woman’s bastard child for years!”
“I refused to give my consent, so the matter remained unresolved. On the surface, your father treated you well. You were young then and relied heavily on him. Later, his ambitions grew, and he devoted himself day and night to maneuvering within the imperial court. The matter was temporarily put aside. He refused to wrong that woman, so he kept her outside the household.”
“After all, I had you. I thought that if we could simply maintain the peace and endure things as they were until you grew up safely, that would be enough. But fate had other plans. That woman suddenly became pregnant.”
Dowager Shen had calmed considerably by then, and she recounted the past in a soft, measured voice.
“He went mad with determination to marry her. He even used your life to threaten me. If the political situation hadn’t shifted at that time, and if he hadn’t been so tightly constrained by the Cui and Tang families, you and I would likely have already been reduced to a pile of ashes.”
“Xiabai, perhaps the father in your heart was a man who could give away most of his fortune for the sake of the common people—a righteous man worthy of respect. But to me, I want to heap every vicious curse in this world upon him. I wish he and that woman had died gruesome deaths and been denied rebirth for all eternity!”
