CH 55

After Fu Zhiyu had delivered Mingdao, it was already late.

On the way back, he deliberately made a mess of himself a little bit. He saw someone looking for him in the woods, so he found a place to fall down. They found him “just in time” and sent him back to the camp.

Princess Miaotang was found, but the child raised by Wang Zhao wasn’t found. It had been two nights, and everyone understood that there was little hope of finding him.

After all, this was a hunting ground, and a child of this age might have been eaten by wolves with no bones left.

Wang Zhao probably couldn’t accept this fact. He had been pampering this child so much. After the child disappeared, Wang Zhao didn’t even care about his body. He ran out to find the child alone, but had an accident. After waking up the next day, he was in a daze. He was already in bad health, but now it looked even worse.

The young couple was originally intended to be matched by Emperor Qingyuan during the hunt, but who knew that there would be such a big misfortune, with the princess not yet awake from a high fever and Wang Zhao falling sick again. How could the two good people suddenly become like this?

Later, there were rumours that Wang Zhao and the princess’s horoscopes didn’t match and forcing them to be together would only hurt them. It was not a good marriage.

Fu Zhiyu also heard it. It was possible that this so-called rumour came from Xie Ke’s side, or it was possible that he just contributed to it.

But now he and the princess were still undecided and there was still room for refusal. Using such reasons as an excuse was the best way to ensure the decency of both parties to the greatest extent. After all, it was just fate, not the fault of either party.

When Emperor Qingyuan came to see him, Fu Zhiyu weakly told him that he wanted to go back to the capital to recuperate. He was sick and wanted to see his mother consort, and Emperor Qingyuan agreed.

“Go ahead,” Emperor Qingyuan sighed, “Don’t worry about Princess Miaotang, Father Emperor will find you a good girl.”

Fu Zhiyu agreed on the surface, but thought in his heart that the emperor might not last until then.

Fu Zhiyu wasn’t afraid that he would be targeted by the Xue and Lin families on his way back. First, they didn’t know that he had seen Mingdao and knew their secrets, so there was no need to do anything to him. Second, they chased Mingdao because they were afraid that he would reveal their plans. If something happened to the prince on the way back to the capital, it would be equivalent to alerting the snake. Emperor Qingyuan would be wary and it would affect their plans.

But what Fu Zhiyu didn’t expect was that the person responsible for escorting him back was Shen Yang.

Xie Ke was very eager to escort him, but Emperor Qingyuan couldn’t let him leave now. Even though his arm was dislocated, the emperor trusted Xie Ke and Xie Lin very much and no one could replace them.

Sure enough, it wasn’t enough to guard against Xie Ke. Fu Zhiyu didn’t expect that when he lifted the curtain of the carriage, he would see Shen Yang with a smile on his face.

“The Ministry of Justice sent a letter saying that there was an urgent matter that needed to be dealt with by this subject. So I had to take a leave of absence from the emperor,” Shen Yang saluted and said, “It happens that Wang Zhao also returns to the capital. The emperor also specifically instructed this subject that Wang Zhao is sick and should be taken care of.”

Fu Zhiyu: “……”

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Intuitively, he felt that what Shen Yang said about the emergency from the Ministry of Justice was an excuse, but it was impossible for him not to go back because of Shen Yang’s emergency. Fu Zhiyu stood outside the carriage for a while, then sat in and lowered the curtain.

The carriage moved carefully. This carriage had a device for making tea and medicine. Shen Yang lowered his head, making medicine for wind chills for Fu Zhiyu. As soon as the lid was opened, the carriage was filled with a bitter smell.

“It’s ready,” Shen Yang looked at the colour of the medicine and carefully poured a bowl, “Wang Zhao, drink a little first, the autumn wind is cold, you have to pay more attention to your health.”

Fu Zhiyu reluctantly took it but didn’t drink it. He put the bowl on the table. At this time, the carriage just turned a corner, and the wheel hit a stone. The whole carriage shook, and most of the bowl of medicine was spilled all at once.

“Did His Highness burn himself?” Shen Yang was worried about him, put away the bowl, picked up the handkerchief and wiped the table clean, saying, “It’s my fault, the medicine that has just been boiled is too hot and not comfortable to drink. It should’ve been cooled for a while before I gave it to Master.”

He was so soft-spoken and attentive; people outside would be scared to death if they saw him like that. Fu Zhiyu squinted his eyes, but his heart thumped.

Shen Yang just used “Master” instead of “Wang Zhao”.

He was the head of the Ministry of Justice, and there should be only one person in Jilin who could be called “Master” by him. That was the emperor in the dragon chair.

Shen Yang didn’t seem to notice the difference. He added water to the medicine pot and carefully boiled the medicine for Fu Zhiyu again. While staring at the boiling medicine pot, he suddenly said: “I still remember that Master was poisoned by Xie Ke in his previous life. No one knew whether you would survive, and I didn’t either. I cooked a bowl of medicine for you like this, watched you fall asleep, and then…”

Ran away with the imperial seal.

Shen Yang didn’t say this, but Fu Zhiyu remembered it clearly, so he continued this sentence in his heart.

In fact, he wasn’t too surprised. He felt that Shen Yang was a little abnormal today, and he had a guess about his rebirth from the time of the fraud case.

As for the betrayal he suddenly mentioned, Fu Zhiyu didn’t have any waves in his heart. He had long been immune to the events of his previous life.

He just asked, “When did you find out? I haven’t said a word to you in the past two days.”

After listening to Fu Zhiyu’s rhetorical question, Shen Yang’s hand tending to the medicine pot froze. He seemed to be sure of something, took a deep breath, and then replied after a while: “The night before yesterday. I heard that Yuan Mingdao was missing, and I was afraid that you were worried, so I went to the camp to find you. You shouldn’t have seen me, or didn’t pay attention at all.”

Fu Zhiyu was holding a torch. He was in the light and Shen Yang looked carefully. He felt that the expression on Zhiyu’s face was different from when he had seen him before. He no longer had the lazy look, and his face was grim. This expression overlapped with his expression in the previous life.

Shen Yang followed secretly. He also saw Xie Ke, but the two of them walked quickly. There were lots of leaves and branches on the ground in the woods and the sound of walking was also very loud. He didn’t dare to walk too close, and he lost them after a while.

Because of the distance, he didn’t hear the conversation between Xie Ke and Fu Zhiyu, but he clearly saw that Fu Zhiyu had been walking in front, and Xie Ke followed behind him.

Zhiyu obviously came to the hunting ground for the first time, but he seemed to be very familiar with the way, and some very difficult places were avoided in time. It wasn’t the first time he was here. Even though Shen Yang lost him later, he could see this clearly. 

Coupled with Xie Ke’s attitude towards Zhiyu, Shen Yang suddenly broke into a sweat from his own conjecture. After returning to the camp, he didn’t fall asleep all night.

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After Shen Yang was reborn, he spent very little time with Fu Zhiyu. To be precise, he never had a chance to say a few words. Perhaps because of this, he was deliberately or unintentionally misled by Xie Ke. For such a long time, he felt that only he and Xie Ke were reborn.

But after discovering that something was wrong, Shen Yang realised that he had actually been affected by stereotyped thinking. He obviously had many doubts, and he didn’t need to talk to Zhiyu to figure it out.

Yuan Mingdao stayed in the Yuan residence for several years in his previous life before going to Fu Zhiyu’s side as a guard. Why did he go to the palace directly in this life?

With his memories, Shen Yang had habitually and naturally accepted that Fu Zhiyu and Yuan Mingdao used to be close, and in this life, they happened to meet again. Only now did he discover that there was something strange in it. 

“Then what does Lord Shen want to say by telling me this now?” After listening to his explanation, Fu Zhiyu’s expression didn’t change in the slightest. “Lord Shen has been a successful person in his two lifetimes. Now, can you leave me, the loser, alone?”

Shen Yang lowered his head and smiled bitterly. Fu Zhiyu saw him lift up his sleeve and wipe the corners of his eyes.

“Zhiyu, you and I have been kept in the dark for too long. A few days ago, I confidently thought that since I had died once, I should know everything. But now I found out that it was not the case,” Shen Yang looked at him and said, “Can you believe it? In my previous life, I didn’t know that you were dead until I was in my fifties. Until halfway to the grave, I thought… I thought everything was like Xie Ke said, that he would let you go if he took the throne. He told me that you were doing fine but just didn’t want to see me and I didn’t need to worry about you. I…”

Shen Yang choked, and suddenly couldn’t speak anymore.

At that time, he took away the imperial seal and felt ashamed to see Fu Zhiyu again. He just had to comfort himself with the thoughts that Zhiyu had left the cannibalistic court and Xie Ke. He even wrote unsigned letters to Fu Zhiyu one by one to make up for the guilt that he had never been able to dispel in his heart.

But when Shen Yang knew that Zhiyu had died when he was twenty-six years old, his guilt became a joke, a self-deception to forgive himself for betraying his benefactor.

In such an extremely sad and angry mood, he took a dagger to attack Xie Ke. When he did that, he had the intention of dying together. But he didn’t die at that time and Xie Ke also escaped death, just pierced by his dagger, bleeding all over the floor.

After listening to Shen Yang’s reason, Xie Ke looked at him, frowned, lowered his head and said something. That sentence Shen Yang remembered vividly until now.

“You are crazy, it’s just that. Now it’s all over at last, I won’t bother with you,” Xie Ke said, “I didn’t lie to you about Zhiyu. He didn’t disappear, it’s just that you don’t have the ability to see him.”

“I thought he was lying to me again,” Shen Yang said, “But I really… I wasn’t reconciled when I died. When I opened my eyes, the whole world started over. I saw you again. Everything was like a dream.”

Shen Yang couldn’t control his tears, but as Fu Zhiyu listened to him talk about these things, except for frowning when he heard about certain scenes, he didn’t have any expression on his face.

What he didn’t understand was that if he, who had been hurt and betrayed, hadn’t shed a tear, why did Shen Yang and Xie Ke cry like this instead?

“You don’t have to tell me all that,” Fu Zhiyu said. He was a little tired. After thinking a little, he added, “I have long since moved on, so you can understand that as forgiveness. From now on, each of us will walk his own road and no one owes anyone anything.” 

These words didn’t give Shen Yang the slightest comfort. He cried even more desperately, unable to suppress his tears, inconsolable.

“Master, Zhiyu, I’m sorry…” Shen Yang said in a broken voice, “I know that our relationship can never go back to what it was before, but I just want to make it up to you…”