CH 1

Chapter One Originated from youth 

The summer night in the capital was sultry and suffocating.

Li Yi woke up in the corner of a dilapidated house. Moonlight seeped inside through the gaps in the thatched roof, pale and cold like a shining ray.

Dazed and not knowing where he was, Li Yi stayed still for a long time. Finally, he raised his hand and wiped his forehead covered in sweat.

He got up quietly, not wanting to alarm Ping An who was sleeping by the door.

In the past, as soon as Li Yi made a little movement, Ping An would always be alert and was ready to get up and wait on him. Tonight he must have been exhausted. He rolled over on the straw mat and snored again softly.

Li Yi walked slowly to the table and drank the remaining half a cup of cold water, only then did he feel that his heartbeat gradually slowed down.

He had that kind of dream again.

In the autumn Imperial Forest, there were just a few puffy clouds in the sky.

The young man, of whom he dreamed countless times, was riding a white horse, his eyes clear as the blue sky. He saw Li Yi suddenly stop behind him, hurriedly pulled the reins and turned around, asking with concern, “What’s the matter?” ”

The young Li Yi pointed to the saddle and the stirrup strap that had suddenly broken.

The young man quickly dismounted and rushed over to take a closer look. He saw that the inside of the strap had been cut with a knife. Several layers of leather were cut through cleanly and the last few were torn apart by an external force.

He turned the strap over and pointed to Li Yi, “Someone is trying to harm you.”

If a stirrup strap of a galloping horse suddenly broke, there was a big chance the rider would fall and die. Even if one was lucky, they could still be trampled and maimed by the horse.

Li Yi’s luck was really great. The strap didn’t break while he was galloping wildly, but it was when he went uphill. However, at that time, the horse’s speed had slowed down a lot.

Furthermore, Rouge, the bay horse bestowed by the emperor, was one of the best horses in the world, and had long understood its owner wordlessly. When Li Yi was in distress, he instinctively pulled the reins, and it stopped almost immediately.

“Qiyuan, my right foot.” Li Yi leaned on his horse, frowning with pain.

“Don’t move!” The young man had already noticed and was gently touching Li Yi’s right ankle. Fortunately, the bone was fine, but it was badly twisted. The sun was scorching in the sky, and it was obviously not convenient to check without cover. The young man turned his white horse again and made the two horses stand firmly next to each other. Then he stretched out his long arm and pulled Li Yi onto his horse.

Li Yi sat sideways on Bai Yucong, and the young man supported him with one hand, saying, “The sun is so poisonous, I’ll find a cave to deal with your injury.”

Bai Yucong quickly ran through the tall grass, with Li Yi’s Rouge following Bai Yucong cautiously, like a child who had done something wrong.

Li Yi was injured and his sitting posture was not right. When the horse started to gallop, he had to work hard to maintain his balance in the saddle.

The young man clamped the horse’s belly, and Bai Yucong moved his hoofs more and more energetically, running happily.

Li Yi suddenly lost his balance and was about to slide off in a panic. The young man quickly put his arms around him and said in a deep voice, “Hold on tightly to me.”

Li Yi’s heart fluttered. Seeing the young man’s calm appearance, he clasped the other’s neck with one hand, still holding the saddle with his other, and lowered his head to hide the joy in his eyes.

The hills of the Imperial Forest were long and lush, and the grass was tall and thick. The two rode together crossing the open area in the blink of an eye.

The young man quickly found a cave, and Li Yi was taken off the horse. The young man was a few years older than Li Yi, and his body had become strong and tall after years of martial arts practice. Li Yi could feel how powerful the arms that held him firmly were.

After finding a place to stay, the young man first put Li Yi down, then took off his coat and spread it on a dry and flat place and carried Li Yi again to move him there.

He knelt down on one knee and looked at Li Yi’s ankle. After groping for a while, he took out some powder from the medicine sack he carried with him, carefully mixed it with the water from the sack and applied it to Li Yi’s red and swollen foot.

Seeing the young man so focused, Li Yi couldn’t help showing a serious expression on his face. The young man treated him so gently as if Li Yi was a treasure to him.

Li Yi looked at the handsome young man in front of him, at his vivid red hair band floating to his shoulders, and felt stunned for a while.

After dealing with his injury, the young man looked up at Li Yi, but saw that he was staring at him in a daze, and the words that were going to come out were left unsaid.

“Qiyuan…”

Li Yi called out and his voice like a clear spring hit the young man’s heart and the echo in the cave made him tremble.

Their silhouettes swayed and Li Yi fell into the boy’s arms. He could clearly hear the boy’s heartbeat, which was beating faster and faster, while Li Yi’s own heartbeat was already too chaotic to be heard.

With their breaths mingling, Li Yi’s body trembled involuntarily. The young man’s eyes were as bright as stars, and his expressive face was too close. He grasped Li Yi’s hands and pressed them to his sides, then leaned over him and pressed him down.

Their long kiss went from sweet to bitter.

Suddenly, Li Yi felt a sharp pain in his wrists, and his eyes became dark.

When he opened his eyes again, he was already lying in the pool of blood in h*ll. His eyes, ears, mouth and nose were full of blood. He could only see scarlet blood, smell the fishy smell of blood, taste the greasy astringency of blood, and touch the viscosity of blood.

Except for the blood everywhere, there was only a bone-chilling cold.

Li Yi instinctively felt that his vitality was rapidly falling, and death was close at hand. No matter how much he wanted to struggle to escape, he couldn’t move at all. He wanted to cry for help, but something pinched his throat tightly to prevent him from making the slightest sound!

Li Yi woke up because of this suffocation.

He had survived back then, and after he was lucky enough to keep his life, he often had similar nightmares. The memories in the beginning were always different, but they were always as beautiful as they were in the past. Then, gradually the beautiful dreams would stop abruptly and turn into the same ending. Li Yi would be imprisoned in the pool of blood in h*ll, with blood in his eyes, ears, mouth and nose.

The memories were so sweet, but now they were cruel. It was really ironic.

Fortunately, in recent years, Li Yi had gradually stopped having such nightmares. So much that in the last year, Li Yi didn’t dream about the good or the bad.

The reason for the nightmare’s return was that the capital was filled with fear and death recently. He experienced many worries during the day, and it aroused Li Yi’s nightmares again. He had thought he was about to forget the past, but he still remembered it so clearly in the dead of night.

Li Yi poured half a cup of cold water for himself again and walked slowly back to bed, his drowsiness slipping away completely.

He looked down at his hands, at the two dark brown scars crawling like worms or snakes on his jade-white wrists, extremely eye-catching.

He touched these two old scars. Everyone thought that they were scars left by his fear of the new emperor and his failure to kill himself. But he knew it was the boy in his dream who really killed him; the boy who was the heir of the King of Southern Yunnan back then.

Thinking of it, Li Yi couldn’t help sighing softly.

“Young master?” Ping An woke up in the end. When he saw Li Yi awake while he was unaware, he turned over in a hurry and was about to apologize.

Li Yi put down his hands as if nothing had happened and comforted him: “It’s all right, go to sleep. ”

Seeing the situation in front of him, Ping An had already guessed most of it, “Did the young master have a nightmare again? Don’t worry, young master, there will be no good reward for that scumbag in the future.”

Ping An’s puffed up look made Li Yi laugh, “Haven’t you heard that good people don’t live long, and evil will last for thousands of years?”

“Bah, don’t speak nonsense young master! That cruel and unscrupulous creature, when he was living as a hostage in the capital, if it hadn’t been for the protection of young master, he would have been tortured to death. Had he died, how would he have the opportunity to avenge his grievances and harm young master’s life.”

Li Yi shook his head, “Back then, he made a move against me to show loyalty to the new emperor. It took me some time to understand that when he made a move on me at the right time and did something that the new emperor could not do by himself, he naturally pleased the imperial court and made it possible for them to release him back, so that he could successfully inherit the throne of Southern Yunnan. I should have thought of this earlier on and guarded against him. I was the first son of the crown prince for fourteen years for nothing, and I can’t blame anyone.”

Ping An was still swearing at the King of Southern Yunnan, but Li Yi’s thoughts had already drifted away.

In fact, he knew his problem a long time ago. The reason why Li Yi was not used to the step-by-step power struggle of the court and the calculations of human hearts was, after all, because he was a transmigrated soul, and the circumstances and characteristics he had experienced in his previous life were not so easy to change.

In his previous life, Li Yi had the same name as the grandson of the emperor. He was just a young professor at the Chinese National Academy of Arts. Although his talent was favoured by the industry, he had a gentle temperament and did not engage in any disputes. He devoted himself solely to painting and was not keen for reputation. When the institution organised a tour that year, he accidentally fell into a deep pool in the mountains, and when he woke up, he had already passed through to the Qing Dynasty, an imaginary ancient dynasty.

Li Yi’s father was the crown prince who was deeply loved by the emperor and unanimously praised by the court and the public as an upright and honest heir to the throne. Li Yi clearly lived a royal life of flowers and brocades, and he should have been carefree, but the longer he lived in this world, the more he worried. His crown prince father was raised to be too proper by the emperor and was incapable of using any hidden, dark means.

Based on the movies and TV dramas that Li Yi had watched, he could guess that this was not a good thing. Sure enough, when the emperor was critically ill, his crown prince father suddenly died and Prince Qin ascended to the throne. Li Yi’s title changed from the original Prince Yin to the ‘Hidden’ Prince.

The new emperor’s meaning couldn’t be clearer. If Li Yi didn’t want to die, he had to clamp his tail down as a person.

Soon, without waiting for others to hit him as he was down, the heir of the King of Southern Yunnan rewarded him with two knife blows. Fate was kind to Li Yi. After surviving, he asked to be abolished as a commoner.

In order to show grace and appease the clan, the new emperor did not kill him. He granted Li Yi’s request and allowed him to go.

From an ignorant teenage lover to the deadly King of H*ll, in ten years, the other man went from the prince to the King of Southern Yunnan and had his wishes fulfilled in proclaiming hegemony, while he, Li Yi, was reduced from the emperor’s grandson to a commoner and wasted his life early on.

Under the same sky, on the same ground, the two people walked in opposite directions.

Although the nightmares of that year were still present, vassal kings that were not called were not allowed to enter the capital for a lifetime. Li Yi had acted as Mr. Dongguo, and the Wolf of Zhongshan1 had also ran away. There was no more intersections between them. After all, nightmares were just nightmares, not reality. Li Yi was convinced that as long as there was more time, there would one day where he would forget.

The moonlight was fading, and Li Yi slowly laid back down again. He forced himself to go to sleep. The situation in the capital was already in chaos. Li Yi didn’t want to lose his life easily anymore. There were still many things waiting for him to worry about tomorrow.

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