Gu Jinyu’s deep gaze pierced through the glamour, striking over in an instant. Gu Xiaodeng felt as if struck by lightning, suspecting his disguise had been seen through by him at a glance. But that shouldn’t be? The Su Family’s disguising skills were formidable. Along the way, he had seen many academy acquaintances, yet none had recognized him.
Distracted by Gu Jinyu, the turbulent waves in Gu Xiaodeng’s heart calmed considerably. He fumed inwardly but pricked up his ears, curiously listening to the gossip at that table.
It didn’t take long for him to figure out the relationships at that table. Gu Ruhui and Gao Mingqian needn’t be mentioned again. The girl beside Gu Jinyu was the current Third Princess, out of the palace to join the fun.
Gu Jinyu was the Crown Princess’s Study Companion, and also liked by the Third Princess. Guan Yunji was the Second Prince’s cousin. Su Mingya’s eldest sister, the Noble Consort, had a daughter in the palace, making Su Mingya the Fourth Princess’s maternal uncle. Ge Dongchen had no blood relation to the Imperial Family, but his own father had once been the swordsmanship teacher for the three imperial scions.
In summary, aside from the sickly beauty who couldn’t truss a chicken, none of the others were easy to deal with.
Gu Xiaodeng could hear it. His sickly beauty young master was isolated at the table. Except for Second Sister Gu asking after him at the start and end to fulfill her hostess duties, and the Third Princess asking a few eager questions, the other four ignored Su Mingya.
Fortunately, Su Mingya didn’t need to tolerate slights. After politely congratulating Gu Ruhui and having a few bites of lunch, he excused himself on the pretext of illness and left.
Gu Xiaodeng naturally followed and left. As he turned to go, he still felt a gloomy gaze on his back. His intuition told him it was Gu Jinyu’s stare.
Once they left the banquet, Su Mingya beckoned him over: “Is the little rice bucket hungry?”
Gu Xiaodeng laughed at the nickname: “Young Master, don’t make false accusations. How did I become a rice bucket?”
Su Mingya stroked his dimple: “Just now at the table, I could hear your stomach singing songs.”
Gu Xiaodeng hadn’t even noticed it himself. He poked his flat little tummy blankly: “Really?”
Su Mingya laughed, took his hand, and walked back to the Bamboo Courtyard, coughing lightly: “Not only did I hear your stomach singing ‘Empty City Stratagem,’ but I also sensed you were unhappy. What’s wrong? Disappointed with Second Sister Gu’s birthday banquet?”
Gu Xiaodeng paused, snorted, and only mentioned one thing: “I felt that besides the two gentle girls, the other four seemed to gang up and isolate you. Our Young Master Su was slighted, and I felt upset along with you.”
“Leaving the Second Prince aside…” Su Mingya held Gu Xiaodeng’s five fingers tight and chuckled lowly. “As for the other three, even now, you still don’t know why their attitude towards me took a sharp turn?”
Gu Xiaodeng looked somewhat dumb: “I don’t know? Maybe it’s understandable for Jinyu, but the other two Young Masters I truly wonder about… And I sense it! Young Master Su, you seem rather happy about being isolated by them. I don’t understand.”
Su Mingya whetted his appetite but gave no explanation. Gu Xiaodeng, having no recourse, returned to the Bamboo Courtyard. After washing off the disguise, he transformed bewilderment into appetite and chowed down a hearty meal.
Su Mingya was in a good mood. Midway, he personally warmed half a pot of wine. He couldn’t drink, but Gu Xiaodeng wouldn’t refuse him. In the end, he drank one cup. After breaking the seal with one cup came another. Gu Xiaodeng was someone who couldn’t hold things in anyway. Soon, he clenched his fists and banged on the table.
“My brother!” Gu Xiaodeng wailed. “My Brother Dengqing! This time last year, he left me! Aaah, it infuriates me to death!”
He grabbed the wine pot and downed it in one go.
Su Mingya had seen him looking like a puffed-up pufferfish full of displeasure, and that was why he had fed him two cups of wine to pour out his grievances. He hadn’t expected Gu Xiaodeng, usually so cheerfully happy, to suddenly explode. By the time he snatched the wine pot away, Gu Xiaodeng had already finished it. Shaking his head, tears welling in his eyes, he called out “Brother Dengqing” like a child.
“Crying like this…” Su Mingya dismissed the servants, pulled him over to coax him. Coaxing didn’t last a few sentences before he lowered his head to kiss him. He knew this was taking advantage of a crisis, nothing more, yet he just couldn’t help it. Seeing Gu Xiaodeng cry only made him want to kiss deeper.
Just as the kissing was at its most pleasant, a servant reported from outside that Gu Jinyu had arrived, claiming the Gu family banquet had summoned “Gu Shanqing” and had specially come to take Gu Xiaodeng away.
This excuse was flawless.
Su Mingya didn’t pick at it either. He just lowered his head to Gu Xiaodeng’s ear and chuckled lightly: “That good brother of yours has come to snatch you. Shall we make him wait a bit, okay?”
Immune to medicine but not to alcohol, Gu Xiaodeng stuck to him dazedly, only hiccupping and muttering about his brother from time to time.
Gu Jinyu waited for a quarter of an hour before entering the Bamboo Courtyard to pick him up. Upon entering the main room, he saw a glaring scene.
Gu Xiaodeng had fallen asleep with red eyes, clinging to the crook of Su Mingya’s arm as if hugging a winter blanket.
“Sorry, Shanqing was feeling down today. He got greedy with his cup and passed out drunk.” Su Mingya made a show of prying him off. Gu Xiaodeng was sleeping deeply. In his dreams, he mistook him for his Sworn Brother and refused to let go no matter what, clingily just clutching tighter.
Gu Jinyu raised a polite smile: “No matter. I’ll take him back to West Prosperity Garden first.”
He stepped forward and grabbed Gu Xiaodeng by the scruff of the neck, easily and lightly “peeling” him off. Once in his arms, Gu Xiaodeng mistook him for his Sworn Brother too, non-discriminatingly clinging to Gu Jinyu.
Gu Jinyu directly scooped Gu Xiaodeng up horizontally. Su Mingya felt like he was watching a big wolfdog pick up a little puppy.
As easily as carrying a child, Gu Jinyu lowered his head to look at Gu Xiaodeng pressed against his heart, then looked up and smiled politely at Su Mingya: “Su the Fourth, thank you for taking care of our family’s Shanqing. I’m taking him back now.”
Su Mingya also raised his habitual light smile: “Gu the Fourth, with the deep ties between our two families, formalities are unnecessary.”
After the two exchanged polite pleasantries, Gu Jinyu turned around holding the person. The moment they turned, the smiles on both their faces vanished cleanly, coldness bursting forth.
Gloomily, Gu Jinyu carried Gu Xiaodeng out of the Bamboo Courtyard. Just as he stepped over the threshold, Gu Xiaodeng, in his tipsy state, started snoring softly, smacking his lips. Gu Jinyu’s gloom was smacked right away.
Silent all the way, Gu Jinyu took him back to the courtyard in East Forest Garden. From time to time, he looked down at Gu Xiaodeng, who had clearly been crying. Halfway there, even Blossom Ashes flew down from mid-air and landed on his shoulder. Man and hawk together looked at him.
Gu Jinyu walked slowly, watching slowly, and slowly weighing things in his heart.
Weighing repeatedly.
Before, he had wanted to be the person Gu Xiaodeng trusted and relied on most, so that he could best use him in the future. This point could be considered achieved. But he hadn’t expected Gu Xiaodeng’s emotions to be so rich and complex that no one could serve as a reference. On top of dependence, there was also a deadly dose of “like.”
Gu Jinyu didn’t know what “like” was, at least he couldn’t comprehend it before Gu Xiaodeng appeared.
His emotions were as dull as a wooden stake. The Gu Family had disciplined him properly from outside to inside. He had nothing he feared, nothing he particularly fancied, just like Gu Pinghan, just like Gu Yan.
Putting it nicely, he was not overjoyed by external gains nor saddened by personal losses. But to open his heart and speak the truth, it was simply numbness.
Heaven knows how chaotic he was when he found out he wasn’t the Fourth Son of the Gu Family. Various feelings erupted like magma from the earth’s surface, washing over him until he only wanted release.
Back then he thought: Why couldn’t this True Young Master, Gu Xiaodeng, have come earlier. He wanted to return all the endless books, the endless martial training, the endless darkness of confinement, the endless filth he had to endure, the endless nightmares, the endless will of the father generation stuffed into him, all back to the True Young Master.
This fake young master of his should return to the Jianghu, return to the mud, whether penniless or possessing nothing at all.
But Gu Xiaodeng recognized his kin so late, so late it was despairing. Gu Jinyu became the nailed-down, ironclad “Gu Jinyu.”
For the first time, Gu Jinyu hated his own hard work so much. If he hadn’t cultivated day and night without rest, he wouldn’t have qualified so quickly to be a candidate for the imperial scion’s study companion. Then perhaps he could have waited as the fake young master in the deep mansion for the True Young Master’s return. Then perhaps he would have already returned to the Jianghu by now.
He had worked desperately to escape the Gu Family quickly. Just when he had initially put one foot out of the Gu Family, one foot into the Imperial Palace, unable to advance or retreat, Gu Xiaodeng came.
How he resented the late-arriving Gu Xiaodeng.
What he resented even more was that Gu Xiaodeng could truly not resent him.
In Gu Xiaodeng’s eyes, glory and wealth were like leftovers, power and status like scraps. Happiness and freedom, being loved and loving, were his staple foods.
Gu Jinyu truly wanted to hate such a simple Gu Xiaodeng to madness.
He couldn’t imagine how healthy and free Gu Xiaodeng’s past must have been to raise him to be so open-minded and joyful.
Gu Jinyu hated so much he wanted to drag him down, make him roll out of the bright sunshine and fall into this massive aristocratic sinkhole.
Until he first left Changle, traveling far to the Outer State, to the imagined free Jianghu that had raised Gu Xiaodeng. He knew the Jianghu was dangerous too—whether the court or the Jianghu, the human world was dangerous.
If Gu Pinghan hadn’t messed up his own Autumn Examination, he should now be staying in Changle for his post assignment. First entering the Hanlin Academy, serving two years as a scholar, carefully considering a good marriage match, just like An Zhenwen did, and then step by step, spending ten or eight years seizing the opportunity to rise to the peak of officialdom.
Thus, two or three decades, a life like a great dream. In the dream, one wouldn’t know if it could be considered a fulfilled long-cherished wish.
Gu Jinyu originally walked such a path too.
After knowing he had another identity, he tried to flee. When his galloping escape failed, when the pursuing soldiers caught up and sliced off half his hair crown, in that dream-like state he thought of the strange Gu Xiaodeng who had dropped from the sky.
Even in adapting to restraint, Gu Xiaodeng carried a burning radiance. Countless people here who couldn’t stand the light detested and loathed his simple happiness. Countless people just wanted to see him fall into numbness, assimilate with the human world, and become vicious and dark.
But until now, Gu Xiaodeng was still bright and light.
Gu Jinyu no longer hated Gu Xiaodeng. Even before he had fallen in love with Gu Xiaodeng, he had already come to see him as an ideal.
An ideal is pure and noble. Desire is stark and naked.
He just watched him like this, from Tianming 12th Year to Tianming 17th Year.
From confused purity, step by step, to clear, stark nakedness.
