Chapter 49: The Beam-Stealing, Pillar-Swapping Literary Heart (Part 2)

“Is it common?” Shen Tang asked, anger creeping into her voice despite herself. “That kind of thing—stealing someone’s future like that.”

Chu Yao shook his head. “Not common. Not frequent.”

He sounded tired, not defensive. “The scholar’s path capable of taking another person’s literary heart is rare. And not every literary heart can be beam-stealing, pillar-swapping. Mine just happened to be… suitable.”

He let out a soft, self-mocking laugh. “In any country, it’s a capital crime.”

“Unless it’s ‘voluntary,’” he added.

Shen Tang stared at him like he’d grown horns. “‘Voluntary’? Who would volunteer to trade away a second-rank upper-middle literary heart for something low-grade?”

She spat the answer herself. “Unless they were ‘volunteered.’”

Chu Yao’s mouth tightened. “Yes. Volunteered.”

He kept walking, bundle hugged to his chest. After a moment, he began.

“My family was poor. When I was young, my parents sold me. I became a page in the Chu Manor, assigned to the eldest son. We studied together.”

“The eldest son wasn’t made for books,” Chu Yao said. “He was restless, quick-tempered, always wanting to play with blades and spears. He often made me handle his lessons for him.”

The eldest son chased weapons and excitement. Chu Yao, instead, was drawn to strategy, policy, and power. He seized every chance to learn and studied with a hunger that bordered on desperate.

“It didn’t take long for my ghostwriting to be discovered,” he said. “I thought I’d be thrown out, or beaten and sold off somewhere.”

Instead, the manor’s master took pity on him.

“Not only did he take me as a student,” Chu Yao said, “he granted me the surname Chu.”

Shen Tang squinted. “So the one who stole your literary heart was your teacher?”

Chu Yao shook his head. “Not him.”

Shen Tang exhaled. “Then I wronged a good person.”

Chu Yao’s smile was thin and bitter. “He wasn’t innocent.”

The teacher truly did treat Chu Yao well—so well that even the manor’s legitimate son grew jealous. Even the teacher’s wife quietly wondered whether Chu Yao was the teacher’s hidden blood, a child left outside, because it made no sense otherwise.

Chu Yao had seen that favor. He’d mistaken it for something like love.

Until the year before his coming-of-age.

He followed his teacher into the palace for a banquet. He drank. He woke up in a dungeon.

The mentor he’d respected like a father for more than ten years stood over him and made a demand that still returned as nightmare.

“Wu Hui,” the mentor said. “Give your literary heart to the Crown Prince.”

Hearing it, Chu Yao’s world collapsed in place.

A trap, laid from the beginning.

“My mentor took me as a student with three parts sincerity,” Chu Yao said.

Shen Tang’s face twisted. “Sure. Three parts sincerity, ninety-seven parts calculation.”

Her voice sharpened. “They kept you like a spare wheel for the Crown Prince. They wanted your literary heart from the start.”

Chu Yao didn’t argue. “To outsiders, it didn’t look that way.”

The Crown Prince promised him that after the exchange, he would be remembered. That when he took the throne, he would use Chu Yao well—even if Chu Yao no longer had a top-grade literary heart.

He also reminded Chu Yao what kind of life he would’ve had without them. Sold by his parents into low status. Without his mentor’s patronage, no matter how gifted he was, he would’ve been nothing more than a clever servant.

So shouldn’t he be grateful?

Chu Yao spoke on, steady. “My mentor said beam-stealing, pillar-swapping wasn’t ‘taking’ my literary heart. It was exchanging two.”

As if losing a second-rank upper-middle heart and being left with something lower was acceptable, because at least there was still a literary heart at all.

Shen Tang’s temper flared. “That’s robber talk.”

She spat the words like poison. “If he believed it, why didn’t he hand over his own literary heart to the Crown Prince? Don’t force on others what you yourself won’t accept. All those years of reading, and that’s what he learned?”

Chu Yao didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

Perhaps the mentor had felt a sliver of guilt. Perhaps Chu Yao still had value. Either way, the mentor indulged his studies after that, letting him read and learn what he could.

Chu Yao, even in hatred, never dared show it.

He studied in silence, trying to claw something back.

Then fate played a joke sharp enough to cut bone.

“The Crown Prince lost his struggle against his brothers,” Chu Yao said, expression turning strange. “He was dragged into the yansheng sorcery scandal.”

During his confinement, the Crown Prince went to the latrine at night, fell into the pit, and drowned.

His faction was uprooted. Chu Yao’s mentor was among them, household confiscated, family exiled.

Shen Tang went silent.

The mentor had never restored Chu Yao’s status, so when the net fell, Chu Yao was caught in it too.

His Dan Palace stage was ruined. He was confiscated and sold.

“By luck and old connections,” Chu Yao said, “I didn’t end up entirely destroyed. A friend helped me become Consort Chu’s retainer. I followed her to Xin State.”

But stability never lasted.

“Consort Chu fell,” he said simply. “I was sold with the rest of her assets. I drifted, and in the end I landed in this small city—washing dishes in the Moonlight Tower for five years.”

Shen Tang stared ahead, a little sick at the sheer consistency of his bad luck.

Then she narrowed her eyes. “You still haven’t explained the three taels.”

Chu Yao blinked, then gave an almost helpless look. “Didn’t I?”

“No,” Shen Tang said flatly. “You didn’t.”

“Then I forgot to mention my scholar’s path.”

Shen Tang stared. “You can just say it like that?”

Chu Yao’s laugh was short and bleak. “Why not? The literary heart is gone. The scholar’s path is ruined. Saying it changes nothing.”

Shen Tang had to admit, grudgingly, “Fair.”

Chu Yao’s voice softened into something resigned. “My scholar’s path was called Willows Dark, Flowers Bright.”

He added, “From the line: when the mountains and rivers seem to block the way, dark willows and bright flowers reveal another village.”

“It can’t be used unless I’m at the very end. I can’t control it.”

“As for whether it ever truly worked,” he said, “I don’t know.”

He glanced down at the road as if it held the answer. “I only know that the night my literary heart was replaced, I had a long, vivid dream. In the dream, I went to an herb shop and wrote a prescription.”

Shen Tang’s eyelid twitched. “What prescription?”

“Ginseng, rhubarb, aconite, and rehmannia—five qian each,” Chu Yao said. “Add three taels of moonlight.”

He spoke the last line as if it were perfectly ordinary. “Then you can know fate and cure stubborn illness.”

Shen Tang went silent for a long beat.

“That was a dream,” she finally said. “And you believed it?”

After turning it over again and again, she made up her mind and set her next target.