In this world, no matter how good a friend, no matter how close a mentor, no one can take the place of a mother—not even a father can. Charles did not lack the longing for a mother; it’s just that sometimes, if you know something is out of reach yet still refuse to accept your fate, it becomes unbearably painful, to the point where you even pity yourself.

Charles had thought countless times in his heart that it was impossible for him to be Grace’s biological child. Now, having received this unsurprising answer, he felt an emptiness inside, unable to describe what he was feeling.

A sense of foreboding grew heavier in Charles’s heart, and he asked warily, “Why are you suddenly telling me all this?”

Grace gazed into the mirror, examining her own face. Perhaps she had applied too much powder, for her complexion looked a bit pale. She carefully scooped out a little rouge and gently blended it onto her cheeks.

“‘Charles’ is the nickname I gave you,” said Grace. “People in the Central Plains say, ‘In the east there is Venus, in the west there is Charles.’ It only appears at dusk, signifying bloodshed and misfortune. In your veins flows both the noblest and the filthiest blood in the world. You were born a terrifying monster—no name could suit you better.”

Charles replied coldly, “Wasn’t I born when you were stranded in Shanxi, captured and raped by bandits? I have so many fathers you couldn’t count them on your fingers—the son of a prostitute and a bandit, what nobility is there in that?”

Grace stiffened all over, not turning around. Even the rouge couldn’t hide the pallor on her face. In her eyes, which seemed to speak, a flash of pain appeared, but it quickly faded, dissolving into a kind of mad calm.

Charles’s earliest memories were in a bandit’s den atop a mountain. Grace would always lock him in a musty-smelling cupboard. Through the cracks in the rotting wood, the young Charles could always see the drunken bandits barging in.

Those rough men would either beat her or have intercourse with her right in front of little Charles.

At first, the bandits kept a close watch on Grace, but gradually, seeing her as weak and submissive, never resisting, they relaxed. Eventually, they even let her out, making her serve them food and drink like the other servant women in the stronghold. Grace poisoned the well and hundreds of jars of wine—no one knew where she got so much poison.

She scooped a bowl of poisoned well water for Charles to drink, but when he actually drank it, she seemed to regret it, desperately clawing at his throat to make him vomit.

Grace stuffed the half-dead Charles into a small bamboo basket and carried him on her back, a steel knife in her hand. Whenever she saw someone still breathing, she would go over and finish them off.

Charles remembered that day: she wore a blood-soaked red dress, splashed kerosene and the bandit chief’s hidden purple-gold all over the mountainside, set the whole mountain ablaze, and took him away.

In his short life of just over ten years, Grace had tried to kill him countless times—forcing poisoned wine down his throat, stabbing him with a knife, tying him to a horse and dragging him, and even, in countless midnight fits of madness, trying to smother him with a quilt...

But every time, she would pull back at the last moment and spare his life.

And left him with a sliver of unrealistic hope.

Charles said as calmly as he could, “You’re overthinking it. I’ve never considered you my real mother. I always thought the reason you hated me was because I was the filth left to you by the bandits.”

Grace sat before the mirror, expressionless, her face growing paler and paler. After a long silence, she suddenly sighed, “Child, I have wronged you.”

The moment those words left her lips, all the wariness and resentment in Charles’s heart nearly crumbled. Only then did he realize that all the grievances he’d carried since childhood could be so easily dissolved by this one sentence.

Yet this fourteen-year-old boy used all his strength to hold back his tears, then asked wearily, “So what are you planning by telling me this now? Has your conscience awakened, and you want to cure the poison in me, or do you just want to kill me outright?”

Grace looked at him with a strange gaze, as if the boy were some precious artifact. “You know…”

Charles: “Of course I know. Ever since I settled in Yan Hui Town, I haven’t had a single night without nightmares. Even if I nap during the day, I wake up in terror.”

Except for that first night—Charles’s thoughts scattered for a moment, and he suddenly regretted having sulked with Sixteen.

Charles: “I admit I haven’t achieved much in my life, but I haven’t done anything truly shameful either. Why would ghosts come knocking at my door every night at midnight? Is there really some strange illness that causes nightmares every night?”

A strange smile curled on Grace’s crimson lips. Her gaze slowly fell on the iron wrist cuff exposed on Charles’s wrist, and in her eyes was a sharp glint, as if she hid a pair of poisoned arrows: “What else do you know?”

Charles instinctively pulled the iron wrist cuff back under his sleeve, feeling as if even a glance from her could taint it.