Shen Huaiyu was Jinling’s most famous pretty fool. He couldn’t do anything at all. He simply had a face no one could look away from, and a foolish devotion people wanted to stomp into the ground.
He saw Prince Chen, Xiao Yun, once at the Grand Princess’s birthday banquet when he was sixteen, and went mad for him. He sent paintings and calligraphy, sent pastries, moved in next door, and climbed over the palace wall in the middle of the night. For ten years, he single-handedly supplied Jinling with its favorite jokes.
Everyone said Xiao Yun hated him to the bone.
But he didn’t care. When Xiao Yun scolded him, he said, “You look so handsome when you’re angry.” When Xiao Yun pushed him away, he said, “Then I’ll come back tomorrow.” When Xiao Yun humiliated him in public, he knelt in the rain all night, still smiling when he looked up.
He thought sincerity could melt anything.
Until the Shen family fell overnight. His father was exiled, his mother hanged herself, and he went from a pampered young master to a prisoner, then from a prisoner to the lowliest servant in Prince Chen’s residence.
Xiao Yun made him fish dead lotus leaves out of the pond in spring, kneel beneath the blazing summer sun, take beatings in autumn, and clean up the soup he had personally smashed in the freezing winter wind.
Shen Huaiyu endured it all.
He endured until chilblains covered his hands, until old scars lined his back, until he had gone from a pale, spoiled young man to a quiet shadow.
Then one day, while feeding the three-legged stray cat in the back courtyard, he suddenly wondered: Wasn’t it time to leave?
The morning he left, the dawn mist had yet to lift from Jinling. He walked down the long street empty-handed and never looked back.
Xiao Yun stood at a second-floor window, crumpling the note that read “Shen Huaiyu has left the estate” in his fist before throwing it into the brazier.
Only when the flames licked at it did he realize his fingers were trembling.
