Han Feizi Stutters

I transmigrated as Han Feizi, and my first words were about reforming the state and making it strong. The nobles couldn't understand me, and they didn't want to, so they spread rumors everywhere: “Young Master Han Fei is a stutterer.”

My mother begged me through tears to stay silent. In times of chaos, too many words invite disaster. I never wanted to enter public service anyway, so I simply let them believe it. From then on, the world saw me as a stuttering prince of the royal house, while my real battlefield was the bamboo slips beneath my brush.

Then, at Jixia Academy, I met Mo Yuan. She was the only one who didn't care about my “stutter,” and the only one who could understand the words I wrote. She said, “The things in your mind are worth more than anything you could say.”

We held hands on the city walls and married in a prison cell. She said, “Wherever you go, I'll be there.”

The Qin army advanced on Han, and the king sent me to negotiate peace. Ying Zheng talked with me through the night, then slapped the table in admiration: “To meet this man and travel with him would make even death no regret!” But Li Si secretly framed me and had me thrown into prison.

Mo Yuan used her mechanical skills to carve a secret passage and risked her life to save me. On the run, she took an arrow meant for me and lay near death. “I'm not afraid to die. I'm only afraid that when you die, I won't be by your side.”

I wrote books and set forth a sixteen-character framework: “Legalists in government, the Hundred Schools among the people, guided toward the people, guided toward striving.” I knew these ideas would cross two thousand years and become the institutional backbone of Chinese civilization. But what I didn't know was this: when I drank the poisoned wine, death wasn't waiting for me. A reunion two thousand years in the future was.