My Frail, Sickly Older Brother

(This won't be complete before it goes premium. A product of letting my imagination run wild, and I've already started working on the setting! - 3-)

Synopsis:

The Zhou family had deep roots, its sprawling, intricate clan ties binding together a hierarchy of blood relations.

When Zhou's father passed away, everyone fixed their eyes on the seat of power.

But Zhou Chen had just celebrated his twentieth birthday in a cold hospital operating room. No one could have imagined that the heir who would hold the Zhou family together would be a sickly, withdrawn, cold-blooded young man like him.

Nor could anyone have guessed that on the very first day after inheriting the family, he would send his own older brother to prison.

With an iron grip, he controlled the Zhou family for eight years.

*

As a marginal figure in this vast family, with no blood ties to it, Zhao Yuhong could see Zhou Chen only once a year, on the day of the ancestor rites.

But even then, he could only catch a distant glimpse of the Zhou family patriarch amid a sea of black suits.

Unlike the terrifying, ferocious monster of the rumors, with a tiger's head and a bear's face, Zhou Chen had strikingly pale skin and delicate features that bore a bone-deep coldness.

He was always seated in his wheelchair, dressed in a solemn black suit, a black fur blanket over his legs. A monocle hung from one ear, a Buddhist ring on his finger. A long, slender cigarette holder rested in his pale, finely boned hand, smoke curling in a narrow trail.

He would rise to place three sticks of incense in the burner, then turn and sit back in his wheelchair, disappearing from sight.

Zhao Yuhong's heart had never once stopped beating for him.

He thought perhaps he had fallen into an abyss from which there was no return.

All because he had dared to covet someone so far above him.

That fire grew like fangs, and sooner or later it would consume this towering mulberry tree, until he could make Zhou Chen his.

(Cold-blooded, beautiful family patriarch as the bottom x a wolfish second heir who seems innocent but is secretly cunning as the top)

Bottom's perspective. No blood relation, not brothers. The top pursues the bottom after a breakup. Happy ending. A story about how everything changes with time. The younger generation overthrows the older. Family infighting, focused on running a business, and so on.

(Original synopsis, to be revised)

Theme: Face difficulties bravely and fear no hardship.