“Why?” Mu Xueshi asked blankly.
The Third Prince frowned. “What is there to ask?”
Mu Xueshi was not panicking or losing his mind the way the Third Prince had expected. Instead, he was unnervingly calm, and for a moment, something of the old Mu Xueshi seemed to return. Ever since waking, he had become more and more impossible to understand. One moment he was so innocent he was almost adorable; the next, so complicated that the Third Prince wanted to hate him.
Then Mu Xueshi asked in a small, helpless voice, “Why are you scaring me?”
The inexplicable question irritated the Third Prince yet again. Everything Mu Xueshi said and did seemed to shift without warning, often making no sense at all. The Third Prince could not tell whether Mu Xueshi was deliberately trying to unsettle his judgment. What he did know was that, for the first time in his life, someone had made him feel genuinely frustrated.
That frustration stirred the cruel impulses inside him. He put two explosive pellets into Mu Xueshi’s mouth and drew the fuses out long. Standing at the other end, he watched him with a cold smile. In reality, the pellets were not terribly destructive. At most, they would leave Mu Xueshi’s mouth hurting for several days; they would not truly disfigure him. The real torment lay in watching the fuses burn shorter and shorter while knowing exactly what waited at the end.
The moment the pellets entered his mouth, two round tears squeezed from Mu Xueshi’s crystal-clear eyes. He looked like a child whose parents had promised him a toy and then refused to give it to him.
“You’re only trying to scare me. I know you wouldn’t really blow up my mouth…” Mu Xueshi murmured.
The Third Prince ignored him and accepted a torch from outside the doorway. The flame drew steadily closer to the fuse, so close that one careless movement would have been enough to ignite it.
“Why did you really sneak out of Qinyi Courtyard and go to the Second Prince’s residence?” The Third Prince ultimately gave him another chance instead of carrying out the punishment immediately. He did not know why he was bothering to ask something he had already dismissed as irrelevant, but he refused to admit that Mu Xueshi’s earlier words had affected him.
Mu Xueshi looked utterly defeated. “I really did go there to save Su Ying. But now I regret it. I’ve realized that there’s no such thing as basic humanity in this place. Everything I do looks like something only an idiot would do to all of you.”
Mu Xueshi’s stubborn refusal to change his story infuriated the Third Prince. He simply could not believe that anyone would willingly put himself at risk for a child he had met only once.
The fuse caught fire.
Mu Xueshi’s eyes flew wide open. “You’re really going to blow me up?”
The Third Prince said nothing and lit the second fuse.
The tiny sparks crawled closer and closer. All of Mu Xueshi’s earlier composure disappeared. He had truly believed the Third Prince was bluffing. Ruthless though he was, he clearly did not treat everyone the same. Otherwise, Mu Xueshi would never have let himself cling to such a stupid hope.
Seeing the disbelief on Mu Xueshi’s face, the Third Prince said almost generously, “You refused to tell the truth. Naturally, you must be punished.”
Mu Xueshi went deathly pale and burst into tears. “How am I not telling the truth? If I really wanted to defect to the Second Prince, why would I come back? I shouldn’t have come back at all! If I’d known you were going to treat me like this, I never would’ve returned… Boohoo…”
This time, every word Mu Xueshi said was true. He knew perfectly well that the Third Prince was ruthless, and he did want to escape this place and find a freer life. But he did not know anyone here, and he did not dare trust anyone. Other than clinging to the Third Prince, Mu Xueshi genuinely did not know who else he could possibly turn to…
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