With his heaven-sent, never-forgetting memory, how could he possibly forget so easily?
But wasn’t the first step toward maturity learning to accept that not every promise had to be fulfilled?
Wei Fu could even recite word for word the conversation they had that day in the back alley behind Wanhong Tower. But recently, Yu Gong Zhao Ye had been so busy he was barely ever home, and on Mid-Autumn night, Wei Fu had to attend the banquet. Bound by their identities and responsibilities, these were things that could not be changed. Saying it aloud would only add to their troubles, so Wei Fu had obediently never brought it up.
As long as he could see him once and look at the bright moon together, he would be very happy.
He coaxed himself like this, slowly letting expectations that could not be realized settle to the ground, doing his best to calmly and frankly accept that “things had gone against his wishes.” Yet Yu Gong Zhao Ye, who appeared to have no mind for romance and seemed as though he would always place love and affection last, had in truth never once cut corners when coaxing someone. He did not even give advance warning. No matter how harsh the conditions, he could always find some winding, bizarre path to make what was wished for come true.
Wei Fu opened his mouth, but his throat suddenly ached so much he could not speak, as though the surprise had struck him straight on the head and rendered him mute.
His eyes always reacted faster than his words. Spring water rose with a thin mist; his smile was bright and light, and nonexistent little pink flowers seemed to float up behind him. Yu Gong Zhao Ye admired him to his satisfaction, then reached back and pushed him into the carriage. “Don’t sit here drinking wind. There are ordinary clothes inside. Go in and change.”
Wei Fu reluctantly rubbed his way into the carriage, then asked hesitantly through the curtain, “Then what about tomorrow night’s banquet?”
“Of course I’ll send you back to the palace exactly as you were. If Chancellor Wei is absent without cause, I imagine His Majesty and all the lords will be so frightened they won’t even dare pick up their chopsticks.” Yu Gong Zhao Ye answered leisurely, “Don’t worry. We’ll spend the night at Yifeng Harbor today. The road takes less than two hours. Tomorrow, we’ll still have time to eat before returning.”
A burst of clanging and banging came from inside the carriage. Then Wei Fu let out a “Wuao!” and rushed out of the carriage, overwhelmingly flinging himself onto Yu Gong Zhao Ye.
“……Take it easy, ancestor.” Yu Gong Zhao Ye was knocked into swaying by his pounce. Fortunately, his cultivation was deep enough that he steadied himself in time and did not fall with Wei Fu straight onto the horse’s backside. “Happy now?”
“More than happy. Since Your Highness keeps me so dearly in your heart, even if you asked me to elope with you, I’d be willing.” At a time like this, Wei Fu no longer pretended to be obedient and sensible. He squeezed close against Yu Gong Zhao Ye, hugged him, and muttered, “To be honest, I was even thinking that maybe I should pretend to get drunk at the palace banquet and leave early. Drinking with them is meaningless. I wanted to stay with Your Highness a little longer.”
Yu Gong Zhao Ye scoffed at him. “The scar has just healed, and you’ve already forgotten the pain. It hasn’t even been that long, yet you’re already thinking about drinking again.”
Wei Fu dragged out an “Ah—” and swiftly pecked him on the side of the face. “Not even tonight?”
Yu Gong Zhao Ye, who was clearly unmatched in martial arts yet had never once dodged a sneak attack: “……”
“Fine.”
The softest-hearted Highness in the world sighed and compromised. “You can do whatever you want tonight.”
“!!!”
Wei Fu was stunned by his sudden generosity. His first reaction was not “Really?” but “Wait!” “This sounds like a final meal before execution… No, if we’re being this extravagant just for Mid-Autumn, then what happens at New Year?!”
Yu Gong Zhao Ye was too lazy to expose the crooked thoughts filling his head and deliberately frightened him. “At New Year, I’ll stew you and eat you.”
Wei Fu, who was not afraid of him at all, cheerfully pushed his luck. “Your Highness likes eating things hot? Then at New Year, let’s go bathe in a hot spring together, all right?”
Yu Gong Zhao Ye: “…”
“Then why are you suddenly so generous?” Wei Fu curiously chased after him with the question. “Does Mid-Autumn have some special meaning in Longsha? Is it a day when one can do whatever one wants?”
Yu Gong Zhao Ye began to suspect that Wei Fu had left in such a rush that he had forgotten his brain back in the palace. “Today is not Mid-Autumn.”
“Right,” Wei Fu said. “But aren’t we going out early to celebrate Mid-Autumn?”
“Is the fifteenth day of the eighth month important, but the fourteenth isn’t?” Yu Gong Zhao Ye really could not hold back anymore and casually gave this unenlightened fool a flick. “Happy birthday, silly Xiao Guan.”
“…”
“What is that expression?” Yu Gong Zhao Ye examined his blank face and tapped the cool tip of his nose. “Didn’t you never forget anything you saw? Yet you don’t remember your own birthday?”
“Your Highness…” Another unexpected thing had descended from the heavens. Wei Fu was so astonished he even forgot to thank him. “How do you know my birthday?”
“I checked last year.” Yu Gong Zhao Ye answered as though it were perfectly natural. “This date is easy to remember. I even confirmed it with your mother. There’s no mistake.”
He had even remembered to confirm this with Jiang Feng Xun?
Wei Fu fell into an unusual silence for a moment, then almost mumbled as he asked, “You started… planning from then?”
This did not seem like the reaction one should have to a “surprise.” Yu Gong Zhao Ye keenly turned his head and glanced at him. “What, you don’t like celebrating birthdays?”
Wei Fu immediately shook his head like a rattle-drum and emphasized again and again, “I like it. I like it very much. I especially like it.” Then he lowered his head and quietly rubbed his tears away on Yu Gong Zhao Ye’s shoulder.
He was clearly already a powerful official governing one side, so how was it that when he cried, he was still as pitiful as when he had been a child?
Yu Gong Zhao Ye freed one hand to wrap around him and sighed. “I know. You’re so happy you’re crying.”
Wei Fu gave a nasal “Mm,” then quickly lifted his head. He had not turned the official road into a canal on the spot after all, but the corners of his eyes were noticeably red. His smile looked as though it had been washed in water, like flowers heavy with dew, as he said softly, “Thank you, Your Highness.”
“I don’t dare accept it.” Yu Gong Zhao Ye sighed ruefully. “As long as Young Master Wei doesn’t blame me for making you cry.”
Being teased so solemnly by him, Wei Fu could not help laughing. “It’s really nothing… In the past, my birthdays were just passed casually. I didn’t expect Your Highness to specially remember it. For a moment, I was so moved I didn’t know what to do and lost my composure.”
He spoke tactfully and lightly, but Yu Gong Zhao Ye was not easy to fool. Understanding at once, he said, “It’s not as if I don’t know about those messy affairs in your residence. When you were young, you never properly celebrated your birthday? What about your imperial father and that brother of yours who heads the Egret Guards?”
Wei Fu said, “…His Majesty and the others did celebrate it for me, of course. That’s why I said it was nothing. I’m just making a fuss over nothing.”
Yu Gong Zhao Ye said, “Go ahead and fuss a little first. I’ll listen and see whether there really is nothing.”
Wei Fu: “…”
On such a wonderful day, did he have to expose Wei Fu’s old wounds?
Yu Gong Zhao Ye seemed to see straight through his thoughts with a single glance and immediately fanned the flames. “In any case, we’re traveling. We have nothing to do.”
“All right…”
Wei Fu had originally been kneeling sideways on the carriage shaft. He shifted and rubbed himself into a more comfortable sitting position, insisting on staying pressed close against Yu Gong Zhao Ye, then slowly said, “Once upon a time, there was a mute child…”
Yu Gong Zhao Ye nearly suffered internal injury from that one sentence. The cool autumn wind brushing his face instantly seemed to turn bleak and desolate.
“His birthday was only one day apart from Mid-Autumn. Because the household was busy with all sorts of matters before the festival and had no time to attend to him, the elders in the family said, Let’s celebrate it together with Mid-Autumn. It will be livelier that way.”
If Wei Fu had been a healthy child, perhaps he would have been happy at this arrangement that added flowers to brocade. Unfortunately, he was mute, and “lively” was one of the two things in this world least suited to him.
The other was “reunion.”
At Mid-Autumn, Mu Heng returned to the palace according to custom, and Zhong Yi naturally had to go with him. Duke Zhenguo’s Manor held a grand banquet, with joy from top to bottom. The young masters and young ladies gathered together to play, and the residence was indeed extremely lively. But all of this had nothing much to do with Wei Fu or his birthday.
He was merely “mentioned in passing,” pulled out to receive a few perfunctory congratulations, given regretful looks, and then, like the hemp rope used to bind steamed crabs, once he had served his purpose, he was sent far to the back of everyone’s mind.
In the evening, while admiring the moon, the children gathered around their parents to laugh and make noise, while uncles, brothers, and cousins composed poems in response to one another, drank wine, and sang, exhausting every description of the clear radiance in the heavens and reunion in the mortal world. Naturally, this “reunion” also had nothing to do with him.
The young Wei Fu sat in the garden, blankly raising his head to look at the jade disc hanging high in the pitch-black firmament. Its bright, pure radiance shone over him until his whole body felt cold. At a certain moment, he suddenly realized that the moon was so enormous it seemed as though it would press down upon his head, and fear rose in him for an instant. Timidly, he fled into the shadow beneath the eaves.
But he crouched in the darkness and waited for a very long time. That snow-white moonlight still spread across the steps and courtyard like soft gauze. It did not retreat because he avoided it, nor did it chase after him to drown him.
The moon did not care about him either.
Between heaven and earth, he was merely alone.
After growing a few years older and reading a few more years of books, he gradually understood that the feeling of looking at one’s own shadow in panic beneath the bright moon was called “loneliness.” He also learned to tactfully refuse when the elders in the household wanted to celebrate his birthday during Mid-Autumn, quietly hiding away his weakness and treating it as an ordinary day. As long as it was not cut open and shown before others, he could avoid much meaningless harm.
After many years of self-cultivation, Wei Fu could actually already pass these two days with a calm heart. He no longer resented it, and at the same time, he no longer held any expectations. But Yu Gong Zhao Ye seemed born knowing how to grasp his fatal weak point. With one casual move, he could lift Wei Fu out of the airtight cocoon and lay him flat beneath the moonlight to be dried.
The bright, pure radiance shone through him. As it turned out, it was not as cold and heartless as it had been in his memories.
People who did not care about him would treat him as scraps even if they stood right before him, while people who truly cared about him would not embarrass him, even if they stumbled into it by accident.
“I understand.”
Wei Fu: ?
Yu Gong Zhao Ye’s face was deep and solemn, mixed with sudden realization, with the sort of serious expression that seemed as though he was deliberately holding back mischief. “Today is the day of the year when your magic power is weakest. No wonder, I thought. No wonder you’re so fond of crying.”
“Ah?” Wei Fu was stunned. “What magic power?”
What image did he have in Yu Gong Zhao Ye’s eyes, exactly? Why did it sound as though he was no longer part of the mortal world?
Yet Yu Gong Zhao Ye still did not let him off. “Will you cry over the birthday gift too?”
Wei Fu said, “Isn’t it the fireworks…?”
“That counts as Mid-Autumn’s.” Yu Gong Zhao Ye had already gone from “what mischief should I make?” to looking at him with pity. He pointed behind him at the carriage. “Why don’t you go in and look for it yourself?”
Wei Fu had not encountered such an exciting scene in many years. His heart was beating so hard it did not feel like he was looking for a gift, but like Yu Gong Zhao Ye was trying to bribe him.
Fortunately, His Highness had not committed the common assassin’s mistake of hiding the gift too well. Very soon, Wei Fu found a brocade box from a small built-in cabinet inside the carriage, the box as wide as a palm and half a chi long.
“I found it!”
He announced it to Yu Gong Zhao Ye with delight. With an excited heart and slightly trembling hands, he lifted the lid of the box—
“A fox spirit?!”
Futile Devices Scans 
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