Chapter One: Returning Home for the New Year

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The Dragon Kingdom. The twenty-eighth day of the twelfth lunar month.

The cold was bone-deep and merciless.

New Year's Eve was drawing near. Before the small stone rooms of the orphanage, lanterns fashioned from old newspapers swayed in the wind, trembling with each gust.

Lin Tian crouched beneath one of those lanterns, absorbed entirely in the task of shaping little clay figures. Beads of sweat, cold as ice, traced slow lines down his cheeks and fell into the earth, which had long since frozen solid.

When the last figure was finished, he cradled it carefully against his chest, shook out his numb legs with great effort, and rose stiffly to his feet.

Beside him on a broken-legged wooden chair lay several other figures, each one vivid and lifelike, resting quietly in a row.

These were his New Year's gifts to everyone at the orphanage.

The sky had not yet brightened. By the faint glow of the paper lantern, Lin Tian had worked without pause, shaping one figure after another, driven by the single hope of seeing the children smile — children who, like him, had no one in the world.

The New Year ought to be a joyful thing.

He swept up the clay scraps from the ground, pressed his hands together — fingers gone purple and numb from the cold — and breathed warm air over the cracked skin of his knuckles before returning to his work.

A slight figure came rushing toward him in a hurry.

"Brother Lin, there's someone outside asking for you. Says she's your eldest sister, come to take you home for the New Year."

Lin Tian lifted his head slowly. He looked at the girl before him, her black cotton clothes washed so many times they had faded to grey, and stood there in a daze.

Eldest sister. Home for the New Year.

What cutting words those were.

He had lived in this orphanage for as long as he could remember. Then, three years ago, his birth parents had appeared at the door without warning.

Lin Tian still remembered that day — the reunion in the director's office, his parents' eyes brimming with tears as they held him tightly, as though loosening their grip for even a moment might cause him to vanish again.

From that day forward, he left the orphanage and went to live with his birth family.

He had believed that having parents meant he was no longer a child without roots, that his life would be happier. What he could not have known was that this was merely the beginning of a second, deeper wound.

The Xiao family already had three daughters — all of them his elder sisters: Cai Yue, Ruo Li, and Yu Heng.

There was also a boy, a few days younger than Lin Tian. After years of searching for their lost son had come to nothing, Xiao's father and mother had adopted this child from a welfare home. They named him Chu Sheng — meaning the rising sun, full of vitality and new beginnings.

Because they had once lived with the grief of losing a child, Xiao's parents had poured every ounce of tenderness into raising this adopted son. Nothing was spared, nothing overlooked.

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Even the three sisters doted on him as though he were the moon and they the stars gathered around it — a devotion that words alone could not adequately describe.

To put it plainly: the family treated him as something so precious that they feared he might melt if held in the mouth, and shatter if held in the palm.

On the very day Lin Tian arrived at the Xiao household, his parents had sworn solemnly that they would treat him exactly as they treated Xiao Chu Sheng.

But he knew the truth. Though he was their flesh and blood, he could never occupy the place in their hearts that belonged to the boy they had raised from infancy — a boy who shared not a drop of their blood, yet had been with them through every year of their lives.

And so Lin Tian had yielded, again and again. He deferred to his adopted brother, accommodated his sisters, made himself as small and undemanding as possible — so much so that he had ground himself nearly to dust.

Yet every concession he made only emboldened the Xiao family to regard him with greater indifference.

He still remembered the beginning. When he first arrived, he had been given the room next to Xiao Chu Sheng's.

Each night, when he pulled back the bedcovers, he found them cold and soaking wet. He learned eventually that it was Chu Sheng who had done it, unable to bear the sight of him and resorting to such petty cruelties in secret.

Wounded and confused, Lin Tian had gone to his eldest sister and told her everything, trusting naively that she would be fair. What she said to him that day was something he would never forget.

"My little brother has always been a child of fine character. I watched him grow up myself. He would never do what you're accusing him of."

After that, no matter how much he suffered, he never brought such things to her again.

Remembering all of this, Lin Tian felt a hollow ache settle in his chest. His frame — already thin from years of poor nourishment — swayed slightly where he stood, as though the weight of memory alone might topple him.

"Brother Lin, what's wrong?"

Bai Yun stepped forward quickly and steadied him with her own frost-purpled hands.

"I'm fine."

Lin Tian managed a thin, strained smile.

He raised his eyes toward the orphanage gate. A sleek black Audi A8 was parked at the roadside, and beside it stood a tall, graceful figure wrapped in a fur coat, her posture elegant and composed.

The pale winter sun had begun to rise. Its warmth fell across her fair complexion, yet somehow only deepened the chill that seemed to radiate from her.

It was Xiao Cai Yue.

His so-called eldest sister. She had never once come to the orphanage to see him in all this time — a testament, thorough and unsparing, to exactly what the bond of blood meant to her.

Two and a half years. And now, without warning, all the humiliations he had buried came flooding back, uncontrollable and relentless.

Lin Tian drew a long breath, steadied the trembling of his body — whether from the cold wind or from something deeper, he could not say — and walked toward her, his expression utterly blank.

"Something you need?"

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Xiao Cai Yue had not expected this. After two and a half years apart, her brother would not even address her by name. The words landed somewhere in her chest like a quiet blow.

She was silent for a moment before she asked, her tone carefully neutral: "Who are you speaking to?"

"The eldest young lady of the Xiao family," Lin Tian replied without hesitation, as casually as one might speak to a stranger on the street.

Xiao Cai Yue's brow drew together. She studied him for a long moment with dark, searching eyes. She had already grown irritable from standing in the bitter cold for several minutes, yet she pressed her voice lower and spoke as gently as she could manage. "Come. Come home with me."

"Home..."

Lin Tian murmured the word softly, then looked up sharply. The corner of his mouth curved into something that might have been a smile — self-mocking and quiet.

On the day they drove him out, he had ceased to be a member of the Xiao family.

It had been another bitter winter afternoon. To avoid any accidents, he had knelt in the small attic room by candlelight, carefully crafting New Year cards for the children at the orphanage.

Xiao Chu Sheng had burst through the door without warning, wild and frenzied, tearing through every card like an animal, shredding them to scraps.

Lin Tian had stared at him in disbelief — at that smug, self-satisfied expression on his face when it was done — and felt a fury rise through him unlike anything he had ever known. For the first and only time in his life, he struck his so-called brother.

The only time. To this day.

What followed was something he feared he would never be free of.

The entire family turned on him with a fury that left no room for question.

His second sister's reproach. His father's face contorted with rage. His mother's theatrical display of wounded feeling. And the cold, unfeeling indifference of the woman standing before him now.

That night, his father, blind with anger, struck him again and again across the face until his vision went white and blood and saliva ran together from the corner of his mouth. Then he was seized — like a chicken by the scruff — and hurled into the attic.

From that day until the day he was cast out of the Xiao household, he lived in that attic room, breathing in the stale, damp air through an entire season.

During that time, he was never given enough to eat and could not sleep properly. Not one person came to check on him — not even for appearances' sake.

This was the reason his body was so frail now.

The injuries from that beating had never been light to begin with, and without proper food or rest to recover, they had settled into him, becoming something chronic and lasting.

Later still, something of great value went missing from the house. Naturally, without hesitation, suspicion fell on Lin Tian.

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