Late at night, in a secluded duty room in the northwest corner of the imperial palace,
Chu Ran lay flat on an old-fashioned wooden bed with a peaceful expression. Stretching out his arms with a dead heart, he reached down toward his wide-open legs.
The next second, the lifeless expression on Chu Ran’s face began to revive from the ashes, and his eyes flashed with a burning light.
Good news, tremendous good news!
His precious asset was actually still there!
However, he had barely been happy for two seconds when Chu Ran’s face collapsed completely.
Then what was going on with this eunuch status of his?
A fake eunuch?
That’s right, Chu Ran had transmigrated into a book.
Not long ago, Chu Ran had just finished the last exam of the national college entrance examination. Stepping out of the exam room, he hadn’t even had time to daydream about a bright future when a stupid driver from who-knows-where suddenly ran across the crosswalk and sent him flying with a direct hit.
After waking up, Chu Ran found himself here. It was already nighttime, and he saw a wooden waist token placed beside his pillow. On it were several rows of dense, tiny traditional Chinese characters. After careful identification, Chu Ran finally understood that this was a waist token representing his identity: his name was Chu Qinglin, and he was a low-ranking eunuch in the palace.
The name Chu Qinglin, along with the status of a eunuch, reminded Chu Ran of an ancient BL novel titled “I Am a Heartthrob.” A few months ago, his senior fujoshi deskmate had grabbed his arm, ignoring his strong opposition, and enthusiastically explained the story to him through various coercive methods like intimidation and temptation.
The main plot of this book can be summarized in one sentence: The shou protagonist in the story is delicate, soft, and easy to push over; he is beautiful, kind-hearted, and capable. He gains a crowd of loyal followers in the fictional world and ultimately captures true love, a classic, satisfying big-protagonist story.
Chu Qinglin and the shou protagonist were paternal half-brothers, but the shou protagonist was the legitimate son of an official family upon whom high hopes were placed. Chu Qinglin, on the other hand, was the illegitimate son of a maid who had climbed into her master’s bed, an unpresentable concubine-born son who had been sent into the palace to become a eunuch at the age of five.
In the book, Chu Qinglin was a clownish villain. Since childhood, he had been jealous and resentful of the shou protagonist, so he would occasionally stir up trouble and play dirty tricks behind the scenes. Interestingly, although Chu Qinglin frequently made trouble, he never succeeded; the shou protagonist always managed to turn danger into safety due to various reasons.
Looking at Chu Qinglin, he vividly exemplified what it meant to try to steal a chicken only to lose the rice used as bait, harming others only to harm oneself. Every time he went through a huge ordeal, he ended up making a fool of himself, covered in bruises and battered all over. Even so, Chu Qinglin walked down that narrow path to the bitter end, never learning his lesson and never repenting. Failing every single time, he would try again the next time. On the road of tripping up the shou protagonist, he had accumulated countless failed experiences, enough to publish a book titled 1001 Ways to Fail When Making Trouble.
Naturally, such a person wouldn’t meet a very good end.
Ultimately, the bad things Chu Qinglin had done were completely exposed. Driven to desperation, he sent people to take the shou protagonist hostage, intending to kill him. Before he even had time to act, the shou protagonist was rescued by someone else. Meanwhile, Chu Qinglin fled wildly in panic, accidentally strayed into a deep mountain, and stumbled into a wolf den. In the end, he was torn apart and devoured by a pack of wolves, leaving not even a skeleton behind, bringing his ridiculous and pathetic life to an end.
Chu Ran was quite heartbroken. Being transmigrated as a eunuch was bad enough, but he had also transmigrated as a laughingstock. Even the small happiness of discovering that little Chu Ran was still there could not soothe the grief in his heart.
For a long time, Chu Ran’s dream had been very simple: to be a salted fish who sat instead of standing, lay down instead of sitting, and muddled through life waiting to die.
To this end, he had once fantasized that perhaps his family was a multi-billionaire household, and he wasn’t just any ordinary high school student, he was actually a rich second-generation heir. His family wasn’t poor; his parents were just pretending to be poor so that he could study hard without being corrupted by money, while also cultivating his noble virtue of hardship and upward striving. But as soon as he graduated from university, his parents would show their true cards and directly toss him a property deed for a luxury villa worth tens of millions, along with a bank savings book with tens of millions as a betrothal gift for marrying a pretty wife.
Only now, he probably wouldn’t live long enough for his parents to have the chance to show their cards to him.
Lying on the cold, hard bed, Chu Ran stared wide-eyed at the pitch-black ceiling above, which looked like a bottomless whirlpool that could suck him right in.
Outside the window, the morning light was beginning to break, and a faint hint of white appeared on the eastern horizon.
Looking like a corpse that had been dead all night, Chu Ran dragged his stiff body up from the bed.
He muddled through getting dressed and washing up, then plunged headfirst into a copper basin filled with clear water, staying under until he couldn’t hold his breath any longer before coming up. When he turned his head, he happened to catch sight of himself reflected in the copper mirror.
His body was slender, and his face and neck were both long and thin. At his slightly open collarbones, the clearly protruding framework of his bones could be seen. The fingers he raised were thin and slender with distinct knuckles, extending all the way out to prominently protruding wrist bones.
Seen from the mirror, his whole person looked like a willow twig that had grown overly long without absorbing enough nourishment. Only his eyes were large, exceptionally dark, and spirited, exuding a sense of quick-wittedness and shrewdness. But Chu Ran knew this was all an illusion; Chu Qinglin at best only had a bit of petty cleverness, and not even that much.
Chu Ran stared at himself in the copper mirror for a moment, wiped the water from his face with a dry handkerchief, placed a black lacquered-gauze sanshan hat on his head, and tied the ribbon under his chin. Shoving two already cold and hard flatbreads into his chest pocket, Chu Ran stepped out the door.
Although he had suffered a devastating blow last night, Chu Ran had no intention of giving up his dream. He planned to go out and look for a thick thigh of a kindred spirit to latch onto for the time being.
From early morning until evening, from sunrise to sunset, Chu Ran squatted in the roadside bushes until his legs grew sore and numb, yet he didn’t see his thick thigh walking toward him against the brilliant sunlight with full of hope.
Taking out the remaining flatbread from his chest, Chu Ran intended to finish eating this piece and head back to continue waiting tomorrow. Suddenly, the sound of voices came from not far away.
Stuffing the flatbread back into his clothes, Chu Ran looked through the gaps in the grass leaves toward the gravel-paved path.
“Where did you steal this brown sugar osmanthus cake?”
“I’m asking you a question. Are you mute?”
“Audacious! The Third Prince is speaking to you, how dare you not reply!”
The person speaking was a shrill, tall, and thin eunuch. Standing next to the eunuch was a luxuriously dressed youth around the same age as the eunuch, though shorter by a head. He was round and plump, his entire person looking like an expanding leavened dough bun.
The Third Prince, Li Gaoyou, and Chu Ran nicknamed him Little Fatty because he was both short and fat.
Aside from being short and fat, Little Fatty was also morally corrupt and extremely arrogant.
He had liked bullying people since childhood, and in the novel, whenever he made an appearance, he was either bullying someone or on his way to bully someone.
Taking a bite of the dry flatbread, Chu Ran silently memorized Little Fatty’s dough-bun-like face, secretly resolving to stay far away from him in the future to avoid unprovoked disasters.
Seeing that the other person pressed his lips tightly together and refused to speak no matter what, Li Gaoyou grew so angry that his face swelled another circle. Reaching out directly, he tried to pry open the other person’s mouth, but when he couldn’t pry it open, he anxiously shoved his own fingers forcefully into the other’s mouth.
“Damn thing, playing mute again!”
During the struggle, the brown sugar osmanthus cake in the other person’s hand, along with the plate, crashed to the ground. Then came a shrill, piercing scream of, “Ah!” When Li Gaoyou pulled his finger out of the other’s mouth, fresh blood was gushing wildly from his short, stubby finger.
The surrounding eunuchs and palace maids panicked like cats whose tails had been stepped on. One by one, they rushed up in a panic to tend to the wound on Li Gaoyou’s finger. Crying and wailing in pain on the spot, Li Gaoyou found the wound was too deep to treat properly, prompting the maids and eunuchs to quickly surround him and evacuate.
The brown sugar osmanthus cake was crushed beneath a crowd of feet, sticking into the soil and turning into mere debris.
Watching quietly from the side, Chu Ran couldn’t help thinking to himself: That was a vicious bite!
He hadn’t been far away, so he saw it clearly just then. The way the other person bit Little Fatty was definitely intended to bite his finger clean off; if Little Fatty had pulled his hand back any later, that finger probably wouldn’t have survived.
Just what kind of person was this, so young yet with such a dark mouth?
Thinking silently to himself, Chu Ran raised his head and happened to lock eyes with the other person’s gloomy, emotionless gaze.
A boy of twelve or thirteen, with a thin and delicate frame, long hair draped over his shoulders, and an old pair of boots with split soles on his feet, stood quietly there. Yet his gaze pierced through the overlapping branches and leaves, looking over toward his side without a shred of warmth.
Holy shit.
Chu Ran’s heart trembled, and he almost dropped the flatbread in his hand.