“How about you become a servant for seven days in return?”
Jingzhao returned from the treasure room, only to see Li Guangzong standing like a stone sculpture waiting for him at the courtyard entrance, which made him feel quite displeased.
He cursed inwardly: You got off cheap, you dog of a servant!
“Many thanks, Heir.”
“Hey, you.” The jade four-faced vase, which glowed brilliantly even in the dark, was tucked into Jingzhao’s arms. Li Guangzong moved with lightning speed, accurately pinching the mouth of the vase to snatch it away, and then bypassed him and walked away without looking back.
“You dog of a servant! You had better remember this great kindness from this Prince’s Heir!”
Jingzhao returned to his room. His adoptive father, feeling disappointed that he failed to meet expectations, sat in the main hall and scolded him severely, strictly warning him not to contact the Li family again, and grounded him before leaving.
He would not be able to step out of the Prince Mansion for a couple of months.
Deep in the night.
The Li family residence faced south, situated directly opposite the Prince Mansion.
Outside the Prince Mansion, the white marble stone lions on the diamond pedestals looked imposing and majestic, while the gilded pair in front of the Li residence were equally formidable.
Li Guangzong walked up to the door and knocked twice on the door ring with a dong dong sound.
The person who opened the door for him was his trusted confidant Li Si, who was also the head of the guards for the Li estate.
“Eldest Master, these past few days you.” Li Si looked surprised when he saw the coarse cloth robe Li Guangzong was wearing.
“It is nothing.” Li Guangzong walked straight into the courtyard, asking as he walked, “How is my father?”
Li Si hurried to catch up: “The same as usual.”
“Bring me my riding whip.”
Whenever Li Guangzong gave an order, Li Si always obeyed implicitly and never asked for the reason, acknowledging the command and leaving immediately.
The Li family had once been considered one of the wealthiest merchant families in Beijing, and their residential architecture was in no way inferior to the Rui Prince Mansion. Only the materials used were different, and the overall layout looked like a deliberately rivaling copy of a pseudo-Prince Mansion. There was even one aspect where it surpassed the Prince Mansion: the Prince Mansion still had not been hooked up to electric lights, whereas the Li estate had purchased a generator and hooked it up several years ago.
The three-courtyard, five-compound mansion was magnificent and imposing, with six wing courtyards distributed on both the eastern and western sides. Once night fell and the electric lights were turned on, the place was illuminated as bright as day.
Li Guangzong lived in the Xiyun Hall in the west courtyard.
After returning from France two years ago, he had remodeled his living quarters, combining Chinese and Western styles. Externally it looked like a traditional Chinese compound, but the interior decoration was French. The master bedroom featured a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling, covered by a Persian carpet, and the large double bed, sofa, and other furniture were all imported from faraway France.
Uniquely, a white porcelain bathroom equipped for showering had also been built inside the bedroom. After locking the four-faced vase into the safe, he went to take a bath.
Washing away the grime of the past seven days, he stood in front of the bright full-length mirror and looked at himself. His gaze darkened, and he picked up the black bathrobe hanging nearby, put it on, and stepped out of the bathroom.
Li Si, waiting in the outer parlor, hurried forward when he saw him come out and respectfully handed over the riding whip with both hands. Li Guangzong took it and gave it a hard tug. Without uttering a word, he walked out the door and headed straight for the Mozhu Pavilion in the east courtyard.
Unlike the Prince Mansion, which had many servants, the Mozhu Pavilion only had two young maidservants on night duty. Seeing the eldest young master walking over with a riding whip and a gloomy expression, they did not even dare to breathe heavily, keeping their heads down as they silently pushed open the main room door for him.
Li Guangzong entered the house and walked toward the bedroom on the left side.
The second young master, Li Guangyi, wearing a foreign school uniform radiating youthful energy, was sitting at the desk writing something. Sensing a sinister breeze, he instinctively glanced sideways and caught sight of Li Guangzong walking in. His pupils contracted in fear as he quickly put down his pen and went up to him: “Eldest Brother, it is so late, why have you come?”
Cruelty swirled in his eyes as Li Guangzong gave no response, delivering a kick without any warning that landed squarely on Li Guangyi’s abdomen.
Li Guangzong knew martial arts, and this kick carried tremendous force. Li Guangyi spat out a mouthful of fresh blood as he flew backward, crashing heavily onto the floor. Clutching his stomach tightly, his body curled into a ball, he grew pale with terror upon seeing the riding whip in his eldest brother’s hand: “Brother, I was wrong. Please do not hit me.”
With an expressionless face, Li Guangzong raised the riding whip high, tensed his arm, and swung it fiercely with a pia crack. “Ah!” The arc swept through the air and lashed across Li Guangyi’s body.
Li Guangyi screamed in pain, trembling as he begged for mercy: “Brother, I was truly wrong, I beg you, stop hitting me, it hurts.”
Li Guangzong’s sharp gaze made it look as though he wanted to swallow Li Guangyi alive, completely turning a deaf ear to his pleas. “Pia!” Waving his arm, he delivered another lash.
No matter how Li Guangyi rolled on the floor or cried out for mercy, Li Guangzong showed not an ounce of mercy, venting his anger by whipping his younger brother heavily, blow after blow.
Inside the Mozhu Pavilion, shrill and miserable screams echoed endlessly, making one’s hair stand on end and causing the two young maids outside to cover their ears.
After an unknown amount of time, Li Guangyi’s clothes on the floor were beaten to shreds, blood splattered everywhere, and he finally stopped screaming as he hovered on the brink of death. Only then did Li Guangzong stop his hand, though his eyes still retained traces of unquenched fury.
“Go invite Master Bai.” Master Bai was the physician of the Li family pharmacy, fiercely loyal to the Li family.
Li Si acknowledged the order and left.
Li Guangzong was not beating his younger brother without reason.
As the old master of the Li family grew older and more muddle-headed, he refused to leave a path of survival for his competitors in the same trade. Relying on the secret formula for the commonly used Anyan Pills held in his own hands, he repeatedly raised the medicine prices for his competitors, yet suffered years of joint suppression from those same competitors and powerful figures. By now, the Li family was teetering in the wind and rain. The old master, who had always refused to relinquish power, finally admitted his age and handed over the declining family business to his eldest son, Li Guangzong.
Upon taking over the Li family’s pharmacy, Wanan Hall, Li Guangzong directly surrendered the secret formula for the Anyan Pills and shifted to western medicine businesses instead. Young and daring, he staked his entire family fortune, mortgaging both houses and shops, to purchase over a dozen large ships of western medicine from foreigners. He was extremely confident that he could rely on that batch of western medicine to help the Li family rise again.
However, man proposes and heaven disposes. A maritime storm caused all dozen ships of medicine to be completely wiped out and swept into the bottom of the sea.
Following this incident, the money lenders and raw medicinal material suppliers who had lent money to the Li family swarmed to their doorstep, shouting to demand their debts be repaid, practically stepping over the threshold of the Li family home.
Driven to a dead end, Old Master Li wanted to sell his late wife’s heirloom keepsake, the jade frog four-faced vase brought from her maiden family back then, to preserve the family property. Yet, after searching through boxes and cabinets for three days, he could not find it. After investigating the members of the Li family one by one, he discovered that it was the second young master who had stolen it and lost it to the Prince Mansion’s heir.
Old Master Li was so enraged at the time that he failed to catch his breath, fainted, and had yet to wake up.
It was precisely to save the Li family from dire straits that Li Guangzong had cast aside his pride and knelt at the gate of the Prince Mansion.
Leaving the Mozhu Pavilion, he wanted to check on his father, but the hour was already late, so he gave up on the idea.
Returning to Xiyun Hall, just as he lay in bed to read for a while, a short-haired boy with a slender figure and a pretty face, wearing a frog-buttoned blue tunic, pushed the door open and walked in.
This boy bore a striking facial resemblance to the young heir across the street, possessing the same pair of attractive peach-blossom eyes. At first glance, one might even mistake them for the same person, except that the boy was slightly shorter and not quite as fair or delicate as the young heir.
“Eldest Master,” the boy said, his cherry lips parting gently as his voice sounded soft and sweet.
Li Guangzong turned his head to glance at him without making a sound.
The boy walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed, reaching out to open the flame-patterned cigarette case on the nightstand. He took out a cigarette, offered it to Li Guangzong’s mouth, struck a match, and softly said, “Yuan’er missed you.”
Li Guangzong held the cigarette between two fingers, slowly taking a puff with a dreamy and hazy gaze as he blew smoke toward the boy’s face: “You flirt.”
The wind rose outside, rustling the branches and shaking the window lattices.
Before long, a fine, pattering drizzle began to fall.
Immersed in a chamber of romantic allure, Li Guangzong and his little lover had no heart to care about the unfurling curtain of rain.
The world gradually fell asleep in the darkness, leaving only the rain continuing to fall in a pattering drizzle, tirelessly. Time seemed soaked by the rainwater, flowing sluggishly onward, night after night, month after month, year after year.
When the rain stopped and the leaves fell, the chill swept through the human realm a second time, and leisurely time had quietly passed for over two years.
In 1912, the fourteenth day of the twelfth lunar month.
The second year of the Republic of China (January 20, 1913).
The winter night in Beijing, swept by a northerly wind, was bone-chillingly cold, making even the air feel as though it had frozen solid.
Jingzhao raised his hand to knock on the Li family door ring. After explaining his purpose to Li Si who opened the door, he paced back and forth, struggling internally for a moment before finally bending both knees to kneel down at the entrance of the Li family estate. With his head lowered, his posture was humbled to the very dust.
Too many things had happened over the past two years. Relying on selling that vase to foreigners, Li Guangzong had risen back up.
Not only did he not give up on the western medicine business, but he also used high interest to suppress creditors, using the money from selling the vase to continue purchasing western medicine. Afterward, relying on his extraordinary intellect, he opened up sales channels for western medicine across the entire country, breaking even and turning a profit in just one year. Not only did he clear all his debts, but he also partnered with foreign capital to monopolize the domestic western medicine import channels. The Li family of today raked in ten thousand gold daily, earning the title of a commercial miracle. Every single grain of western medicine entering through customs had to bear the surname Li.
Meanwhile, the Rui Prince Mansion had declined.
On the twenty-fifth day of the twelfth lunar month of the previous year, the Empress Dowager issued an abdication edict on behalf of the young emperor. The Qing court collapsed, and the Qing imperial relatives were reduced to ordinary citizens overnight.
Adding insult to injury, a few days prior, the Rui Prince Mansion was suddenly raided by a band of bandits. The Prince was unfortunately shot and killed by the bandits in his sleep, and the mansion was thoroughly plundered, leaving not even a single satin quilt behind.
Misfortunes never come singly. The land title and property rights of the Rui Prince Mansion originally belonged to the Qing court. Following the young emperor’s abdication, the property rights were transferred to the new government. Because the Prince had once belonged to a faction hostile to the new government, he was not included in the preferential treatment regulations for the royal family. The government demanded that Jingzhao and his family move out of the Prince Mansion before the year ended or redeem it with fifty thousand silver dollars; otherwise, when the date arrived, they would clear the premises.
After the funeral of the Prince, looking at his mother and sisters crying into a tearful mess, Jingzhao seemed to grow up overnight. He no longer grieved over the family’s misfortunes; with his adoptive father gone, he was the only man left in the Prince Mansion. He resolutely shouldered the heavy burden, vowing to protect the Prince Mansion and support this entire family.
Yet reality was cruel. He ran all over the city, but not a single pawnshop or bank was willing to lend him money. The reasons given were identical: he had no collateral.
Hitting walls everywhere and driven to a dead end, the only thing he could think of was repaying the kindness of Li Guangzong regarding the four-faced vase from back then. Without those four-faced vases, there would be no Li family today. Holding onto a faint glimmer of hope, he prayed that Li Guangzong might remember that past kindness and lend him fifty thousand silver dollars.
The crimson gates of the Li residence opened, the heavy door hinges producing a muffled sound.
Li Guangzong walked out draped in a mink coat, looking arrogant and imposing. Approaching Jingzhao, he leaned down slightly, using a single index finger to lift up Jingzhao’s cold, stiff, and pale little face: “How about you become a servant for seven days in return?”
Jingzhao’s heart skipped a beat. He knew that Li Guangzong was likely seeking revenge for the humiliation of years past, but he had no other choice. Looking around, the pitch-black surroundings offered nothing but dead ends. At that moment, willing to do anything as long as he could get the money, he nodded his head.