Gu He, the Prime Minister of Chu, possessed an exquisite appearance. He looked like a bright moon or pristine ice and snow. He held himself with upright integrity; he was a gentleman of orthodox and steadfast character, traditionally embodying the demeanor of a celebrated scholar.
However, in the ninth year of Xuanhe, he was framed by treacherous villains and perished while protecting his sovereign.
The Biography of Prime Minister Gu: Gu He
The wind and frost in Huaiqiu City were exceptionally severe. While the storyteller slammed his gavel to recount this past event, Gu He was sitting by a roadside tea stall, quietly sipping tea.
The tea was somewhat hot, so he drank it in small sips. The clear droplets gradually moistened his dry lips, tinging their pale color with a faint pink that only accentuated his delicate features.
The young man sat upright, possessing an extraordinarily handsome face.
His skin was a cool white, his nose bridge high and straight, and his eyes a warm, gentle light brown. They were often curved in a gentle arc; even when he was not smiling, he always appeared warm and mild.
This made him look as though he always had a remarkably good temper—not only friendly, but also deeply endearing to young children.
Right beside the tea stall sat a round little dumpling of a child. Dressed in a chubby cotton tunic and holding a candied hawthorn skewer, he held his breath in intense concentration, unable to keep from lifting his head to look at him.
At first, he looked at his long, soft black hair and his eyebrows and eyes, which were gentle down to the finest detail.
Eventually, he watched the expression on Gu He’s face as he listened to a certain section of the storytelling—he seemed deeply interested, and his eyes curved into crescents.
Yet, his health seemed rather poor. Slender fingers covered his lips as he let out a light cough from time to time, his long eyelashes fluttering down like little fans.
Every time, the little dumpling would be stunned into a daze. He would press his lips together, cast a hesitant glance at the golden sugar-coated hawthorn in his hand—reluctant to eat it, yet equally reluctant to lick it.
Instead, he finally mustered the courage to walk over, tug gently at the handsome older brother’s hem, and shyly thrust the candied hawthorn into his hands.
In a soft, babyish voice, he urged: “Big brother is sick, so you have to be a good boy and take your medicine. Don’t be afraid; eating candy will make it not taste bitter, and your health will get better after you take your medicine.”
Gu He had been listening to the storytelling with great relish when he was caught completely off-guard by a tug at his hem. Stunned for a moment, he lowered his head and saw the little dumpling staring at him with wide, pleading eyes.
It was an exquisite little dumpling of a child, jade-white and adorable. At a single glance, one could tell he was pampered and raised with utmost care since childhood, the kind of child who received boundless affection at home. At this very moment, he was earnestly trying to push his most cherished candied hawthorn into Gu He’s hands.
Gu He was momentarily bewildered. Then, leaning his ear closer to listen carefully, he finally understood: the little dumpling had seen him coughing, assumed his health was poor, and was urging him to take care of himself.
Gu He could not help but chuckle.
He stroked the little dumpling’s soft hair and pushed a plate of osmanthus cakes from the table toward him. Giving it some thought, he originally intended to tell the child that he was perfectly fine and thank him for his kindness, but before he could stop himself, a fresh series of low coughs escaped his lips.
He rubbed his face, which looked all the more pale from the fit of coughing, and lowered his gaze to meet the little dumpling’s blinking, deeply worried eyes.
At this point, Prime Minister Gu, who was usually accustomed to smoothing things over, felt too embarrassed to keep up the pretense. In mutual silence, they stood there, both of them somewhat helpless.
It was true that this body of his wasn’t performing very well, but there was no helping it; how good could a body be after you had already died once?
Fortunately, the deterioration was merely superficial. Until he completed his mission, Prime Minister Gu would still diligently push forward.
As for how he ended up in this current state, it was a long story.
Gu He was a mission worker, the kind who traveled everywhere to pick up, raise, and protect little cubs, nurturing them until they grew into successful individuals who reached the pinnacle of life.
Gu He did not know what criteria the system used to determine a successful person, but in every single world, his cub either achieved great renown or reached the pinnacle of success by the very end.
It was the most complete and fulfilling ending Gu He could possibly imagine.
Take this world, for instance. This was the very first world Gu He had ever experienced. Although he lacked experience, he had poured his absolute heart into it.
The little cub he was assigned to look after was originally an unfavored young prince living in the Central Palace. The Emperor and Empress were estranged, and the prince had lost his backing right along with them; by contrast, the son of an imperial concubine was immensely favored and at the height of his power.
When Gu He first laid eyes on the little prince, the boy was sitting all by himself. He was a pre-teen youth dressed in pitch-black robes, his features cold and indifferent, with thick, unmelting blocks of ice frozen deep within his eyes.
The man who was not yet the Imperial Tutor Gu walked up to him, offered him a sweet, tentatively reached out to take his small hand, and asked in a tone as soft as coaxing a child: “I am your tutor. From now on, I will take care of you, all right?”
Under that care, more than a decade flew by, until the little prince grew into a grand prince, the little block of ice grew into a towering glacier, and the little sapling grew into a resolute, towering pine.
Gu He had broken through countless perilous trials for him and helped him ascend to the supreme throne. Everything was clearly going well; if things continued like this, even after Gu He departed, the boy should have matured into nothing less than an exceptionally brilliant monarch, revered by all under heaven and praised for generations.
Yet, no matter how hard he tried, Gu He simply could not fathom how things could have turned out like this. How did a sagacious ruler of a golden age transform into a brutal initiator of war? How did the world collapse?
Worse still, more than one world had collapsed, a scenario that, for a mission worker, was practically a death sentence.
With no other choice, Gu He had been forced to drag along a body that had no business existing anymore, reload the save file from scratch, and, burdened with a heart full of doubt, attempt to find an answer.
Yet, deep down, Gu He refused to believe that the little prince he had raised with his own hands would ever turn into the fierce, ruthless, and irredeemable monster described in the official reports.
However, because he lacked concrete details about the situation, Gu He could not jump to conclusions just yet. He could only wait until he finally met Chu Heng to get his answer.
And that brought him to the other thing that was troubling Gu He right now.
Six or seven years had passed. The little prince had long since grown into a high-and-mighty sovereign, while Gu He was no longer the Prime Minister standing second only to the emperor. The situation was, to put it mildly, rather awkward.
In fact, shortly before, when he had just arrived and tried to enter Huaiqiu City, he had almost been denied entry due to his lack of a proper identity.
Huaiqiu City was a vital fortress on the northern border of Great Chu, and it was also Gu He’s initial landing point upon arrival.
Logically speaking, as a crucial national gateway, strict checks on entry and exit were entirely appropriate. Although he had been stopped, Gu He understood the reasoning and was even prepared to camp out on the streets outside the city if necessary.
However, for reasons unknown, the garrison general had walked over, glanced at him by chance, and, upon whatever thought crossed his mind, his complexion had instantly changed.
Following that, quite inexplicably, Gu He was permitted entry, even though he possessed no official documents to verify his identity.
To be honest, Prime Minister Gu found the whole affair utterly baffling.
Whatever had crossed that general’s mind at the last moment remained a mystery to him, but he had to admit that he felt genuinely grateful for such good fortune.
Otherwise, had he been forced to rough it out in the wilderness for the night, given how poorly functioning his current body was, there was no telling how much further damage it would have sustained.
It was truly heartbreaking.
Because he had already existed once, the system refused to issue him a new identity. Someone whose mission had failed apparently had no right to demand human rights.
He had no choice but to rely on the body saved by the system from years ago, a body that had died once and was far from user-friendly.
Even so, compared to other players whose failures resulted in direct termination, this outcome could be considered exceptionally fortunate.
Prime Minister Gu was quite satisfied.
In truth, he couldn’t afford to ask for much more anyway. Even if he did, the system wouldn’t provide any extra conveniences. Gu He, who used to have access to a system mall, let out a sigh and decided he would just have to figure things out himself.
The reason he was currently sitting here listening to the storytelling was precisely to gather intelligence on the current political situation and news, hoping it might help shed light on the questions weighing on his mind.
And then, entirely unawares, he had received an earful of his own posthumous deeds.
Once Prime Minister Gu finally managed to filter out the parts he already knew from the narrative, he lowered his gaze to listen to the rest, plunging into a profound silence.
According to the storyteller, after Prime Minister Gu passed away all those years ago, the first person to go mad was the young prince.
The prince was forced out of the capital and dispatched to guard the frontier. Initially flanked by his civil and military pillars, Cheng Shu and He Jun, the prince received the news and, ignoring all dissuasion, led an army of three hundred thousand directly toward the imperial capital.
Leaving the details aside, he successfully reclaimed the position that should have belonged to him all along.
Although it was a perilous gamble, the outcome was at least a positive one.
Even so, rumors and gossipy whispers had persistently circulated within the imperial capital ever since.
Word had it that when Prime Minister Gu forced the young prince to leave back then, he had actually seen through a scheme plotted by the Imperial Noble Consort. During the reign of the late Emperor, the political climate had been deeply unfavorable to the prince, who was born of the Central Palace Empress.
To protect him, Gu He had deliberately forced him out.
As for the Prime Minister, who chose to remain behind alone after sending the prince and his chief aides away, he naturally became a living target.
His sudden demise afterward suddenly made complete sense in hindsight.
Listening to it all, it truly sounded like a profoundly moving tale of sovereign-vassal devotion. As the person at the center of it all, even Prime Minister Gu himself was left dumbfounded, his eyes widening slightly.
He pressed his lips together, recalling the circumstances of those years and searching his memory. He realized that while the general trajectory of events was roughly similar, it had certainly never been as tragic and epic as the storyteller made it sound.
It seemed artistic embellishment was truly a powerful force. Taking a sip of tea to mask his slightly choked expression, Gu He lowered his eyelids and continued to listen.
If the aforementioned accounts were merely groundless rumors passed from mouth to mouth without concrete evidence, then what followed next was the behavior of the young prince, which completely shattered everyone’s expectations.
The newly crowned monarch was a remarkably difficult entity to evaluate.
He seemed entirely devoid of anything he cared about from birth.
He cared nothing for rules, nothing for power, nothing for fame—he cared about nothing at all.
His return back then seemed driven solely by a singular resolve for revenge; even his subsequent reclamation of his rightful throne felt like an afterthought.
Because the moment he secured it, he tossed it aside, paid it no further heed, and simply walked away with crisp, decisive finality.
Imagine this: the ruler of an entire dynasty spent six out of seven years on the throne away from the capital, leading armies on relentless campaigns across the four directions.
The frequency of his military expeditions was so high that he was practically a stranger to his own home.
Aside from the Mid-Autumn Festival every year, when he would regularly return for a fixed period to receive foreign envoys, he spent almost all his time out in the field. Within the court and out, the entire state apparatus was propped up single-handedly by the Left Prime Minister, Cheng Shu.
If the nation hadn’t remained relatively stable, and if the Left Prime Minister weren’t a genuinely talented and loyal individual, the new king’s actions would have completely earned him the label of a colossal tyrant.
It was only around this time that people slowly began to realize that this icy-cold majesty perhaps didn’t care about nothing at all.
He had traveled thousands of miles back to avenge someone, likely caring deeply for the late Prime Minister Gu, yet the timing had been cruelly misaligned.
Prime Minister Gu was no longer alive in this world.
In earlier years, whenever foreign nations brought this up, they would inevitably mock the deformed state system and the wretched King of Chu for fancying a true Son of Heaven who insisted on living like an exiled vagrant.
In recent years, perhaps they had been beaten into submission, or perhaps the nations that dared voice such taunts had already quietly vanished into the river of history.
Not only foreign countries, but even within their own dynasty, no one dared utter similar sentiments anymore, let alone commit the crime of slandering the sovereign.
The storyteller before him was a rare exception. As he spoke of the most thrilling parts, he grew animated and expressive, unintentionally providing the uninformed Gu He with quite a bit of useful context.
Yet, thinking of all the aforementioned details concerning the young prince, Gu He shook his head, unable to suppress a helpless sigh.
Chu Heng was stubborn by nature. If his reputation for ruthlessness wasn’t built overnight, then getting him to change course would be no easy task.
With this thought, Gu He felt a headache coming on. He rubbed his temple, then habitually poured another cup of tea and fed it to the little dumpling, whose mouth was still stuffed with an osmanthus cake he couldn’t quite swallow down.
Only after watching the child obediently gulp it down and recover did Gu He withdraw his slender, cool-white fingers, tap the edge of the table, and return to his own thoughts.
Now, he finally understood why the system hadn’t dropped him directly into the imperial capital, but instead deposited him in remote and desolate Huaiqiu City.
Huaiqiu was located right on the frontier, serving as a vital border city. If Chu Heng had been campaigning outside for years, it was entirely possible that his forces were stationed somewhere in this vicinity.
However, figuring out how to actually see him posed a genuine problem.
After all, Gu He knew Chu Heng’s methods of military administration better than anyone—they were strict to the point of harshness, leaving zero room for the slightest oversight.
Let alone a situation like this, where an unknown individual wished to request an audience with the commanding general—such a thing simply did not happen.
This made things rather troublesome. Extending a slightly chilled fingertip to gently tap his temple, Gu He even considered whether he should simply brazen it out, find someone he knew, and ask them to pass along a message.
Even after all these years apart, Prime Minister Gu surely still commanded that much face.
Besides, back then, the situation had been urgent, and he had departed abruptly. Once he left, his body was immediately taken over by the system, so theoretically speaking, no one should know his true condition.
Perhaps he could fabricate a story about waking up after years of being in a severe coma, returning now just to take a look, and maybe that would fool someone?
Yet, who was the current commanding general stationed in Huaiqiu City?
He curled his fingers, gave his cheek an uncertain scratch, seriously pondered the answer, fell silent for a fraction of a second, and quietly abandoned the idea.
That would be just as awkward as a down-and-out relative trying to show up at your doorstep to sponge off you.
No matter how close their relationship used to be, too many years had passed, and no one could guarantee whether the person on the other side remained the same as before.
Therefore, with just a brief thought, Gu He swiftly dismissed the notion.
He knew that the current situation was already dismal enough. Even though the system repeatedly emphasized that as long as he tried, there was still a chance to repair the world.
To be honest, however, Gu He himself wasn’t certain of that at all.
You always knew your own raised cub best. Chu Heng might not look difficult to talk to, appearing remarkably agreeable on the surface, but he was actually stubborn to a fault. Once he made a decision, nothing in the world could easily sway him.
What he needed right now was to discover the precise catalyst and reason behind why Chu Heng had changed, and only then could he hope to devise a corresponding countermeasure.
The even harder part was that even if he came up with a countermeasure, executing it wouldn’t be simple.
After all, the stark contrast between the current chaotic era of frequent warfare and conflicts and the peaceful golden age of their original trajectory was simply too vast.
With this reflection, Gu He rubbed his temples once more, feeling the onset of another headache.
As he drifted off into his thoughts with a rather troubled expression, the round little dumpling beside him glanced at him, and a look of distress instantly mirrored itself on the child’s chubby face. But because he was only imitating the shape of it without understanding the depth, it only came across as adorable.
The little dumpling thought for a moment. Deciding not to disturb him, he used his short little legs to climb onto the chair next to Gu He and hugged a teacup to take small, polite sips.
Once he finished, he extended a tender, fair little paw to pat Gu He’s hand, offering well-meaning comfort: “Big brother, don’t worry. Whatever it is, don’t worry.”
He was already five years old and knew that such an expression usually meant someone had run into a difficult problem, because adults often wore that exact look when they came to his house, leaving afterward either elated or distressed.
He thought hard about how those happy people had acted, and once he remembered, his face immediately brightened with joy, believing this matter wouldn’t be difficult for him at all.
So, he offered the young man this comforting assurance: “Big brother, don’t be afraid. My little uncle is coming to pick me up soon. Whatever trouble you have, I’ll make him help you fix it.”
Though he was young, his expression was entirely earnest. Gu He turned his head, looked at him, and was instantly tickled into a smile.
“So formidable, are you? Thank you.” Prime Minister Gu, an expert in raising cubs, never underestimated any child.
Even though the adult world was filled with rules and might not turn out the way one wished, in Gu He’s eyes, such direct and sincere words deserved to be respected.
To show his gratitude, he called over the tea stall owner and ordered a portion of cloud flake cakes.
Gently sliding the pastries toward the little dumpling, Gu He’s eyes curved into crescents, glowing with a soft luster as he spoke in a warm tone: “Here is a token of my thanks.”
The little dumpling beamed, his own eyes curving into sweet crescents.
He was still young; once certain words left his mouth, he might not even remember them clearly himself, which was why he completely forgot his earlier attempt to help.
Gu He accompanied him quietly, failing to notice this detail either.
Nor did he know that the garrison officer he had crossed paths with at the city gates was at this very moment clutching a jade pendant with highly distinct features, his mind haunted by the image of a refined, highly recognizable face.
With cold sweat nearly soaking his back, the officer had frantically mounted his horse and was galloping furiously in a specific direction.