ITVCFITB CHAPTER 119

 Chapter 119 — The Reborn

Li Mingjin and the Fourth Prince had shared their final conversation. In it, the Fourth planted two thorns: Shen Mingyun’s true origin, and the truth about the two children.

After that meal, Shen Mingyun begged for an audience with Luo Shuyu as well, he wanted his children spared.

He still couldn’t fathom how the “protagonist” had ended up a villain’s prisoner. Did he cross over the wrong way? Play the lead the wrong way? Ever since the Fourth lost, Luo Shuyu had captured him and the system had vanished.

He’d been shaved bald and, as a man, found it tolerable, stubble soon grew in. He even thought it made him look tougher.

They were confined in a secluded villa far from the Fourth Prince’s residence. The only people they saw were tight-lipped maids and guards. Shen Mingyun had considered escape, but the system was gone. Even the shop interface had disappeared. He’d become ordinary again, no system, no items, just an everyday man like his former life.

Panic followed. Without the system, what could he do in a foreign world? Would he simply die alongside the Fourth Prince?

At last he grasped it: he would die secretly, executed for treason and collusion, even as a prince’s consort.

Fate, as simple as winner and loser. He’d always known the saying; now he felt it to the bone.

He burned to see Luo Shuyu. He was convinced Luo Shuyu had crossed over too, maybe a quick-transmigrator, maybe the same type as himself. He was certain Luo Shuyu was his kind.

If he could confirm that, then losing to him might be easier to swallow. At least he wouldn’t have lost to a “native.” Perhaps when he died he’d just pop back to the modern world and resume his salted-fish existence. Why not? Maybe this had all been a game, or a dream, he clung to the thought.

Only after the Fourth asked him about the system and they had a frank talk, did he realize how foolish he’d been. The Fourth had noticed his “conversations” with the void and the oddities whenever he used items.

“So you married me just to use me?” Shen Mingyun trembled with fury.

The Fourth had his own rage. Anyone who learned his children would one day be “reclaimed” would. And all of it had arrived via Shen Mingyun; their last scraps of domestic peace vanished into the lie.

“Use you? You don’t remember how our marriage came to be? You flitted from man to man like a gaudy butterfly. Let’s set that aside. Answer me this, our children, are they real people or tools to meet your ends?”

However shattered their relationship, the Fourth still cared most about the two children. Now he was told they might not “exist” in any true sense. His last anchor was gone.

Shen Mingyun froze. “Tools? I carried them for ten months and bore them. Watch your mouth. Didn’t you raise them yourself? What part of them looks like a ‘tool’?”

The Fourth had no rebuttal. The children ate, slept, cried, laughed, got sick and well, like any others. Why would Third Brother tell him this? To let him go at peace? Or in pieces?

He slumped. “Fine. It’s come to this. After we’re gone, we can’t care for them, nor entrust them to anyone.”

Shen Mingyun blinked. “What do you mean, Yi’er and Tian’er will die? Luo Shuyu and the Third won’t spare them?”

The swing in roles was too much. Those he’d never taken seriously now stood at the summit; he was the captive. Who was the real protagonist? Was this what the system meant, that failure meant erasure? Not at the system’s hand, but at his enemies’.

His mind stalled. He’d never been a deep thinker. Wasn’t this world built for him? Would there be a twist later? Had the system “gone dark” to cue the next arc, fresh tasks and items?

But it had been gone a long time. Would it come back at all?

He’d breezed through seven or eight years; to crash now didn’t fit the pattern of any transmigration story he knew.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Was he meant to “lie on firewood and taste gall” like Yue King Goujian? But his whole family was under guard together. How do you endure and rebuild when there’s no way out?

Why had that damn system disappeared? Why wasn’t it fixing this?

If he vanished, did this transmigration novel keep running?

He raked a hand through his new-grown bristle. What now?

The Fourth watched the children running carefree in the yard, bitterness in his chest. He waved them over. “Yi’er, Tian’er, come, Father will wipe your sweat.”

They bounded up. “Father, fly kites with us!”

He smoothed his face. “All right.”

Li Chengyi glanced at Shen Mingyun, who was staring blankly at the sky. He tugged his sleeve. “Papa, come fly kites with us?”

Whatever else, Shen Mingyun loved his kids. He ruffled the boy’s hair. “All right.”

Kites he understood; he’d flown them as a child. He hadn’t visited his childhood in a long time. He decided to teach them. “Come on, Papa will show you how. I was great at this when I was little!”

There was too much to untangle; his brain wasn’t up to it. Better to play for a while.

The system could wait.

If he’d had a camera, he’d have recorded their growth. He’d never asked if such an item existed. Looking back, aside from a few protection tools for the children, he’d redeemed almost nothing. Seven or eight years, where had his “points” and time gone?

He couldn’t even tally it.

Without the system, Shen Mingyun woke in the night, again and again, no more instant sleep. He dreamed repeatedly that the system had returned to help him. No, that system had never been his; it helped the Fourth ascend.

But the Fourth had failed. Was that the system’s fault? His? The Fourth’s? Useless questions. Only failure remained.

On his fifth request, Luo Shuyu finally agreed to see him, the day before they would be sent to the imperial mausoleum.

Escorted into the palace, Shen Mingyun found the mood utterly different. Luo Shuyu did not wear lavish robes; his bearing was the same, elegant in a way Shen Mingyun could neither achieve nor stop resenting.

Without the system, Shen Mingyun was just a man. Luo Shuyu had never feared him.

They met in a pavilion in the imperial garden, facing one another.

With Tiancheng gone and his beauties dismissed, the vast palace now held only guards and the emperor’s small family.

“Do you like it here?” Luo Shuyu asked.

Shen Mingyun had no mood for scenery. His emotions had run the gamut, from anger and grievance, to incomprehension, fear, panic, and finally helplessness.

He still had a thousand questions, yet he knew this: without the system he was small and ordinary. All his former swagger had been borrowed light. Even his transmigration was an accident, because the system needed a tool.

Faced with Luo Shuyu’s poise, his inferiority rose. Perhaps that was why he’d always hated what he secretly admired.

Seen anew, Luo Shuyu’s temperament was striking. When he looked at someone, the corner of his mouth lifted slightly; his voice never grated, warm without extremes.

For all the wrongs Shen Mingyun had done, Luo Shuyu had never treated him rudely.

“You’re doing well,” Shen Mingyun said.

“No need for politeness between us,” Luo Shuyu replied. “I’m doing…fine, thanks to you. You asked to see me, what did you want to say?”

“When you wouldn’t see me, I had so much to ask,” Shen Mingyun said frankly. “Now that I’m here, I don’t know where to start.”

“Do you want to know why I beat you?” Luo Shuyu said mildly. “Where your system went?”

Caught out, Shen Mingyun nodded. “Yes. I’m jealous of you. I even hate you a little.”

Luo Shuyu smiled. “Hate me? If anyone should hate, it’s me. Without that feeling, I might never have come back. You asked if I’m a transmigrator. I’m not.”

Shen Mingyun’s next question stuck in his throat. Luo Shuyu spared him the effort.

“I know you have a system,” Luo Shuyu said. “I know you and the Fourth would end up together. I know you’d make nice with the princes of Geyan and Zhou. I know…everything. You’ll ask how I knew what even your system didn’t. Consider it heaven’s punishment for wreckers like you and our chance at a do-over. I seized mine, so I lived. You didn’t, so you face erasure.”

“I know you have a system,” he repeated calmly. “I know all of it. And as for what I am—”

“You are a transmigrator,” Shen Mingyun breathed.

Luo Shuyu shook his head. “You are the transmigrator. I am, in every sense, the reborn.”

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