It didn’t take long for someone to bring a bowl of water. The old man dipped a trembling finger into it and left a single, dark bead of blood floating on the surface. Qian Tu steadied himself, slit his palm quickly, and let a few fresh drops fall into the bowl.
All three of them watched the two droplets with rapt attention. When the fresh blood twined with the old and blurred into one, the old woman could no longer hold back. She threw herself into a howl of relief and grief. “My son… Mother has finally found you!”
Qian Tu’s composure cracked too. His eyes burned red as he stared at the pair before him. His lips trembled, and he managed one word—“Mother.” Then, looking at the old man beside her whose face was alight with hope, he added, “Father.”
“Ah!” The old man answered through tears. After so many years, at last he had heard that single, longed-for word. He could die content.
“Father! Mother!” Qian Tu laughed then—truly laughed—feeling it bubble up from a place behind his ribs. He had found his birth parents. They loved him. He had not been abandoned out of malice.
The days that followed were gentle and strange. The two elders filled him in on the family back home. He was the fourth son— the youngest. After he disappeared, his parents never tried for another child. They ran a small trading business, and the three older boys worked in it—though none of them had any taste for it.
The eldest fancied literature and ink-stained dreams but had never achieved anything solid. The second cared only for powders and beauty rituals. The third wasted his days in loafing. The parents, exhausted by disappointment, had pinned every hope on their missing fourth son.
Qian Tu let a crooked smile pass his face. To be honest, he didn’t like running the family shop either. He was content as a constable in the capital. Hearing that, the two elders bowed their heads in temporary disappointment, then rallied. “Fourth son has ambition and talent,” the father said. “We’ll support him. As for the shop… those three can be put to use before the place rusts away.”
Back home, the three elder brothers sniffed suspicion and annoyance as if answering a summons. “Who keeps nagging us about the shop? Has father and mother even found our fourth brother yet?” the second grumbled.
“Will he even recognize them?” the second asked aloud when they were all gathered, circling like pack animals curiously sniffing a scent.
“He will,” the eldest answered with the confidence of an old habit.
“Why are you so sure?” the third scoffed. “Maybe your intuition runs the other way and he’s actually a girl.”
The eldest only shrugged. “A feeling,” he said. The other two exchanged sour looks at the casual absurdity of it all.
If the brothers had known how narrow their thinking sounded to their parents, they might have been chastised sharply. Their father had tried to stir the eldest into something useful—get him to study for an official post—but the lad buried himself in ghost stories and arcane superstition instead. The parents had even once tried the old blood-drop test on him, and bitterly, that was their son.
Sorrow and stubbornness sent the three brothers to the capital to find the fourth. They sneaked about Qian Tu’s residence for a while, peering like thieves into a stranger’s life, until palace guards spotted them and dragged them in. Qian Tu was about to have the three questioned and thrown in a cell when the old woman stepped forward.
“You know them?” Qian Tu asked, surprised.
“Know them?” The old woman ground the word with a laugh and a sob. “They’re mine. Of course I know them.”
Qian Tu glanced at the three faces and then at his mother’s expression. It finally clicked—their furtive, familiar way of moving. These were his brothers.
“I’m Qian Tu,” he said, inclining his head. “It’s good to see you, brothers.”
They tried to ward off the sudden intimacy. “No need for formalities, brother,” the eldest said quickly. “We’re family. We came uninvited and caused you trouble.”
The old man—so used to disappointment—came and set his roots in the capital instead of turning back. The family, ragged and imperfect, knitted itself together in a small, contented circle. The three brothers, for once, found reason to be glad: if the fourth son stayed in the capital, the parents wouldn’t bother them to take over the shop.
Word of the reunion reached Mu Fengjia sooner or later. He had been listening from the side but let the family have their moment. When the dust settled, he called Qian Tu aside.
“You probably know why I brought you here,” Mu Fengjia said.
“I understand most of it,” Qian Tu replied. “But I’m not clear on Xiujuan’s connection to Mu Renedong.”
Mu Fengjia explained. Xiujuan, he said, was the daughter of a local magistrate—one of those village families who had found ways to move in the world. On the day Mu Renedong married, she had used tricks to take the bride’s place and became his wife. She had convinced herself that Mu Renedong was her husband and refused to accept his death. Now she was in the capital, and her obsession had narrowed to a single aim: get back into the palace.
“If I’m right, in three days she’ll use the excuse of palace servants returning home for visits to slip inside,” Mu Fengjia warned.
Qian Tu frowned. He had expected determination—he hadn’t expected such a dangerous kind. “What does the princess plan to do about it?” he asked.
Mu Fengjia’s answer was blunt. He didn’t want Xiujuan inside the palace. Mu Renedong was dead—silently, without spectacle—and that truth must stay buried. On that understanding, Qian Tu’s path forward fell into place.