When Lu Lancheng heard Lu Lanqing say this, he was also stunned. When he was a child, he had heard his father talk about that uncle. His father was only five or six years old when he left. In fact, the uncle was more than ten years older than his father, and there should be no feelings between them. However, these things are now in the past, and it doesn't matter whether it is true or not.
"I still remember my father saying that when my uncle left, he gave him a silver note worth a hundred taels of silver, and that he would come back for them sooner or later. But things didn't go as planned. Five or six years later, my grandmother was poisoned by those people and died not long after. Before she died, she entrusted my eleven-year-old father to a loyal servant to take him away from Huzhou. They survived many assassinations along the way and eventually settled down in Bingzhou Prefecture."
Hearing Lu Lancheng say this, Lu Lanqing also remembered what his father said that year. Thinking about how his fifth uncle lost his mother when he was only ten years old, if it weren't for the loyalty of the servants, it would be hard to say whether he could survive.
"Fifth uncle only had you, but he has other brothers?"
Lu Lancheng stretched out a slap.
"We are five brothers, I am the third. My eldest brother is Lu Lanchen, my second brother is Lu Lankun, my fourth brother is Lu Lanqi, and my fifth brother is Lu Lanshu."
After hearing what he said, Lu Lanqing looked at Lu Lancheng with a puzzled look on his face and said,
"Shouldn't they be arranged according to music, chess, calligraphy and painting? Why did the last two use chess and calligraphy?"
Lu Lancheng smiled when he heard him ask this. "That's something you don't know. Although my father escaped with the help of a loyal servant, he was also poisoned. He was young, and those little villains were afraid of attracting trouble from the clan, so they used a lighter poison. But even so, my father's health wasn't very good. After getting married, he thought it would be great to have an heir, so he didn't think too much about it. But then my second brother and I were born, which gave my father hope of expanding the family. However, my brother and I had already been named, and they were already recorded in the family tree, so we didn't change them. When my fourth and fifth brothers were born, we used chess and books. As for zither and painting, they were a bit feminine, so we didn't choose them in the end."
"So, given Uncle Wu's situation at the time, having an heir to carry on the legacy was already a great achievement. That's true. Alas, it seems Uncle Wu and my eldest son have suffered the same fate!"
Lu Lancheng looked at Lu Lanqing for a long time, and seeing that he didn't mean what he said, he said.
"Then why did you team up with Lu Minghong's sons to assassinate Feng'er? You should know that Feng'er is the legitimate eldest grandson of our Lu family and is the one who will inherit our Lu family's bloodline?"
"Whether it was my uncle or my father, they always wanted to go back to Huzhou for revenge all those years! As my uncle's son, what did you do? You have the ability to go back to Huzhou for revenge, right? But did you do it?"
"But our branch wants revenge, but we don't have the strength to do it right now. Also, although my uncle was young when he left home, at least his mother wasn't killed by those people. For him, it's just a bit frustrating. But what about us? My grandmother was killed by those people, and my father died at a young age due to his poor health caused by the poisoning they gave him. Fortunately, the five of us brothers united and supported each other to survive and develop our family."
Lu Lanqing was really ashamed at this moment. What Lu Lancheng said made her feel embarrassed, thinking that Feng Ge'er's family was raised by the cousin in front of her.
"Brother Cheng, I hope you don't mind me calling you that. I'm a few years older than you, actually."
Lu Lancheng did not object. What Lu Lanqing did was wrong. As his younger brother, he could dislike it and criticize him, but he could not disrespect him.
"It's natural. We are cousins. This is an indisputable fact."
"Brother Cheng, how did you adopt Mingyuan?"
Lu Lancheng was indeed lost in thought, and spoke only after a long while.
"Actually, my biological son, Lu Mingyuan, was seriously ill at the time. No treatment was available in the nearby town, so I, his mother, and I took him to Xichang County, hoping to find a good doctor. However, he died before we even got there. Heartbroken, we found a temple, performed a prayer for him, and buried him on the hill behind the temple. That night, we met a woman."
Lu Lancheng took a sip of the tea and continued, "The woman said she was the wet nurse of the Dingguo Mansion in the capital, and that the child she was holding was the master's child. A disaster had befallen her family, so she brought the child all the way from the capital to Bingzhou Prefecture. However, she encountered multiple assassination attempts along the way and was seriously injured. She's afraid she won't live long. She wants to find a family for the child to raise. She saw my husband and I praying for the soul of the recently deceased child, so she came out and hoped we would adopt the child. She also said that the master had said that if the Dingguo Mansion didn't send anyone to look for him, they would conceal the child's background and let him live out his life as an ordinary farmer."
Upon hearing this, Lu Lanqing's eyes were filled with tears. He knew he had done something wrong, so he had no complaints about his eldest daughter imprisoning him here, because what the wet nurse had said back then was what he had instructed the secret guards to do, because at that time he had wanted the third son to inherit the title, and the eldest son was already useless, so if he let the second son leave the Duke Dingguo's Mansion in the capital, in the end it would be the third son who would inherit the title.
He had calculated it very well. This way, he would not kill the second son, and he could also let the third son inherit the title. Isn't that the best of both worlds?
But he forgot that there are many things in the world that are uncertain. In the early stages, things did go smoothly step by step according to his guess, but later because of Lu Zifeng's arrival, first he met King Jing, and then Lu Zifeng joined the army, which disrupted everything Lu Lanqing had planned.
There was another point that Lu Lanqing had not expected. He had just heard Lu Lancheng say that the wet nurse had said that they had encountered many assassinations along the way from the capital to Bingzhou Prefecture, but Lu Lanqing knew that he did not send anyone to assassinate the wet nurse and the second son at that time. But now thinking about it, it is likely that Aunt Shi had already sent people to hunt down the wet nurse and the second son at that time. It was also the second son's good luck that he finally arrived in Bingzhou Prefecture safely and was even adopted by Lu Lancheng and his wife.
Lu Lancheng looked at Lu Lanqing's expression, and his heart was filled with mixed emotions. It was rare to find someone in the world who could treat their own children in such a way. They say that even a tiger won't eat its own cubs, but people! Sometimes they are even worse than animals.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com