Chapter 4 : Chapter 4
Chapter 4: “Cheng Yu Is Practicing” — Cheng Zhenjiang, the Father Who Coaxed Others Into Trapping His Son
After just a few exchanges, a bleak and pitiful scene rose vividly before everyone’s eyes.
Knowing that his parents were dissatisfied with him, Cheng Yu had forced himself to cultivate through the entire night. Only after finally finishing had he taken out the relic left behind by his deceased foster parents, clinging to it as he thought of them.
And then someone appeared, accused him of being idle and neglecting proper work without asking a single question, and gave him no chance to explain before snatching away the relic of his foster parents and destroying it.
And that person had just happened to be his own biological father. He had not even possessed the right to be angry and could only swallow his grief by himself.
After something like that, where was the warmth? How could a place like this still be called a home?
Zhao Xichun stared at Cheng Zhenjiang in disbelief.
Her own son had been treated like this, yet she, his mother, had known absolutely nothing about it.
“Cheng Zhenjiang! My son suffered for eighteen years and finally found his family, and this is how you treated him? No wonder he was determined to leave. You must give me an explanation today!”
The sharp and chilling aura of an Eighth Rank martial artist rose from her body.
Cheng Zhenjiang’s expression turned strange. Though he had reached the Ninth Rank, how could he possibly bring himself to quarrel with his own wife?
“H-he... why did he not say anything? If he had told me it was something important, how could I possibly have done that!”
As he spoke, he gradually slipped into a sighing, aggrieved tone again.
“I was only too anxious and ended up making a mistake. But if that rebellious brat had not learned such a vicious nature, and if he had not lacked benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and filial piety, then why would I, as his father, have been so worried that I acted without asking first?”
It was not his fault.
If the same thing had happened to his youngest son, Cheng Feng, he would only have thought the boy was resting briefly after working hard.
In the end, it was still Cheng Yu’s fault. If he had been more promising, how could something like this ever have happened?
After that explanation, aside from Cheng Si, whose expression grew stranger and stranger, everyone else showed sorrow mixed with helplessness.
Cheng Zhenjiang was a great hero publicly recognized throughout the Jianghu. They believed that if he had done something wrong like that, it had surely only been because of his anxiety.
A father’s love was like fire. If, in his urgency and pain, it burned a little too hot, then that could hardly be blamed on him.
Zhao Xichun lowered her eyes again as tears streamed down her face, then looked tearfully at the servant.
“Did Yu’er truly leave nothing behind in this home? Was our reunion after eighteen years apart no more than a dream?”
As a mother, she simply could not accept it.
She had cruelly left behind her young son once, and now she had to watch him leave a second time with her own eyes, yet she could not even find a single thing to remember him by.
“Madam Cheng, there truly is nothing left.”
“Wait!”
At that moment, Cheng Zhenjiang suddenly slapped his fist into his palm, remembering something. He looked at Zhao Xichun with a comforting expression.
“I remember now, my lady. When that rebellious brat first came back, did I not have a painter make a family portrait for us? Now that he is gone, at least he has left behind a portrait.”
“Where is it?”
Hope flashed through Zhao Xichun’s tearful eyes.
Her second son might have had many unlikable traits, but he was still flesh of her flesh. If she could at least have something to hold onto, that would be for the best.
“Go fetch it at once!”
“Yes!”
Cheng Zhenjiang hurriedly ordered the servant to bring the painting. At the same time, he muttered under his breath again.
“That rebellious brat truly learned nothing but vile habits. He does not understand filial piety in the slightest. He keeps talking about severing ties. If that happens, what are parents like us supposed to do?”
Cheng Yu’s sharp words before leaving had touched him enough to make his heart ache a little, but what he felt far more strongly was still dissatisfaction.
No matter what parents did, how could children behave like this?
What was more, everything had been done for Cheng Yu’s own good. Brutality and treachery were never the righteous path.
While he was thinking that, the servant moved quickly and soon returned carrying a scroll.
For some reason, however, his expression was unspeakably strange.
“Let me see it quickly.”
Zhao Xichun hurriedly snatched up her son’s portrait and unrolled it at once, desperate to ease the pain in her heart.
Cheng Zhenjiang stood at the side with his hands behind his back, sighing as he spoke.
“Such a rebellious brat. Not the slightest understanding of filial piety. If I had not proposed that the whole family have a portrait painted, he truly would not have left behind even the faintest trace of himself. If word of that got out, people would laugh at—”
He stopped speaking halfway through, freezing where he stood at the sight before him.
The others frowned in confusion as well.
There was clearly no trace in the painting of Cheng Yu’s tall, straight figure dressed in black. Instead, it showed only the back of a young heroic swordsman facing the enemy with blade in hand.
Looking carefully, that youth was none other than Cheng Feng, posed in all his graceful splendor.
Why was it him?
“Why is it Feng’er? Did you bring the wrong one?”
Zhao Xichun’s beautiful eyes widened in shock as she looked at the servant in confusion.
The strangeness on the servant’s face only grew more obvious as he shook his head.
“It is not the wrong one, Madam Cheng. Please look at the inscription beside it.”
Zhao Xichun quickly looked over and saw five large characters written there.
“Cheng Yu Is Practicing.”
“C-could it be written wrong? This is clearly not Yu’er, but Feng’er!” Zhao Xichun was still full of confusion when Cheng Zhenjiang, the highly placed Martial Alliance Leader, suddenly turned cold-eyed.
“Could it be that painter deliberately meant to insult us?! He clearly painted Feng’er, so why did he title it with that rebellious brat? Bring him to me at once!”
“It is not the painter’s fault...”
The servant lowered his head, his voice trembling slightly as he replied.
Cheng Zhenjiang’s expression changed at once, and he exploded in fury. “If he wrote it wrong and that is not his fault, then whose fault is it? Mine? Since when has there been such logic in this world?”
The servant shuddered all over, but still forced himself to explain.
“That day, Master, you insisted that the painter could only paint within the sect’s martial practice ground. You said it absolutely had to display the very best side of our River-Severing Sect. He followed your instructions exactly.”
For those of the Jianghu, face mattered more than almost anything. Since a painting might be preserved for a long time, naturally one could not casually allow any loss of dignity.
It was not an unreasonable request to have the painter choose the best background possible.
“A-and then? He followed my instructions, and the result was that one of my sons was simply left out of the painting?”
“You were the one who ordered that the painter could only paint in the martial practice ground...”
“And what kind of excuse is that? I only want one answer. Where is the rebellious brat mentioned in the title of the painting?!”
“Second Young Master was practicing... You did not allow him into the martial practice ground, so he could only practice elsewhere...”
The moment the servant finished speaking, the atmosphere once again froze into silence.
Everyone instinctively looked at the five words “Cheng Yu Is Practicing,” then looked at the painting itself, which contained no trace of him at all, and felt an overwhelming absurdity rise within them.
He had indeed been practicing!
Everyone knew that, for one reason or another, Cheng Zhenjiang had forbidden him from appearing in certain places.
And once he did not appear, no one remembered him at all.
At that moment, Zhao Xichun could no longer bear it. Her tears poured down as rage made her teeth tremble.
A person longing for family affection had instead suffered one blow after another like this. How cold must his heart have become?
“Cheng Zhenjiang! This is the fine job you have done? You forbade your own son from going here and there, and in the end there was not even a trace of him in his own portrait, yet you knew none of it! Is this what being a father looks like?”
“Then just cling to your useless chivalric morality! Your son has already been driven away by you!”
“My poor son! How could you be so cruel as to leave without even a keepsake for your mother?”
Listening to his wife’s furious scolding, Cheng Zhenjiang could not even answer back. His mind was in complete turmoil.
Everything he had done had been directed toward what he believed was right—protecting the sect’s reputation and dignity, rescuing his son from the wrong path—so why had things ended up like this?
Was it wrong to insist on chivalry and moral principles?
Just then, a somewhat youthful and delicate voice sounded out.
“Father, these things may all have been small matters to Second Brother, and he may have endured them all. But what I want to ask is this: why exactly did he leave?”
After listening for so long with an increasingly strange expression, the youngest sister, Cheng Si, finally voiced the question in her heart.
Because of special circumstances, she too had left home from a young age and studied under a master elsewhere for many years, only returning home one year ago.
For that reason, she did not share the same instinctive resistance toward Cheng Yu that the rest of the family did.
On the contrary, she had taken the initiative to seek him out and chat with him, listening in fascination as he told her vivid stories of life and death in the Jinyiwei.
Those stories satisfied her curiosity about the harsh, bitter lives of those at the bottom, while also helping her understand her brother’s suffering more deeply.
Cheng Yu’s maturity far surpassed that of those around him, and he gave her the strongest sense of what an elder brother should be.
As the one in the family who had spoken with Cheng Yu the most, she was deeply dissatisfied with his departure.
In her eyes, although her second brother was not strong, every single step he had taken had been won through his own desperate struggle.
How could such a person casually sever ties and walk away for no reason?
Faced with his daughter’s question, Cheng Zhenjiang darkened and explained how Cheng Yu had killed the disciple.
“I taught him to treat others with tolerance, yet over some trivial matter he resorted to killing. That is something the Jianghu cannot tolerate. It goes against chivalry!”
“And yet he refused to listen and still went his own way, taking a life with such ruthless brutality. I had no choice but to enforce family punishment, but he could not endure it and fainted...”
“After waking up, his attitude became incomparably extreme. He spouted a heap of nonsense, behaved with extreme disrespect, and left despite your mother’s attempts to stop him.”
Cheng Zhenjiang went on and on about all the things his son had done wrong.
As for the fact that he had beaten Cheng Yu half to death under family punishment, he did not mention a single word of it.
After all, the boy had not died!
“Family punishment?!”
Cheng Si trembled all over at those words. She knew all too well what family punishment meant. Given her second brother’s strength, it could easily have killed him!
The only slight comfort was that at least she could now be certain her second brother had survived.
“Your daughter does not understand one thing. Was that disciple truly so audacious? He clearly knew that Second Brother was your son, and he also knew Second Brother had a hard temperament, so how did he still dare threaten him and then go back on his word?”
Cheng Si bit down lightly on her lip. It was obvious to her that most of the fault in this matter lay with her father, but as his daughter, she could not openly say so.
She only hated that the disciple had enjoyed the River-Severing Sect’s cultivation and resources, yet had still done something so shameless and malicious to the Sect Master’s own family.
At that question, Cheng Zhenjiang’s face twitched slightly. He stood there in silence for a long moment before finally speaking in a muffled tone.
“At first, that disciple naturally did not dare threaten him. It was only after he came to report the matter to me that, in my anger, I told him to go and test that rebellious brat a little, just to wear down that foul temper of his. Who could have known that the brat’s killing intent would be so heavy? After I disciplined and punished him, he still turned ruthless enough to kill...”
You put him up to it?!
Cheng Si and the others all sucked in a cold breath.
Was there actually such a father in this world? A father who incited a disciple to trick his own son and force him into killing!
“H-how could you do something like that?”
Cheng Si unconsciously took half a step back and hid herself behind her mother, Zhao Xichun.
Her eyes grew redder and redder. “Cheng Zhenjiang, what exactly do you want? If your son has his own thoughts, can you not simply speak plainly? Why push him this far?”
Cheng Si’s face was full of worry. “Second Brother has already suffered family punishment and then taken another palm strike. He is injured now and could be in mortal danger. The most urgent thing is to find him first!”
At those words, Zhao Xichun shook violently, and the guilt and sorrow in her heart deepened even further.
That was right. She had been so busy crying that she had forgotten her son was still carrying serious injuries.
If anything happened to him, it would become a lifelong regret for this entire family!
She truly was an irresponsible mother!
“I am going to find Yu’er. He has already suffered enough!”
As soon as she said that, Zhao Xichun wiped away her tears and immediately used a top-tier movement technique to rush outside.
Cheng Zhenjiang’s face flickered uncertainly.
That rebellious brat was still his son. It would be a lie to say he was not worried that the boy might be in mortal danger. But if he rushed out in panic to search for him, would that not be the same as admitting with his own actions that he, as a father, had been wrong?
How could that be allowed?
If word got out, the people of the Jianghu would laugh at him!
“Father.” Cheng Si saw through Cheng Zhenjiang’s hesitation. Her face turned pale, and she had just begun trying to persuade him when her vision suddenly went black and her body pitched forward.
At her side, Cheng Yue reacted quickly and caught her. She only had to touch her sister once to feel an icy chill pouring from her body, along with a terrifying aura.
Her heart jumped.
That condition again!
“Little Sister is having another episode!”
Zhao Xichun, who had not yet gone far, immediately rushed back in concern and pulled her daughter into her arms.
“Quickly, summon the Medical Elder and the Medicine Mountain Elder!” Cheng Zhenjiang looked at his beloved youngest daughter with a face full of worry. “Which elder? All of them!”
He wished he could mobilize every resource in the entire River-Severing Sect to guarantee his daughter’s safety.
And just like that, the Cheng Yu who had been the focus of discussion only a moment earlier seemed to be forgotten all over again.