Cultivation Retirement Plan (BL)

24. Past to Present

minor mentions of past child abuse ahead. we're also dealing with a flashback and a mini time skip forward!

—

Three tragedies stood out in Nan Wuyue's life.

First was his birth. His family was poor and it was a bitter winter night when he came into this world. The skies were devoid of moonlight, leaving the crude mud hut that was his home dark and unforgiving. Because of that, his father never noticed the blood pooling beneath his mother's skirts until it was too late. By the time he found a doctor, her body was cold and the baby lying on her breast had cried himself hoarse with hunger.

He was given the name Wuyue (無月) or "moonless," both because of the night he was born and how he'd killed his precious mother Qiu Xiyue. (邱夕月)

His father fell to drink not long after that, leaving the baby to fend for itself. If not for the kindhearted auntie next door who raised him with her own daughter, he never would have survived past infancy.

When Nan Wuyue was only four years old, the auntie moved away and his father lost his job. The small family of two was forced to beg on the streets. Naturally, he used his son copiously for extra change. The young boy was remarkably handsome for his age and incited plenty of pity from passerby with his large, bright eyes. Some of the richer ones even offered to buy him off his father's hands, but the man was shrewd enough to keep his main source of income closeby.

Unfortunately, a famine struck the country and charity became scarce. Simple things like bread became worth their weight in gold. At one point, people stripped the trees of bark, the ground of grubs and grass, just to fill their stomachs. Nan Wuyue was no exception, but he had always been a clever child. Once he managed to win a mantou from a kindhearted monk and bring it home as a surprise for his father.

Yet the man had been starved for so long his rationality was gone. He devoured the entire thing and demanded for more, refusing to believe Nan Wuyue when the child insisted that was all he had. He beat the boy within an inch of his life, leaving him stunned on the ground.

Nan Wuyue laid there for two whole days.

On the third, his father approached him with a delirious look in his eyes, his mind hungry for meat. He had no knife, but found a large shard of pottery on the ground to be a replacement. Nan Wuyue was too weak to move and could only watch as the man clumsily tore his sleeve apart and took the sharp edge to his stick-thin arms.

The moment he cut was when the second tragedy struck. Nan Wuyue's unconscious urge to live awakened the latent bloodline in his body and burned through his father's hands. Screaming, the man ran off in terror before succumbing to his wounds. He died without an intact corpse, his hands reduced to ashen stumps.

As it turned out, Nan Wuyue wasn't his father's son at all. His mother had an unfortunate run-in with someone from the demon realm who took a fancy to her looks. He was the baby of that unwanted union. The first awakening of his demon bloodline all but exhausted his latent qi reserves. By some miracle he pulled through, but not before his father's body had started to rot in the wilderness and attract the company of flies and vultures.

Nan Wuyue didn't bother burying the corpse, but staggered off as soon as he was well enough to walk. For the next few years he struggled to survive on his own, surviving by the skin of his teeth in the streets and back alleys.

Then one day, he met a cultivator.

Perhaps fate took pity on his circumstances; perhaps it simply wanted to pull a massive joke. But the young disciple from Star Pavilion Sect who had gotten lost until Nan Wuyue showed him the way repaid his help with both food and coin. He observed that Nan Wuyue had a good foundation for cultivation and invited him to come to the next disciple selection ceremony for the sect.