I've been bullied and humiliated for thirteen years; when I wake up, I'll be bloodthirsty.

Chapter 948 Extra: A Young Man's Journey 1

When Zong Lin was critically ill in the imperial palace, the capital of the Great Zhao Dynasty had already been moved to Yanjing.

With such a long distance between them, by the time news of his illness reaches Yanjing, it will likely already be news of his death.

After suffering a stroke, Zong Lin gradually lost his last shred of dignity.

All that arrogance he once possessed vanished when he was on his deathbed, unable to even take care of himself, with only the old servant Feng Dajian by his side to attend to him.

As a dying man's words become more eloquent, he asked Grand Eunuch Feng more than once, "I have no one left by my side. Didn't you say before that you wanted to leave the palace and find a house to live a peaceful old age when you got old? Why don't you leave?"

His speech was already slurred, and the sounds he made were very difficult to produce; it took him a long time to say just this one sentence.

But Grand Eunuch Feng remained patient. He said, “Your Majesty, this old servant has served you all my life. Now that I am old, although I have nowhere to go, I do not know where to go. So I will stay with you until the end.”

Zong Lin had spent his life manipulating power, and there was no one left who truly cared for him. Hearing what Eunuch Feng said, his cloudy eyes felt even more desolate.

How did things get to this point?

he does not know.

Having spent these past few years barely surviving in the palace, he had plenty of time to think about these things, but even after thinking about them over and over again until his brain was about to give out, he still had no answer.

He opened his eyes and thought, "Maybe next time I close my eyes, I'll never be able to open them again."

Is death not also a form of liberation?

I never imagined that the process of waiting to die would be so long.

"Your Majesty, Prince Wen has come to see you." Zong Lin heard Grand Eunuch Feng say this when he was in a daze.

He was a little confused. Who was Prince Wen?

Before he could figure it out, Eunuch Feng stepped forward and helped him up with difficulty, placing a cushion behind his back. Then he saw Zong Huai walk in.

Compared to when they met a few years ago, Zong Huai seemed to have become much younger.

He then remembered that one day, Grand Eunuch Feng had told him that Crown Prince Chongwen had refused an official position in the court and only wanted to be a wealthy and idle person, so Zong Que had given him the title of Prince Wen and let him be.

"I'm dying," Zong Lin said with difficulty. As he spoke, saliva dripped from his mouth due to his discomfort, making him look more like an old man on his deathbed.

As for Zong Huai, after his health improved, he traveled to many places in the past few years, and his spirits improved a lot. Even his hair was not completely white, and the wrinkles between his eyebrows and eyes had a kind of refined and gentle quality that came with the passage of time.

He wore a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, which not only did not detract from his demeanor but also gave him an indescribable charm.

Zong Lin clenched his fingers with all his might, the sound crackling like the bellows of a blacksmith striking a hammer, "I never thought that in the end, the last person to come to see me would be you."

“They all went to Xindu. I happened to be passing by and learned of your critical condition, so I came to see you off,” Zong Huai said gently.

Zong Lin wanted to laugh out loud. How ridiculous! In his life, he had wronged many people. He couldn't say who he had wronged the most, but Zong Huai was definitely one of them. He was his greatest rival and the deepest knot in his heart.

When he was on his deathbed, it was this person who said he would see him off.

He wanted to laugh, but he couldn't.

Because during these years of loneliness, he longed so much for someone to talk to him. The feeling that was driving him crazy sometimes made him forget that he was paralyzed in bed and had lost his dignity.

Because he had nothing to say for a long time, even practicing became extremely difficult for him. He could hardly finish a sentence in one breath.

He didn't say anything, but Zong Huai seemed to understand the meaning behind his silence.

"Have you found these past few years difficult?" Zong Huai pulled over the small stool that Supervisor Feng usually sat on and sat down. He spoke gently to Zong Lin, "In the first few years after I went to Yanjing, there were still people we could talk to. But they were afraid that we would conspire together to plot something, so they forbade us to speak loudly. Later, they forbade us to communicate at all."

"At first, I could endure it. Those who followed me to Yanjing were either passionate new scientists or scions of noble families who had been raised for many years. They were driven by a sense of righteousness and could endure what ordinary people could not. However, they could not endure it day after day. But this was not the most painful thing. The most painful thing was that every sober person was watching the people around them go crazy."

"The feeling of watching a once vibrant life slowly wither away before your eyes is far more painful than any form of torture."

"Do you remember Zi'an? The spirited third-place scholar, chosen by the Emperor himself for Zhizhi. They were a perfect match. When he left, Zhizhi was just pregnant. In the beginning, he would secretly fantasize about when their child would be born, who the child's eyebrows, eyes, and nose would resemble, when the child would start to speak, and whether the first word would be 'father' or 'mother'."

“Ah Lin, I’ve seen that child. The first word he learned was neither ‘father’ nor ‘mother.’ After you poisoned him, he couldn’t even speak until he was three years old.”

“Zhizhi grew up with us since childhood. She is your sister, her child, and your nephew. You are blackmailing Zhizhi. Isn’t it because you don’t love her, but because everyone around you is gone, and you want to prove that those past events still exist? Those few genuine feelings in your life.”

Is this one of the few genuine feelings one can have?

That must have been a long time ago.

So long ago, even on his deathbed, Zong Lin could hardly recall anything.

He was also part of their best era.

A youth without youthful exuberance is a wasted youth.