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Xiao Biehe, the eldest son of the Great General, was a man of peerless talent and martial prowess. Taken to the battlefield by his father at the age of seven, he never once tasted defeat, earning him the title of Great Liang’s “Little War God.”
In the folk tales of the common people, he was described as a celestial deity; yet, in reality, not a single citizen dared to approach him. Even the servants within his own manor avoided him like the plague, fearing they might inadvertently offend the young master.
His father raised him with a rod of iron. The slightest dissatisfaction resulted in brutal punishment. When Xiao Biehe was fifteen, he was forced to kneel in the snow for three days and nights while suffering from a high fever, leaving him with a permanent leg disability that made walking difficult every time the weather turned cold.
His mother, a refined lady of noble birth, was gentle and kind to her other children and servants—yet she never once graced him with a smile.
His younger brother resented him for his brilliance, loathing the way Xiao Biehe’s light eclipsed his own.
Even his betrothed the Emperor-appointed fiancé, the Crown Prince, was his childhood friend. A man known to the world as a refined and gentle scholar, the Prince secretly feared that Xiao Biehe would one day slip from his grasp. Because of that fear, he wanted him dead.
When a heavy blizzard blanketed the capital, the Kingdom of Yan invaded the borders of Great Liang.
The General’s troops were diverted, and reinforcements were deliberately delayed. While staying behind the city walls to defend offered a slim hope of survival, opening the gates to face the enemy meant certain death. Under the manipulation of the Emperor and the Crown Prince, Xiao Biehe was presented with a royal decree. Using the lives of his entire clan as a threat, they forced him to open the gates. The Crown Prince was willing to sacrifice an entire city just to ensure Xiao Biehe’s demise.
The fires of war raged for three nights. Even in the face of impossible odds, the War God of Great Liang managed to turn the tide, saving the lives of the citizens. However, when the reinforcements—controlled by the Emperor and the Crown Prince, finally arrived three days later, the fields were carpeted with corpses.
Xiao Biehe was nowhere to be found.
The genius War God of Great Liang had, as everyone wished, perished in that war.
Then, the cold-blooded and manipulative Crown Prince began to regret. He spent his nights in a drunken stupor, drowning in memories of the hardships he and Xiao Biehe had shared in their youth, searching frantically for a body that would never be found.
The Emperor knelt before the ancestral tombs for days, repenting for personally destroying a pillar of the state.
The brother who once loathed him now spent his nights clutching his brother’s portrait, visiting every place Xiao Biehe had ever been, refusing to let anyone speak a word of gossip against him. The General blamed himself for being too harsh on his eldest son, while his mother’s hair turned white with grief overnight.
The servants were consumed by sorrow. Their eldest master, a man as pure as the breeze and the moon, had stood before them like a god, yet they had never dared to look up at him.
The entire capital from the commoners to the imperial court waited for the Young General to return.
But no one ever saw Xiao Biehe again.
Until a year later, when Great Liang fell once more to the Kingdom of Yan.
The Emperor of Liang, the Crown Prince, and the old General were taken as captives to a banquet in the enemy nation. There, they saw the new Emperor of Yan Lu Guanyan, a man famous for his volatile cruelty and eccentric ruthlessness.
Sitting beside him was his Empress a person rumored to have been wed with a dowry that stretched for ten miles, for whom gold leaves were scattered throughout the imperial city.
That Empress was the “fallen” Young General of Great Liang Xiao Biehe.
However, his gaze was utterly indifferent. He looked at them as if he had never known them at all.
Lu Guanyan, the new Emperor of Yan, spoke with a sinister delight: “I must thank you all for your blindness. It allowed me to gain such a magnificent Empress!”
The Story of the “Little Madman” and the “Beautiful Corpse”
When a desolate border gate of Great Liang was breached, Lu Guanyan who had not yet killed his brothers and father to ascend the throne passed through and saw a… remarkably beautiful corpse.
Xiao Biehe possessed the bloodline of the extinct Wuyi clan. The blood from his heart could bring the dead back to life, but it would bind the savior to him for the rest of their days.
Lu Guanyan, a little madman who lived only for slaughter and cared nothing for his own life, had a sudden, violent urge: he wanted to make this beautiful corpse come back to life to play with him. He would wake him, then ruthlessly tear open his wounds, “torturing” him until he broke.
To his surprise, when the beauty woke up, he remembered nothing not even his own name.
Facing the dazed and cold peerless beauty, the little madman suddenly found he could not bring himself to inflict pain. Instead, he searched the world for rare herbs to heal the beauty’s wounds and his leg disability. For the first time, Lu Guanyan felt as though his life had a purpose.
Later, when the beauty’s scars had faded and his long, elegant legs could walk freely even in the dead of winter, the little madman lied to him. He told him they were lovers who had pledged their lives to one another. He tricked the beauty into marriage, and into his bed.
Life was blissful.
One day, Lu Guanyan had a whim: Why not destroy that corrupt, decaying country to avenge his beautiful Darling?
He hadn’t expected those wretched people to be the ones to start coveting his Empress first.
