Chapter 232: Origins Relived: The Fall
"What? There's a new house master?"
"What happened to the previous one?"
"I heard he fell sick… I hope he's okay."
The orphanage overflowed with animated discussions, hushed whispers, and quiet gossip—all circling the same subject.
The emergence of a new house master.
And the implications that came with it.
"Brother Chuan," young Su Tianhao said nervously, tugging at Chuan's sleeve as he glanced around the courtyard, watching clusters of orphans murmur in twos and threes. "What does this change mean for us?"
Chuan's eyes slid closed with an effortless, reassuring smile. "Don't worry, lil bro. We'll be alright."
"You think?"
"No doubt."
He nodded without hesitation—his smile unwavering, as though the weight of the world around him had tried and failed to find purchase.
Chuan had grown noticeably taller over the years. His build was slim but well-proportioned, his frame defined by hours of disciplined exercise he simply called a hobby. His obsidian eyes were sharper now, carrying a crystalline clarity. His hair had grown longer too—influenced, quietly, by Su Tianhao's—long enough now to be gathered into a small ponytail.
Young Su Tianhao watched him and smiled. Confidence had a way of traveling.
"Good! That's the spirit—no need to worry!" Chuan grinned, tapping him on the shoulder.
Young Su Tianhao closed his eyes and nodded, his worries gone as quickly as they had come.
The present Su Tianhao, watching the memory unfold, could only sigh at how naive he had been. How naive they had both been.
---
The day passed without incident. The same routine. The same schedule. The same warmth that had defined the orphanage for years. The new house master was still adjusting to his post—or so it seemed.
The next day, everything changed.
New principles. New rules. New schedules.
The orphans were required to wake at six in the morning. Prayer time was eliminated without explanation. The playing field was razed. The shade trees were cut down. In their place, the children were put to work cultivating the land—six hours of labor before a single meal was served. Breakfast became lunch, served at 12pm, becoming the only anchor in their day. Only dinner remained untouched, served at exactly the same time.
Some of the more energetic children greeted the change with cautious optimism. More farmland meant more produce. More produce meant more income. The reduction in meals, they told themselves, was simply a consequence of the transitional period—things would settle.
But the next day brought the same. And the next.
When complaints reached the house master—children asking, through the nuns, for the previous arrangement to be restored—he responded with a new rule.
Lunch only. No breakfast. No dinner.
The announcement threw the orphanage into frenzied panic. Children who had never known a day of hunger in their lives suddenly faced it all at once, and the shock of it was something they had no framework to absorb.
Within a week of the new house master's arrival, the orphanage had become a shadow of its former self. The laughter that had once filled the hallways was gone. The smiles were gone. What remained in their place was a heavy, unspoken bitterness—children carrying hunger they didn't know how to name, in a home that no longer felt like one.
"Brother Chuan…" Young Su Tianhao's voice dropped as he pushed a plow through the soil, his small arms working steadily. "Everyone looks sad."
Chuan's brows drew together for just a moment. "I can see that, lil bro." He raised his axe and let it fall with a clean thud. "But don't worry—it's because we're short on funds. The house master said if this wheat harvest comes in well, things go back to normal. Three square meals again." He glanced over with a grin. "Wouldn't that be great?"
"Yeah…" Young Su Tianhao's voice carried a mixture of wonder and quiet hope. "It would."
Chuan drove the axe into the earth again. "Don't worry," he said. "Hard work and teamwork. That's all it takes."
Young Su Tianhao's golden eyes brightened. Something stirred in their depths—a flash of the conviction that would one day become something far greater than either of them understood.
"I hope you're right."
"Hmph! I'm always right!"
---
Four months passed.
The wheat grew tall and full under the meticulous care of two hundred pairs of hands. The orphans had worked with a diligence born not of obligation but of hope—each of them carrying the promise of a better future as they moved through the long days.
The harvest came and went. The wheat sold out within a week.
---
It had been four months and two weeks since the new house master arrived. Now the entire orphanage gathered in the main hall.
The children pressed in together at the center of the room, their faces carrying the particular brightness of people who have endured something difficult and are finally about to receive what they were promised. Many were noticeably thinner than they had been—the months of reduced meals had taken their toll—but hope had a way of making the body feel lighter than it was. The nuns lined the walls or stood behind the speaking platform, their own expressions soft with quiet anticipation.
The house master stood at the front.
He wore long brown robes with orange embroidery—not luxurious, but carrying a studied elegance. His face was pale and even-featured, a well-trimmed mustache sitting beneath a pair of slanted eyes with small dark pupils that moved across the room without warmth, settling on no one in particular. He carried himself with the effortless confidence of someone who had never once been told no and fully expected that to continue.
When he cleared his throat, the hall went silent.
"I'll go straight to the point." No greeting. No introduction. His voice cut through the room like something that had no interest in what it passed through. "You've heard my offer—work well, produce a good harvest, and reap your rewards."
He let the pause stretch.
"Right?"
"Right!!!"
The children echoed, their voices filling the hall. But even beneath the confidence, something in the man's expression made the sound feel hollow before it had fully left their mouths.
"You failed."
He said flatly. Without preamble. Without softening. Without even the courtesy of building toward it.
The hall erupted.
Shock. Outrage. Voices climbing over each other, the nuns among them. Even those who had maintained composure through four months of hunger and labor couldn't hold it now.
"Silence!"
A single word, delivered with enough force to kill the noise instantly. His gaze swept the room—slow, deliberate, settling on each face just long enough to make the point.
"Useless." He let the word sit. "Every one of you. Until you prove otherwise, don't expect anything from me."
He turned toward the door. His stride was unhurried, entirely indifferent to what he left behind him. At the door, he paused—and turned back with the particular smile of someone enjoying a private thought.
"When there's a reward for success, there should be a punishment for failure." His eyes moved to one of the nuns near the wall. "Don't you think, Sister Xinxin?"
Xinxin's head dropped. Her nails pressed into her palms. She said nothing.
"I'll take your silence as agreement." His gaze returned to the children, cold and final. "From now on—no food. As the saying goes, no meal for the man who doesn't earn it. Fend for yourselves. Impress me in the next harvest, and perhaps I'll reconsider."
The door opened, and just like that—he left.
The hall fell into a silence so complete it felt like the room itself had stopped breathing.
Then, one by one, the children turned to the nuns—and everything that had been held back came out at once. Rage. Confusion. Desperation. The nuns had no answers to give and no authority to act on. All they could offer were words, and the children had run out of patience for words.
---
In the days that followed, some of the nuns began finding ways to bring food to the children in secret—small amounts, passed quietly, at risk to themselves.
It lasted two weeks before the house master discovered it.
The five nuns who were caught were made an example of. What was done to them, Su Tianhao did not dwell on in his memory—only the outcome registered with cold clarity. The morning after, all five were found dead. Whatever punishment the house master had forced upon them drove them to take their own lives. Among them was Sister Xinxin.
The orphanage grieved in the particular way of people who have already lost too much—quietly, without the energy left for anything louder than tears.
But one thing was now certain.
Death had been invited into their home. And it would not be leaving.
---
After that, the food stopped entirely.
What followed was the steady unraveling of everything the orphanage had once been.
The children went into the streets to beg. What little they brought back was taken from the weaker ones by those strong enough to take it. The bonds that had defined the orphanage—the family that two hundred children had built together across years—dissolved under the pressure of hunger with a speed that was genuinely difficult to witness.
It became the survival of the fittest.
Those who adapted turned to other means. Stealing. Deception. Pickpocketing carefully chosen targets. Crime that started as desperation hardened, with repetition, into habit. Some of the children who had once fought over who got to feed the sheep now took from their younger brothers without a second thought.
But Su Tianhao was exempt from it all, even though he suffered his own trauma. He had Chuan. That made all the difference.
Chuan wasn't the oldest child in the orphanage—but he was among the strongest, and more importantly, among the sharpest. Others thought carefully before approaching either of them. The two of them moved through the chaos with a precision and quiet calculation that kept them fed when others weren't. They studied their targets. They adapted their methods. They did what they needed to do... in order to survive.
But Su Tianhao could see what Chuan was doing, even then—even at five years old. Chuan was not just surviving. He was managing. Protecting. Extending what he had to cover the two of them, always, without ever making it obvious that was what he was doing.
Not everyone had that.
The children who were too young, too small, or simply unlucky enough to have no one watching over them became invisible first—and then they began to disappear. Some starved quietly in corners of the dormitory. Some pushed too far in the streets and met the wrong person. Some simply stopped waking up.
In the month following the deaths of the five nuns, ten children died.
The population of the orphanage continued to fall. By the end of three months, it had been reduced by half. Some had died. Some had fled—choosing the uncertainty of the open road over the certainty of what the orphanage had become.
No one who remained was untouched by it.
Not even Chuan.
Not even Su Tianhao.