Ten Thousand Miles

At five years old, Lu Li watched his mother throw herself into a well. For the next eighteen years, the only son of Duke Zhen, Lu Zhenshan, sat alone in his mother's pear orchard—no one asked him why, and he never spoke a word. In the autumn of his twenty-third year, he gathered an old iron blade and a lock of hair his mother had tied for him eighteen years earlier, and slipped out the back door at midnight. He left no note. He had no destination in mind. But he knew exactly who he hated. The Northern border, where his father had spent thirty years cutting down enemies, was his first stop. Barbarian hunters found him in the snow: "Your father killed my entire family. I can't kill him, but you'll do." Deserters recognized him by the campfire but kept their swords sheathed—"You're not like them." Then Jiangnan, his mother's unreachable homeland. Before a shrine bearing 123 ancestral tablets, an old servant who had kept vigil for twenty years revealed the truth: the Su family had not been executed for treason—they were framed. His father had knelt before the emperor all night, yet could not halt the massacre. Finally, the capital—his dying father, and by the well, three whispered words: "Me too." He set out carrying hatred, but across ten thousand li, he witnessed the full arc of his father's life. This is not forgiveness—it is a son finally grasping every cause and consequence behind a lifetime of silence. "My name is Lu Li. Lu of Lu Zhenshan. What he didn't do, I will."