"I feel sorry for the two of you. My Hans was a monster, like this," Mei leered, pulling her hands about nine inches apart.

  Jing looked envious, while Fu Qingyu was aghast.

  "By the heavens! If the king had been carrying around a weapon like that, I don't think I would have survived our wedding night."

  "Oh, I think you would have been just fine, Mistress. Maybe you'd even find men a little less repulsive if you'd experienced such a big one," ughed Mei.

  "Never," Fu Qingyu denied, much to the other dies' amusement.

  Another four months had passed.

  Little Prince Fu Anwen was sitting on his mother's p while the three young dies sat around drinking tea and talking nonsense.

  From their conversations over the past few months, he had learned that Mei and Jing's husbands had both been killed during a beast tide shortly after they were married. When his mother was chosen as a Royal Consort, she had selected the two recent widows as her personal maidservants. Fortunately, the maids' workload was very light, so it wasn't too much of an inconvenience when they both quickly found out that their deceased husbands had left them pregnant.

  Fu Anwen had been shocked when he first learned about beast tides. Apparently, on very rare occasions, a huge number of wild beasts would join together and attack a city. Mei and Jing's husbands had been city guards, which had led to the two men being among those fighting on the front lines against the beasts.

  Changing the topic, Fu Qingyu pointed off to the side, "Little Hua and Ying are growing up to be quite the beauties." The two little girls, now a few months more than a year old, were sitting in the grass nearby and pying with dolls.

  Fu Anwen gnced over at the two young girls, doubt clearly visible on his face. He wasn't sure what standards his mother was using if she could call those dirty little girls pying in the grass beauties. As far as he could tell, his mother was just talking nonsense like usual.

  The two proud mothers looked over at their daughters with doting smiles.

  "Have you thought about my marriage offer yet?" Fu Qingyu asked.

  "I still don't think it's right, Mistress," Jing replied, shaking her head.

  Mei looked over at Fu Anwen, "I agree. He's royalty. If not for that, marrying him would be the girls' blessing, but the status difference..." She shook her head, "It's too much."

  Fu Qingyu wasn't one to be easily dissuaded. "How about this? If his Awakening Ceremony doesn't go well, and it likely won't with such low odds, neither of us will be royalty anymore. Then you won't have anything to compin about."

  The two maidservants went quiet and looked at one another. For a while, the only sounds to be heard were the chirping of birds and the babbling of the two baby girls.

  Finally, Jing nodded. "If little Anwen is no longer a prince when he turns eighteen, my Ying'er will marry him."

  "Little Hua, too," Mei chimed in, "though I bet he's going to surprise everyone in the Awakening Ceremony."

  "Excellent!" cheered Fu Qingyu with a dazzling smile lighting up her face. She looked down at her son and happily announced, "You just picked up two cute little wives, you lucky rascal!"

  Fu Anwen looked up at his mother in shock.

  'Did I just get sold off?' he wondered.

  "Cookie!" he shouted, pointing to the pte of snacks on the table. He had chosen that as his first word two weeks earlier, and he felt like a cookie was the least the dies owed him after what they'd just done.

  "Here you go, baby," his mother said while handing him a soft cookie filled with jelly. "Only one. You can't ruin your lunch."

  He nodded like the perfect little son he was, then started eating. While he had plenty of concerns about being part of the Fu royal family, the quality of the food wasn't one of them. These cookies were fantastic, an opinion little Ying and Hua clearly shared, as could be seen by the way they were now loudly yelling for cookies of their own.

  After finishing his cookie, Fu Anwen felt slightly better about the three dies deciding on his future wives over tea.

  It might seem strange for him to still be yelling out "cookie" like a dumb baby instead of using a full sentence, but he had his reasons.

  After spending so many nights listening to his mother's stories featuring endless new and terrifying ways for a Fu family prince to die, he had decided to be very cautious when it came to revealing his intelligence.

  There were many lessons to be learned from his mother's stories, but one of the most important was that the tallest tree in the forest catches the wind. The more he stood out, and the more attention he drew to himself, the more danger he would face.

  It hadn't taken him long to figure out that he was far smarter than other children his age. Revealing that fact would no doubt draw just the sort of attention he was trying to avoid straight to him.

  All he wanted was for the rest of the Fu family to forget that he and his mother even existed.

  Fortunately, the three young dies were perfect teachers when it came to the topic of how to act like a normal baby. They were always guessing when he would start crawling, start walking, say his first word, and so on.

  They'd say things like, "He's so smart, I bet he'll say his first word any day now!"

  Ha ha, no thanks! They had already talked about the average ages for a baby's various firsts, and Fu Anwen was going to stick as closely to those averages as he could. He also had little Hua and Ying to act as his guides. Between his mother, her maidservants, and the two baby girls, he wouldn't have a problem presenting himself as a perfectly normal baby.

  Today was his first time hearing about that Awakening Ceremony, though. Could that be he and his mother's ticket out of this dangerous pce? Time would tell.

  ~-o-O-o-~

  Two more years passed like flowing water.

  Now three years old, Little Prince Fu Anwen had still never met any of his royal brothers or sisters. In fact, the only other people he had ever seen were his mother, her maidservants Mei and Jing, and their daughters Hua and Ying. Not that he minded, of course, given the fact that he assumed most of the people in the pace either didn't know who he was or would prefer him dead to alive.

  His st year had been a fairly busy one. Ever since he had first seen the house's rge library and learned what books were, his top goal had been learning to read so that he could find out more about the world around him. As it was, he didn't feel prepared at all to deal with the challenges of being a prince.

  He was happy to discover that his mother was willing to read a book to him each night before he went to sleep. These new stories were a huge improvement over the scary family history she had traumatized him with when he was younger. Whoever owned the house previously had been a huge fan of adventure stories featuring martial artists, so most of the library's books featured legendary fights between martial artists and powerful monsters.

  It hadn't taken long for Fu Anwen to learn to read on his own. However, as usual, he kept his exceptional abilities a secret. Ever since then, he had snuck into the library to read books whenever he could.

  Unfortunately, his health was still poor. He was much smaller than even the two little girls in the house, plus his muscles had hardly developed at all. Due to a ck of energy, he ended up sleeping for a decent portion of each day. That heavily cut down on the amount of time he could spend reading.

  Still, he had already managed to work his way through almost twenty books. While he enjoyed the martial arts tales for their entertainment value, he was much more interested in usable knowledge like the current situation of his kingdom and anything that could potentially threaten him, such as beast tides or rival kingdoms.

  He was happy to learn that the Fu Kingdom's st enemy kingdom had been destroyed hundreds of years earlier. He was less happy when he read that the reason the kingdom fell was due to a series of powerful beast tides. If his own kingdom faced that same level of attacks in the future, there was no guarantee that they could avoid suffering the same fate.

  The world around his kingdom seemed to be peaceful at the moment, or at least it had been fifty-three years earlier when that book was written. Was fifty-three years a long enough time for the kingdom's situation to change significantly? Fu Anwen didn't know, and he could only hope that the kingdom's situation hadn't changed for the worse.

  Overall, he had learned quite a lot from the handful of books he had read so far.

  The practice of martial arts was divided into two paths, Body Refining and Internal Energy, each broken down into many stages. The two paths could either be practiced on their own or together. Combining the two paths was the far superior option, assuming a practitioner had the necessary talent, dedication, and resources.

  Each path was broken down into Entry Level, Third Rank, Second Rank, First Rank, Grandmaster, Great Grandmaster, Supreme Grandmaster, and Martial God. He didn't know if there were any levels above Martial God, but that was the highest rank mentioned in the books.

  While Entry Level martial artists were only a bit stronger than a normal person who had trained their body, it was said that a Martial God was able to destroy mountains with a single punch. After learning that, Fu Anwen felt that it was a real pity that his body wasn't suited for practicing martial arts.

  In addition to the Body Refining and Internal Energy techniques that were only able to increase a martial artist's raw power level, there were also various movement skills, weapon skills, defensive skills, and miscelneous skills to enhance combat abilities. A martial artist with powerful skills could leap from treetop to treetop with only the gentle tap of a foot or send a sword flying out thousands of feet to chop off an enemy's head.

  The Fu Kingdom had been created many thousands of years earlier by a powerful Supreme Grandmaster martial artist from the Fu Cn. The Fu royal family of the Fu Kingdom and the Fu Cn were still separate entities, however, and the title of the strongest Fu branch had swapped back and forth many times over the past few thousand years.

  In recent times, the royal family of the Fu Kingdom had been far more focused on immortal cultivation than they were on martial arts. Countless young women with spirit roots had been married into the family in the past few hundred years in order to transform the Fu family into a family of immortal cultivators, with a decent level of success.

  Now that many Fu family members were being born with spirit roots, most of those who were born without them would focus on mortal endeavors instead of traveling the grueling path of martial arts, which required a great deal of painful and arduous training. The current king, being a Great Grandmaster, was obviously one of the rare exceptions.

  Sadly, there was little information about the surrounding kingdoms or the massive Sacred Heart Empire that the Fu Kingdom was a part of in the house's small private library. According to Fu Qingyu, there was an enormous Royal Library filled with books located on the Fu Royal Pace's grounds. As much as he wanted to avoid meeting any potential enemies, he knew that he would have to pay the library a visit once he was older.

  For now, he would keep reading the small selection of books avaible in the Jade Court while impatiently waiting to grow up.

  ~-o-O-o-~

  Another two years zily flowed by.

  Hua and Ying were growing up nicely. With Fu Qingyu teaching and Fu Anwen assisting, the two girls along with their mothers were steadily learning how to read and write. While Fu Qingyu, Mei, and Jing had all grown up in small vilges before being married off to men of higher status, Fu Qingyu had the benefit of her father being a retired schor and her mother being a teacher. Her education and knowledge of proper etiquette had both been excellent even before she moved into the pace.

  Fu Qingyu and her two maidservants, all now in their early twenties, had recently decided that the two little girls were going to become Fu Anwen's maids. The idea had seemed strange to him, considering the two girls were already pledged to marry him in the future, but after thinking about his mother's retionship with her own maids, he decided not to think too much about it.

  The two girls were supposed to be learning the basics of being a maid, but they were far more interested in pying with dolls and messing around most of the time. Fu Anwen didn't really mind, though. The only tasks he really needed a maid's help for were things like cooking and pulling books down from the highest shelves, and the little girls weren't much better suited for any of that than he was at the moment.

  Maybe one day he would be happy to have these two cute little girls as his maids, but it was still too soon for that.

  While the situation with his maids was fine for now, there was one thing that was seriously frustrating Fu Anwen. His health issues seemed to have nearly stopped him from growing entirely.

  He had just turned five years old, but his body seemed to be stuck at around two feet tall. His proportions were completely normal for his age. It just seemed like he had somehow been shrunk down to half the size he was supposed to be. He hoped that something about his situation would change soon, since a future where he became a fully grown adult and his height barely reached his mother's waist didn't seem all that appealing.

  No matter how much he ate, he just couldn't grow taller or build any muscle. He had no idea what was wrong, and could only hope that his eventual trip to the library would let him figure something out. He had considered asking his mother to call in a doctor, but he feared that there would be some terrible consequences, especially if the doctor inspected his mother and informed the king that his most beautiful concubine was now back in perfect health.

  "How's mama's favorite birthday boy?" Fu Qingyu crouched down and wrapped her son up in a tight hug. She pointed off to the side, "Look at what Aunties Mei and Jing have for you!"

  Fu Anwen ducked out of his mother's arms and looked over to see the two maidservants carrying a rge wooden object into the room.

  "A guqin!" he excitedly shouted out before running over to get a closer look.