As a child, Lyra once whispered to Aurel:"From the very beginning, I had to learn how to be the understanding one, because my brother was too naïve, too blind to the ways of the world. I had to grow up quickly, to live on his behalf."
Aurel fell silent. In his own memory, he was no happier than she. At school, he was bullied, mocked, humiliated. At home, the family treated him with a coldness as bitter as the winter wind. And when sickness gnawed away at his body, when he lay close to death, Lyra never once came to see him. The blood that flowed into his veins that day did not come from his parents, but from a stranger. His childhood—was it ever anything but a tattered, broken song?
Madam Nha, who once saw Aurel clutch his stomach in tears over a bowl of cheap instant noodles, was the sole witness to his pain. Day after day, he survived on dried sausage and antacid pills. Mornings brought the cruelties of classmates, afternoons the indifference of parents, and nights the silence of a boy crying alone in the dark.
As he grew older, simply because a few foreigners noticed him, his father—Lucan—grew envious. And so he exchanged Aurel's fate with Lyra's. By bloodline, it should have been Lyra who bore the burden, for the Western heritage in their family traced back to a Frenchwoman generations ago. Yet Lucan, blinded by his love for his daughter and his hunger for wealth, ordered that Aurel be injected with an overdose of benzodiazepine, forcing his son into addiction, condemning him to carry a fate that was never his.
From that moment on, every blessing was stripped from Aurel and poured upon Lyra. He became a vessel of shadows, while she basked in the daylight. And Aurel bitterly wondered:"If Lyra were the one burdened with sickness, would Beryn still love her? Would she still be surrounded by friends?"
In his drugged delirium, Lucan devised yet another scheme—forcing Aurel into a bond with a Western girl. Yet Aurel's true love that year was not for her, but for Kairos, a Western boy. Because of Lucan and his brother Thuran, that love was twisted beyond repair. Suspicion poisoned Kairos' heart, and he abandoned Aurel for a Vietnamese girl. All unfolded exactly as the two elders had planned.
Ten years passed—2015 to 2025. Aurel waited in silence. He wrote novels, sent fragments of his memories into the world, until the truth emerged: he was never the traitor, only the puppet, drugged and ensnared. And when Kairos and the Western friends finally understood, they turned away from the "matcha latte idols" they once praised and sought Aurel again. But Aurel saw through them: they loved neither him nor anyone else—only the heroic image they wished to wear for themselves.
So Aurel chose another path. He stood with the weak, with the abandoned. He remained beside the "matcha latte," helping the betrayed rise again.
Lucan and Thuran had not only condemned him to a brutal withdrawal, but also sinned against heaven itself—turning their son into a vessel for greed. They believed that by transforming Aurel into a "Western woman trapped in a Vietnamese man's body," America would pour money into their clan, making Lucan rich. But their scheme crumbled.
When the truth came to light, Aurel chose differently. He refused to be his father's "Western girl." He learned new tongues, forged himself into a resilient man of the East, stripping away the foreign spirit that had been forced upon him. And when his strength was complete, he would return the burden—the true "fate"—to Lyra, along with every consequence of the years he had borne in her stead.
That day would come—when Western money was reclaimed, when Lucan and Thuran's conspiracy lay exposed, when the world would witness Aurel rising from the ashes.
And in the darkness, Aurel smiled:"Once, my father sold me for silver and gold. Now, I will sell the very legacy he cherished, in order to reclaim myself. That is how I will live—decisive, cold, and swift as the stroke of a blade."