Part 1: The Moss-Covered Imperial Feast and the Bleeding Sounds of the String Instruments
Hue, 2023.
The rain of the ancient capital has never been a well-timed guest. It poured relentlessly and persistently outside the large glass windows of the ancient mansion nestled beside the Huong River. The foggy city spread out, covering the glazed lapis lazuli roof tiles in a dull grey, with a mercilessly cruel stillness. The lingering downpour seemed intent on barricading the past, yet it simultaneously stirred the hot blood of a family tragedy stretching across sixty long years.
Inside the mansion, the atmosphere offered a contrasting display of luxury and overwhelming tension. This was no variety show intended for casual tourists seeking a cheap "Imperial Court" label. This was a true historical restoration—an imperial feast laid out exclusively for a fateful reunion after more than half a century of exile for one woman.
The shimmering light of beeswax candles clearly illuminated the long, polished black rosewood table, casting dancing streaks of light across the exotic mountain and sea delicacies. The Hue Imperial Court Music began to resonate. The somber, heavy echoes of war drums blended with the intermittent plucking of the pipa and the moon lute, creating a perilous, piercingly cold melody that sliced through the dense darkness like knives. Each strike of the wooden clapper sounded like the heartbeat of an aging soul enduring wounds that had never once properly healed.
Mụ Nuôi sat in the position of the head host. At the twilight of her life, this woman who had risen from a destitute background and endured the absolute contempt and cold estrangement of the Phan clan decades ago now carried an intimidatingly sharp and lucid demeanor. She wore a black velvet ao dai embroidered with branches of the Norfolk Island pine—a tree that stands proudly upright on grey stone despite roaring typhoons. Gathered beneath her today were her five children, both sons and daughters, along with her sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren, all sitting around her in a submissive posture.
To an outsider, anyone would assume she had succeeded in building a blissful family empire in the bustling South, where she had hustled them away to escape the gunfire of that rugged war in 1968, roaming southward to reunite with her husband like a reunion of mountains and rivers after Liberation Day, only to face bitter disillusionment and be forced to make a subsequent decision to press directly on toward the Mekong Delta. Yet, only Mụ Nuôi understood that their success was merely a glamorous veneer masking hollow, soulless voids.
Her five children had all pursued major business paths, establishing their careers across the Southern region; three had taken root in the aquatic lands of the Mekong Delta, while two held their ground in the prosperous soil of Saigon. They had all settled down into marriage. Some had struck gold, owning magnificent villas and luxury vehicles; others had more average, middle-class households, but overall, they were considered well-off, with no one left to suffer the destitution of their mother’s early days.
Yet, that material abundance failed to fill the void within the widowed woman’s heart. The invisible thread connecting these young people to their roots in Hue was growing thinner by the day, like a strand of spider silk facing the Central region's harsh dry season gales. They agreed to leave the South and return here, sitting within the sacred space filled with the frankincense smoke of the ancestral hall, but their minds were entirely consumed by electronic stock boards flashing non-stop numbers, paper real estate projects, and the looming debts encircling them from failed investment ventures in the South. They sat there, physically close but ten thousand miles away in spirit.
Opposite her, concealed behind an ancient mother-of-pearl inlaid screen, sat a secret figure. It was Old Master Trần Đình Gia, a third-generation descendant of the former Minister of Rites—the only man who still held true to the silent oath sworn between the Phan and Nguyễn lineages.
The first dish was served: A lacquered box of phoenix pate and peacock spring rolls, each intricate carve looking like a miniature architectural masterpiece.
Old Master Gia took a sip of the pungent Chuon village wine, watched the dense smoke of frankincense rise, and spoke in a low voice: "Mụ Nuôi, sixty years ago you led your children and fled to the South, accepting to leave the ancestral land to be manipulated by the Trần family. The world mocked you, calling you a loser, a fugitive. But I know you left to preserve the lives and bloodline of this secondary branch. So why, today when everything has been settled, have you chosen to return?"
Mụ Nuôi gracefully used her ebony chopsticks to pick up a piece of the rolls, her half-smile carrying an entire lifetime of turbulent storms: "Old Master Gia nờ, when people are young, they always think that traveling as far as possible is a way to escape, to build a brand new empire. But by the time the leaves return to their roots, looking back at the path already traveled, I find my heart strangely hollow. I fear the Southern soil can contain the physical flesh of my descendants, but their souls will be eternally marooned. I dragged them back to this land of our fathers and ancestors, not because of a few plots of Kim Long garden land being inflated to hundreds of billions by speculators, but because I wanted to see... among this flock of descendants I poured my heart out to raise all this time, which one still retains the core character, the ancestral spark of the Phan family, and which one has already transformed into a 'stranger' suffocated by money."
She paused abruptly, her eyes staring into the void. Her body had recently begun to protest; lingering joint pains flared whenever the wind shifted, and her heartbeat occasionally grew irregular, as if signaling that her remaining time was short. She had a powerful spiritual premonition that this trip would be the last time she would ever see the Huong River. She would have to rest eternally in the Southern land—the place where she had spent her entire youth clearing land and building a life.
The pain of leaving her homeland weighed like a thousand pounds against her frail chest. She had guarded this family tradition for too long, sacrificed too much, only to look back at the twilight of her life and realize she did not have a single kindred spirit to share her moments of vulnerability.
Her life was not just a battle against poverty; it was also a continuous chain of days enduring the hatred of her husband’s other women—the women of Mr. Liên. Even long after he had passed away, people from distant corners of the world—like France, America, and Australia—still found every way to return, harassing and disrupting her life with absurd demands regarding status and ancestral inheritance. They came in the name of love, but in reality, they were merely vultures descending to tear apart what little remained of a fallen era.
The Erhu suddenly shrieked a piercingly high note, painful like Mệ’s weeping years ago before her final breath. The second dish was served: Royal clam rice in an antique porcelain bowl. The sharp spiciness of ripe chili, the rich saltiness of Hue shrimp paste, and the freshness of herbs seeped into the tip of the tongue, dragging along the memories of a time of starvation.
Mụ Nuôi closed her eyes tightly, letting the pouring rain outside the eaves soothe the old memories rushing back, razor-sharp and excruciating. She remembered that distant girlhood, the era when her body began to hit puberty in an absolute fog of confusion and terror. At the age of fifteen, when the first contours of womanhood began to awaken on her gaunt frame, she had no mother by her side to comfort or guide her.
The natural physiological transformation for an orphaned child turned into a guilt-ridden nightmare. She shamefully hid her very first drops of life, terrified of every prying gaze, wrapping herself in oversized, tattered old clothes as a way to flee the judgment of the world. Her growth that year was lonely and silent, like a wild branch budding in suffocating darkness.
Sheltering that wild weed back then was the household of her maternal uncle—a prestigious doctor living prosperously under the Republic regime. Yet, the glamor of the private clinic and the expensive Western suits, along with the sacks of cash her uncle brought home, could not conceal the cruelty hidden behind the family's closed doors. The person who directly pushed her into the mire of daily contempt and irony was her uncle's wife—a half-baked aristocratic woman who always looked at her out of the corner of her eye as if looking at a back-door beggar, a parasitic creature making the freshly polished tiled floors dirty. The woman treated Mụ Nuôi like nothing more than a servant.
Yet in that very same royal-like miniature hell, destiny did not leave her entirely alone. Sharing the invisible lashes of abuse and bitter taunts along with her was the Euro-Asian daughter—the product of her uncle's first marriage to a French woman. The cousin possessed a lonely pale complexion, wavy hazel hair, and deep blue eyes that seemed perpetually flooded with tears year-round. In a society that simultaneously worshiped and ostracized the mixed-race children of foreign soldiers, the fate of that younger sister was equally perilous, turbulent, and bore a crushing boulder on her shoulders no different from Mụ Nuôi.
And so, the two girls were pushed to the margins of an upper-class family—one shunned for her orphaned poverty, the other cold-shouldered for her mixed blood bearing the scars of turbulent times. They clung to each other beneath the crawlspace of the warehouse. They shared dried crusts of bread, wiped away each other's resentful tears after every beating or the mocking sneers of her uncle's wife. Out of shared suffering, the two became sisters of the same blood, bound by a bleeding kind of love.
That mixed-race younger sister that year, with eyes as deep blue as a sorrowful ocean, was the very first person to teach Mụ Nuôi that even if this world cruelly locks every door, a person must still live—live proudly and tenaciously like wild grass growing against the crest of the wave. Mụ Nuôi missed this younger sister dearly; on this trip back, she also wanted to arrange a search to find any trace of her whereabouts.
Mụ Nuôi glanced over at Thúy—Dũng’s wife, a niece-in-law who called Mr. Liên her uncle. Looking at Thúy, she bitterly remembered Aunt Loan from the old days. Years ago, Aunt Loan had traveled all the way to the South to find her, not to reconnect any broken family bonds, but solely to divide the family estate. Mụ Nuôi's trust and delegation back then had been callously betrayed by her aunt.
Now, Thúy was repeating that exact same calculating pattern. She had given birth to five successful children in the ancient capital—three doctors, one banker, and one prominent businessman. Yet, the inability to produce a single male heir to carry on the line had twisted into a deep-seated melancholy, driving her into a state of jealousy, frantically clinging to material wealth to compensate for her low status within the lineage.
Sitting tucked away at the far end of the rosewood table, Thúy appeared like a jarring note in the middle of the ancient capital's imperial feast. As the wife of a successful doctor in downtown Hue, she draped herself in a trendy dress made of glossy satin silk along with an expensive pearl necklace. She desperately craved sophistication, but her destitute past had nailed itself into her every gesture, turning her display into something half-baked and tacky.
The core nature of someone who once had to scramble for every meal was blatantly obvious in her guarded, hunched posture, and her hands gripping her expensive skirt tightly. Under the candlelight, her face was ash-grey, exposing a exhaustion born from jealousy and the exhausting struggles she had entangled herself in.
She resented that Mụ Nuôi had only given birth to daughters, without a single son to inherit for Mr. Liên's branch. Yet, Mụ Nuôi's four sons had already produced four grandsons to carry on the line, ensuring that every absolute power of life and death, the supreme voice within this Phan clan, remained fully intact in the hands of that aging widowed woman. Thúy's voice in her husband's home had never been respected, and that deep sorrow had corrupted into boundless greed.
"Do you know why the Trần conglomerate is determined to buy this ancestral land to build a resort at all costs?" Old Master Gia lowered his voice, breaking the silence. "It’s not just a simple economic calculation. The Trần family—a legacy power stretching down from Mụ Cả’s era in 1963—has quietly manipulated Thúy, turning her into a pawn to exact revenge on the Phan clan. They know the secret beneath the soil of Kim Long. It is not just the family's feng shui dragon vein; beneath that very earth lie buried the bones of your brother-in-law, your father-in-law, and the Viet Cong soldiers who fell during the stormy night of the Tet Offensive. The Trần family wants to use reinforced concrete to erase a historical truth, while simultaneously digging to unearth the treasure of old documents containing the pledges of yesteryear."
Hearing this, Mụ Nuôi felt her chest tighten painfully. The young people thought they were clever when they shook hands with the enemy to hack away the land of their ancestors. They had no idea that the land so fiercely sought after by conglomerates on the commercial market was highly successful because it had been watered by the blood and tears of those who came before. Her descendants were surrendering the land of their forefathers in exchange for luxury cars and glamorous apartments in Saigon—a betrayal measured and calculated in cash.
Part 2: Schemes Beneath the Veil of Rain
As the night wore on, the atmosphere of the imperial feast grew increasingly dense with pressure, like a string pulled far too tight, ready to snap at the slightest touch. The court music shifted to the melody of Lưu thủy kim tiền, its rapid, resonant tempo sounding like an urgent call to a merciless hand-to-hand battle.
Thúy continually shifted uncomfortably in her chair, her satin silk dress rustling with every rapid breath. She was absolutely certain that Mụ Nuôi was old, her mind bound to be muddled and exhausted after the long, grueling flight from the South to the North. She calculated that an old woman at the twilight of her life, just stepping back into her home village only to be suddenly struck with the grim news that the ancestral lands had been sold off completely, would fall into a panic, unable to scramble or handle it in time. It was precisely because of this dismissive thought that Thúy had secretly mapped out a perfect script with her accomplices—a sophisticated trap designed to force her into a fait accompli.
Right when the tension reached its absolute climax, the final dish was served to the banquet table: Lotus seed sweet soup wrapped in longan fruit. A light steam drifted out, carrying the pure, delicate sweetness of Hue lotus seeds across the solemn room, but ironically, the hearts of the people sitting here at this moment were bitterly cold and filled with pungent, foul schemes.
Thúy stood up, attempting to force a sycophantic smile, completely ignoring Old Master Gia as she stepped beside Mụ Nuôi. Holding a folder and a gold signature pen, her voice sounded sickeningly sweet: "O nờ, Old Master Gia here is also an old acquaintance, and with him here to witness, please sign this authorization form for us, hear o. The Trần conglomerate has already deposited thirty percent of the down payment. Please sign early for us, we still have to arrange the transfer procedures, because the debts of the uncles and aunts in the South and even out here are almost due, and people are cornering us for the money already, o nà. You love us, you love our family tradition, so let us resolve this disputed land, o. In times like now, having money is having everything, o ơi."
The entire dining table fell into a dead silence. Her five children—those brilliant business figures from the South—all avoided their mother's gaze at this moment. One lowered his head to stare at his bowl of lotus seed soup, another pretended not to hear. Under the crushing weight of massive debts from failed business ventures and a luxurious lifestyle, driven by a misguided love for their own children, the five biological children chose to take another step down the path of betraying their mother. Their silent consensus was a indirect slap to the resilient heart of a mother who had sacrificed her entire life. They had been completely blinded by wealth, entirely willing to let their niece-in-law slice up the sacred land of the lineage.
Mụ Nuôi did not show anger, nor did she slam the table and shout. She leisurely scooped a spoonful of the lotus seed soup, chewing slowly to savor the refined sweetness, and then placed the silver spoon down onto the plate, producing a sharp, metallic clink that echoed through the entire room.
"Thúy nà," Mụ Nuôi spoke, her voice not loud but carrying a deep, steel-like inner strength that caused Thúy to violently tremble all over. "Do you think your petty cat-and-mouse games could ever bypass the eyes of someone who grew up eating hardships more than eating rice like me?"
She slid her withered hand into her velvet coat pocket, pulling out not a pen to sign, but a stack of confidential documents bearing the official seals of the Thua Thien Hue provincial authorities.
"You secretly forged the signature of Mr. Liên—my husband, who sacrificed his life and rests eternally in the Southern soil—to prove he had authorized the land to your father-in-law before he left for the resistance. You and O Lũy, who else could it be! You even went and conspired with that Trần Văn Bình fellow, promising that once this project goes through smoothly, you will personally receive five percent of their conglomerate's shares to open your own company across the seventeenth parallel, creating a status for yourself so people won't look down on you for the sin of only giving birth to daughters. Did you think my silence over the past few days was because I am ancient and senile?"
Mụ Nuôi bolted upright. Her figure was small, her back slightly hunched from years of turbulent hardships, but the fierce spirit of the woman who had once stood against Mụ Cả back in 1963 instantly came alive, rising grand and majestic like a great mountain shielding the souls of the lineage before a violent storm.
"My silence was to watch and see if in this house, there was any child, any grandchild who still possessed a shred of conscience to stand up and stop you! My silence was to measure your filial piety, the morality of you all toward the blood and bones of your own forefathers! But now, I am utterly disappointed..." She cast her gaze across her five trembling biological children. "You open your mouths to speak of 'sacrificing for your children,' but in reality, you are selling out the souls of your ancestors, selling out the dragon vein of the clan just to trade for a fake luxury, covering up for your debt-ridden mistakes in the South."
Thúy’s face drained of every drop of blood, the iPad and the folder slipping from her hands and crashing heavily onto the wooden floor, the sharp noise echoing amidst everyone’s sheer shock: "O... O, you have misunderstood me... I only did that for the future of the Phan lineage in the South..."
"Shut your mouth!" Mụ Nuôi roared, her powerful shout blending with a thunderclap that shook the heavens outside the mansion. The rain that had been pattering since the afternoon had now escalated into a violent tempest; rainwater slammed fiercely against the glass windowpanes, blurring the weak, distant lights of the foggy city. Nature itself seemed to rage against the corruption of human hearts.
Mụ Nuôi looked out at the white sheet of rain outside the window, her heart twisting in excruciating agony. She remembered the days of dragging her starving young children into the South, promising herself that one day she would bring them back in the glory and purity of their clan. Yet now, pragmatism had eroded everything. She turned back, looking directly at Thúy and her five children who sat with lowered heads, enduring their judgment:
"The original will of Mệ along with the deed of ownership to the Kim Long dragon vein land, I have already handed over to Lê and Minh—the children who truly understand the value of the dark, of history, and of awakening. The Trần family's project will be suspended tomorrow due to fraudulent activities and the illegal desecration of graves. A modern-day legal battle will take place right here to reclaim justice for those who have passed. As for you all... if you do not know how to turn back, then this ancestral hall will eternally have no room for you to step into!"
Mụ Nuôi walked out of the banquet room, her black velvet ao dai slowly vanishing into the salt-frost mist of the Hue night. The sixty-year family feud had far from ended; it had merely been handed down to a brand new generation, entering a legal battle filled with high drama and a cruelty multiplied tenfold. Lê and Minh would have to face the aggressive Trần conglomerate on the outside, while simultaneously fighting off the madness and bitter jealousy of their own flesh and blood on the inside. The Central storm had officially made landfall, and absolutely no one could stand on the sidelines of this war to protect their faith.
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