11 Unlikely friends

He Jie had grown up without a known father and sorrounded by ladies, being one of the many children of the governor's palace harem. It might therefore not come as a surprise that his inclinations had quickly veered towards the arts at an early age, he was already somewhat accomplished in calligraphy and music, and one can immagine his shock when instead of preparing himself to study at the academy of arts while entertaining the harem madames, by virtue of his talent betraying him, he was now forced for the foreseeable future to live in White Valley and study martial arts, of all things.

He could also not be more different from Huang Mu, who for all his strenght and intelligience could only be equated to a barbarian illiterate in comparison.

There were also however things the two kids had in common, which nobody would have noticed had they not been thrown together by destiny.

They had received the love of a parent before White Valley, which had provided them with a good moral compass to tackle life and molded them into future upright individuals, both were disciplined and hard working in their own fields of interest and, while Huang Mu was still a diamond in the rough at the time of their first meeting, they both were naturally blessed with considerable intelligence.

After getting over his timidity and since He Jie had been used to interact with kids at the harem, he started to question Huang Mu about his life at White Valley, trying to learn what he had gotten himself into.

He was also curious about Huang Mu's age and was thinking of a tactful way to broach the subject. At first he though Huang Mu was internally upset with him for causing the earlier commotion, despite his earlier friendly words, given how brief and concise his replies were, but he soon understood that this was just his counterpart's natural behavior and that he wasn't used to long conversations.

From his vocabulary and sentencing structure He Jie deduced that Huang Mu must have had a military background and right at that moment had an epiphany, trying desperately to control his facial expression while feeling very surprised at his discovery.

He realized that Huang Mu must have been the banished foster kid of the old prefect, that had been a juicy tidbit making the rounds in the harem court last summer, He Jie remembered that he had wrote one of his first poems about the tragedy and his face reddended.

Huang Mu looked at him quizzically and thought that this kid sure was quite unstable emotionally, excluding the earlier hysterics, first he had showed undue surprise while he was telling him about his forays in the woods, that wasn't even the interesting part of the story, now again out of the blue he seemed to be feeling embarrassed about something Huang Mu just said, but for the life of him, Huang Mu could not figure out what that could possibly be!

Despite these awkward moments it did Huang Mu a ton of good to have a willing, interested listener that did not seem to hold any animosity or ill will towards him, after a year of practically complete enforced solitude and paranoia; it also helped He Jie a lot to overcome the shock of the testing stone failure and start to fortify himself to facing what fate had in store for him, the seeds of a long lasting friendships had been planted.