3 Being Found Out

Slumping down in his soft, plush chair, Xiao Ying resigned himself to watch the screen in front of him, ready to sit there for a while, watching for any updates.

As soon as he touched the fabric, the image of a small boy, coated in a layer of brown mud, begging at the side of a stall, engulfed his view. Behind said stall, there was an old woman with a broom, progressively becoming more and more angry the more the little boy cried out. A man, similar to her age, began nearing the scene as well - the expression on his face as enraged as the woman's.

Xiao Ying immediately recognised his own protagonist as the dirty, beggar boy, and he sat there, waiting for the inevitable strike of the old woman's broom upon his arms, knocking the child over, as she spewed out vitriolic hate unto him without refrain.

He felt himself tensing up in anticipation of the blow, not feeling himself quite so ready to watch the boy that he had so lovingly crafted become the target of some nameless old lady's prejudices.

Xiao Ying closed his eyes at the moment the broom smacked down onto the fragile boy's skin, the loud, echoing thwap making Xiao Ying feel a little sick when he heard it.

It was still nothing in the face of the almost animalistic howl of pain and anguish at the blow, the rawness and accompanying hallow screech almost drowning out the old lady's speech of all beggar children being the contemptuous drain of society and that they were all responsible for their plights, considering their ungratefulness and their general need to die to make the general area a better place to live for those who were actually contributing to the community.

Xiao Ying winced at it, turning his head away from the scene, immensely regretting what he had written down, hating himself for creating a child that would have to hear those words.

Xiao Ying's only solace was the fact that the little boy would soon be rescued, just before the last blow of the old woman's broom, just before the final blow that was supposed to break that broom.

Just to the side of the screen, just about to turn around the corner, there was a servant girl carrying a several buckets of lentils, bought on the occasion of the emperor's nephew returning from what Xiao Ying had dubbed 'The Battle of the Bridges' for the sake of the conflict happening across several cliffsides within the mouth of a mountain range.

Later on, the little boy would be visiting the site and would look down on the hastily constructed bridges connecting all the different cliffs and mountains that the Emperor's nephew had used to spy on the enemy in the dead of night; the bridged would be thrown over to the different mountains, and the assigned men would scale down certain cliffs, trying to eavesdrop on the enemy while archers would rain down a storm of arrows on the enemy count on the last day of the battle, when they had been sufficiently lured inwards enough into one particularly narrow mountain pass, just in time for the steadier bridges to have been built.

That little boy would take one look at the rotting remains of the tactical prodigy's monument, and would erect stone walkways to stand where once the wooden planks, tied together by rough vines and rougher twine had extended to support the kingdom's best archers.

The king's brother had a strange fondness for lentils that Xiao Ying had written in, copying his old next door neighbour's strange, eclectic hobbies.

Xiao Ying threw his hands out in exasperation at the notion of potentially writing any more characters using his current neighbours as references. One would be a self-absorbed idiot who was at least partially deaf and nose blind, considering his music was always too loud, and his apartment always smelled vaguely of piss. The other neighbour wasn't much better; he was a stiff and awkward boy who always had his head in a book and was almost terrifyingly clumsy with his lack of both spatial awareness and self awareness - bluntly put, a child who was too sheltered from the world, only ever interacting with it at an uncomfortably large distance suddenly forced to adapt to it all too soon.

None of them were aspirational in the slightest.

And now that Xiao Ying was thinking about it, neither was he. His life accomplishments could be summarised as idiot boy who was too expecting of things to go a certain way without room for compromise or the slightest notion that things could go disastrously wrong and that maybe sometimes he should take a moment to look around himself.

Also, now that he was thinking about it, other than torture, why would Xiao Ying ever be here, watching the contents of his novel playing out on screen. He could easily infer that he was supposed to interact with the poor child who was getting beaten up on screen, but with his mouse symbol currently invisible, he figured to himself that he couldn't possibly do anything about the situation that the little boy was in right now.

But more pressingly, was there a way for the little boy to end the story happily, instead of being murdered in cold blood on the night of his wedding, after a lifetime of surviving the lethal court of the kingdom to get to his position as emperor?

After all, he would deserve it. Nobody could possibly doubt that their conquering Prince, responsible for pushing back the kingdom's enemies and striking a peace deal with a neighbouring, warring state, was not worthy of the throne.

If Xiao Ying was to change the events of his original novel, and steer the plot into a new direction, he couldn't guarantee that he would be able to guide the little boy to safety and sanctuary. He might be jeopardising the very rise of the little boy to his power. He would have no idea of whether he was possibly doing the right thing or not, considering the more he would change the plot, the more uncertain the little boy's life could be.

He could potentially die early, or maybe die painfully, writhing in agony under torture, rather than passing away peacefully in his sleep.

Oh God....

Was this what being a parent was like!?