14 Why hadn't the Aunts Visited him

Xiao Ying eyed the children shown to him at the corner of the screen.

As soon as the lunch break came, the bullying, or rather the first hints of it, would begin.

Xiao Ying was dreading having to relive all his bad writing choices when there was so much other good stuff that he could focus on.

It physically pained him to have to see all the actions of his own childhood bullies recast onto a screen in front of him with different names.

And as much as he hated it, these children were the only candidates the Ming Cheng could have as friends, or even allies, in the palace at this stage, the servants all being too busy at work and already placed in their established roles, and therefore, subject to suspicion by the upper echelons of the household if their behaviour ever changed.

Children were stupid and weird: the perfect candidates and the only companionship that would seem sensible for a child of Ming Cheng's age.

"You can befriend those children, if you like, at lunch time," Xiao Ying mumbled out as he typed out the message for Ming Cheng.

The boy in question froze as he heard those words, his hands shaking slightly on the screen as he continued to keep washing the rice.

Xiao Ying took note of how Ming Cheng had decided to walk outside into the sunlight to get himself another bucket of water, even if he hadn't fully used up all the water that he had fetched from his last water run.

He leaned back into his chair and rest his head onto his hands, closing his eyes and trying to think up ways that the bullies could be transformed into Ming Cheng's friends.

The original novel had the bullies never be redeemed.

They relentlessly tortured Ming Cheng by calling him names, by saddling him with extra work, by wiping the mud from their shoes on him, and by generally excluding him from all praise and complements for any of the work that he had done.

They had been punished in story by being shunted to the wayside when Ming Cheng had been revealed to be the prince, begging him for forgiveness on their knees in a humiliating sequence where they feared for their lives and admitted to all the staff what they had done to Ming Cheng. They had been forgiven, of course, by the perfect protagonist, and learned the error of their ways, keeping their career in the palace as kitchen staff.

They were never mentioned again other than a small reference within a small side story when the palace was preparing to be sieged when Ming Cheng was away at war.

A small enemy squad had infiltrated the palace and was planning to kill the king. The three bullies had received a mysterious order from the crown that they needed to stay in the kitchen for the night, armed and ready, to slaughter an intruder that would be entering the room from the window.

They had done what they had been asked and were then dropped from the story.

Xiao Ying had only put that bit in, because he had panicked over the complete lack of characters that were present in the palace that he had given names to, and that he needed to demonstrate and retroactively display that the current Emperor wasn't useless, after it had occurred to him that he had basically left his untrained, inexperienced son in charge of defending the country for no inexplicable reason.

The subplot was there to display the Emperor's intelligence and his faith in his son, by predicting the both assassination attack that would be coming from a kingdom that had been pushed back over and over again, and the path that the assassins would take, by deliberately adding weak spots into the palace's defence, before exploiting the staff in his palace to have them kill the assassins to spread around the image and notion that even the palace staff were trained to kill for their ruler, actively discouraging any other attempts upon the Emperor's life.

Xiao Ying had to admit to himself that despite his ability, later into his book far past the point where his readers were willing to reach to get to any potential gold, broken up and scattered within the litany of spelling mistakes and the muddled devices that Xiao Ying had decided to use by telling the story in pieces not in chronological order by having the Emperor functionally act as a narrator, cutting in here and there to explain the events as they happened to functionally ruin the entire mini arc, and that he oughtn't have not thought himself so clever for presenting the story this way....

Anyway, Xiao Ying admitted to himself that making friends was harder.

He wasn't sure how he needed to direct Ming Cheng into making friends with the three children, considering an extra member would only ruin the insular community that had already formed.

He couldn't exploit the fact there were three of them, an odd number, and that one of them would be alone in school PE lessons whenever students had to pair up. He couldn't exploit the fact that there would be some sort of seating system that would force the children together in a classroom.

And he couldn't exploit any kind of shared experiences of suffering under a terrible manager and co-worker, considering that everybody in the kitchen was so focussed on just getting through the day and that there was no real enemy here for everybody to collectively band together around and hate.

Ming Cheng would have to just use his personality and charisma by putting himself out there and speaking to the children, which was an objectively terrible idea looking at the child.

He was a quiet boy, trying to keep his head down and do his work, just so happening to be perfect at the work and his demeanour unquestionable, considering he was such an upstanding member of the community.

There was never any scandal about Ming Cheng, considering the child never really put himself out there, and put himself in any scandalous situations.

He was a hard worker who was well respected for it. He was only a genius because he studied hard. There was really little natural talent involved, other than creative uses at looking at what was around him to learn.

There was no other way to go forward other than with pain.