I am Kael Everwyn.
All my life, I have been treated like a puppet.
Before that, I was the illegitimate child of the Piao family's father—something I would not fully understand until later.
My father left the Piao mother when I was five. The twins were three at the time, too young to understand what was happening, yet old enough to remember it.
I despise my father.
He was a man of ill manners, unworthy of respect. Yet my mother adored him, infatuated to the point of blindness.
When the government learned of my existence after the major incident of their divorce, it took less than a month for them to arrive at our door. They demanded me.
They promised my father riches beyond measure if he handed me over.
Even though he had married into the Piao family, he could not resist ambition.
He said,
"It's not enough. I need a bit more than that. I'll give him to you when he's ten. Right now, I just need to teach him a few things he must learn."
At the time, I thought him a fool.
He had been part of the Piao family for years, yet he acted for a paltry gain compared to their power.
But once the government left and my mother went shopping, his expression changed. He was no longer the man I thought him to be.
He explained the shift: he had read an old diary—rare, nearly impossible to find.
It spoke of patriarchy, of men ruling the world.
He knew that despite my illegitimacy, I would have been the one to inherit the Piao family.
So he left—not out of neglect, but to shape me. To teach me the way to claim what was mine, to secure my rightful place, and to show that the women in the family were of no concern.
At the time, he partially convinced me.
But a small tingling in my heart warned otherwise.
When I was born, he did not come to me.
If he truly believed in his ideology, he would not have sought another child with the Piao mother.
This meant only one thing: he intended to have a legitimate male heir with her—and then impose his ideology through that child. To force him to claim the Piao throne. To ensure his doctrines would rule the family, unchallenged.