Chapter 805 — The Yu Family Comes Calling
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
At the sight of the young man, Li Cihua was briefly startled. He knew this person — Yu Haitian, a manager of Yu Family Trading, of the Yanjing Yu family.
Yu Haitian had also just caught sight of Zhao Qibing in his wheelchair, and he too was briefly taken aback. How had Zhao Qibing become a cripple?
"Young Master Bing, what happened to you?" Yu Haitian walked over, somewhat surprised. Though he was of the Yu family, he also knew Young Master Bing's standing, and so his manner toward him was fairly respectful.
"Isn't this Brother Tian?" Young Master Bing knew Yu Haitian's identity as well — a scion of the hidden Yu family's branch in the secular world. And he himself was the Zhao family's bastard son; one might say the two stood on roughly equal footing, neither able to lord it over the other.
A woman of the Yu family had married into the Zhao family — none other than Zhao Guangyin's principal wife, Zhao Qibing's father. But a marriage of that nature was merely an alliance of interests, and the relationship between the Yu and Zhao families today was in fact far from harmonious!
For the Zhao family envied the Yu family's business in the secular world and was itching to carve out a domain of its own there, yet was held back from acting by the pact of years past — while the Yu family's present standing had come about entirely through a twist of fate!
That branch of the hidden Yu family had in fact been founded by members of the secular Yu family who had been thrown out and cast aside. In truth it had long had nothing to do with the secular Yu family, but as the hidden Yu family grew great, the secular Yu family had naturally latched on to it again, content to become a money-making tool for that branch.
The branch had become the trunk, and the trunk was now the branch — absurd as it sounded, that was the plain fact of it, and it could not be replicated. Other great houses might wish to copy it, but copy it they could not.
And so the Yu family now stood at the head of the mundane world's four great houses and five lesser houses, while those hidden houses, eager to meddle in mundane affairs, dared not lift a finger lightly, held back by the old compact.
That the Yu family had come to this had its historical reasons, and the Yu family declared to the world that this mundane branch of theirs had nothing to do with them — though whether it did or not, everyone knew perfectly well. It was simply that the thing had become an accomplished fact, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
These past two years the Zhao family had also sought to cultivate a puppet to work with the Yu family, but founding a new mundane house ran counter to the Yu family's present interests, and the proposal was refused. And so relations between the Zhao and Yu families had grown somewhat strained.
On the surface, however, the two families remained on good terms, and so when Yu Haitian came to Songshan City, the first person he paid a call on was naturally Zhao Qibing, the Zhao family's bastard son. Unlike Yu Kun, who had slipped in quietly, he had come in broad daylight and by proper channels, and so appearances had to be kept up.
"Don't even mention it — the very thought of it makes my blood boil. I don't know where some madman crawled out of in Songshan City, but I had the rotten luck to run into him!" Zhao Qibing ground his teeth in fury at the mere mention of his legs.