Chapter 523 A Promice...
Not disturbing his father, Lu Qiang stayed silent while Lu Jinhai looked as if he went in the past trying to remember the day when his father told him the truth.
"It started when I was hardly one-year-old. At that time, father-mother had to s.h.i.+ft to another village that was far away from our ancestral one. The purpose was to look after the huge piece of the land that belonged to our family and to provide the labor to the people in the village. The main purpose was the development of that village, as our family always did everything to help others."
"They took me with them and left my elder sister Lu Zhilan with my grandparents as they wanted her to study in the town because there was no proper school in that faraway village. Before father went to that village, there was one man who used to look after the land and handle everything related to it. He was a good and loyal man that my family trusted, thinking of him as one of the family members."
"Everything went smoothly for one year, where my father could do for what he went to that village and that man helped my father a lot. My father and that man became close friends, who could do anything to help each other. That man had a wife and a mother, a family of three and no other relatives."
"One day in the night, there was a disastrous incident in the village when dacoits entered the village to rob it. It was so sudden and shocking as something like this never happened. Villagers fought with them at the cost where so many of them lost their lives as they were not prepared for it."
"Father and his friend hid us inside the safe place at home and they went to figure out how to deal with dacoits. As the situation was almost in the control, don"t know how but one dacoit found us. My mother and the other two women tried to fight him. That man wanted to take me with him but the wife of that man who was nine months pregnant, somehow managed to take me away while mother and that grandma tried to stop him. That dacoit must have known that I was the child of the village chief and they must have planned that attack long back."
"The dacoit was strong and two women were not enough to stop him and he dodged them. He followed the man"s wife who was running away carrying me in her arms despite her bad condition. Before the dacoit could catch us, my father"s friend who was already wounded found us and fought with the dacoit. Both husband and wife gave their everything just to protect me."
"In that instance, my father came with a few more men but by then it was too late. That man had me and his pregnant wife to protect while that aggressive dacoit had nothing to lose. The man got stabbed by the dacoit in front of his helpless wife who couldn"t do anything but to see her husband getting hurt in front of her eyes."
"The men who came with the father took over the dacoit but till then my father"s friend was taking his last breath. At the last moment of his life, he just asked my father to take care of his family, a wife, and his unborn child. My father promised him to do so as he lost his life just to protect me."
The man died and his wife and who was in a shock, her condition worsened. That night, she somehow gave birth to a child. She knew she would not last for a long so she called my father and asked him for one promise that he was not allowed to break ever.
Her last words were- "My husband lost his life to protect your son so I have one request to you. I know I will die soon as there is no will left inside me to continue my life and I can only leave this world with my husband knowing you will look after our son."
"I will."
"I just don"t want you to look after my son but I want something more. You can call me a greedy woman but I don"t mind as nothing can be more important for a mother than her son."
"I will do whatever you ask me to. These are my words to you."
"I want you to adopt my son and raise him like yours, giving him your last name Lu. No one should ever know that he is your adopted son, not even my son himself. I don"t want anyone to look at him as an orphan kid, and I don"t want him to ever feel that he is alone in this world. I want all the happiness for him, which he could have had if his parents were alive. Will you do that for me?"
"I will. From today, he is my son, blood of Lu."
"My father agreed to know the woman would die, and he wanted to fulfill the wish of a dying person. Moreover, the guilt of that man and a woman losing their lives just to protect me was overcoming every thought that came to my father"s mind. Just as father, mother was feeling the same, and she a.s.sured the woman that she would treat her son as her own."
"The same day, the woman died. Other than my parents, the old woman from that family and two servants who worked for my family no one knows about it. The woman giving birth had been kept a secret and there was chaos and death in the village so no one was there to pay attention to it."
"The news spread that the woman and her newborn died while she was giving birth and my parents left the village with me and the newborn baby the same day. The old lady, the mother of that man had no objection over the decision made by her daughter-in-law and allowed my parents to take away the baby in the hope of her grandson to have a good life."