Transmigration; Married to My Ex-Fiancé's Uncle-Chapter 308; Celestial Family

Nothing happened.

Shuyin watched him carefully, then nodded once, accepting this truth.

But her next question came without warning.

"How many illegitimate children do you have out there?"

The room went utterly silent.

Every head turned to stare at her in shock, her brothers’ faces reflecting complete surprise, her mother’s expression shifting from confusion to dawning hurt.

"You know Father isn’t that kind of person!" Long Chen immediately jumped to his father’s defense, his voice sharp with indignation.

But Long Tian’s next words stopped everyone cold.

"I have two," he said quietly.

The silence that followed was absolute and devastating.

Long Mingyue’s face drained of color, her hand rising to press against her chest as if she’d been physically struck.

The brothers stood frozen, their expressions ranging from shock to betrayal to disbelief.

This was news to all of them, a secret their father had apparently kept for centuries.

"Tsk."

Shuyin’s smirk was loud and knowing, utterly unsurprised by this revelation.

"But my dear..." Long Tian rushed to explain, turning toward his wife with desperate urgency.

"Those are children I had with the first woman, before I even met you. But she died giving birth to them. They both died. I mourned them and moved on...."

"Dead?" Shuyin interrupted, her voice cutting through his explanation with surgical precision.

"Are you certain about that?"

She walked back to the couch and sat down with deliberate casualness, crossing her legs as she regarded her father with cool assessment.

"Yes," Long Tian insisted, confusion clouding his features.

"I watched them cremate the bodies. I held the memorial service myself. This was before I even met your mother, Kailani. It’s ancient history."

"You have four children," Shuyin said flatly, watching his face carefully.

"Not two. Four. They look remarkably like me, actually, we share certain distinctive features. They’re quadruplets. Two boys, two girls. And they are very much alive and living well."

Long Tian’s face went through several shades of white.

"That’s impossible!"

"I watched them get cremated!" he protested, his voice rising with genuine distress.

"I held their still bodies in my arms. Their mother was dead, and they were dead. I saw it with my own eyes and confirmed it!"

"If you confirmed it, then they played you magnificently," Shuyin said with cold satisfaction.

"That woman is very much alive too. I saw her myself and asked around about her background. Do you know the interesting part?"

She paused, letting the tension build.

"She belongs to our enemy clan. Probably came to you with a specific mission, to get close, to extract information, to steal whatever she was supposed to steal. I doubt giving birth was ever part of her plan, but accidents happen. So she faked her death and the children’s deaths, took what she’d come for, and disappeared with her prizes."

Long Tian staggered slightly, his face cycling through shock, denial, horror, and dawning realization.

"But I really saw it... I confirmed their deaths..."

His voice had become hollow, distant.

"Their family was just a low-earning household. My parents declined the relationship because they were beneath our status, but when she became pregnant, they didn’t have any choice but to agree to a quiet marriage. Then she died in childbirth, at least, that’s what the physicians told me. They said she’d bled too much, couldn’t be saved, and the twins were stillborn."

He shook his head as if trying to clear it.

"I thought it was tragic but medically sound. I never suspected..."

"Then you really were played," Shuyin finished for him, her tone almost sympathetic beneath the sarcasm.

"Thoroughly and completely."

She watched as her father’s face continued changing colors, white to gray to a sickly pale that suggested he might actually be sick.

"Father, how could you never mention something like this?" Long Chen demanded, his voice shaking with a mixture of anger and shame.

He’d just defended his father so vehemently, and now this.

"You had children, have children, that none of us knew about?"

The other brothers looked between Shuyin and their father, their expressions torn between concern for him and shock at the revelation.

"It happened twenty years before I met your mother," Long Tian said weakly, his usual commanding presence completely shattered.

"I thought they were dead. I thought it was meaningless to speak of the dead, to drag up painful memories of a brief relationship that ended in tragedy."

But now they weren’t dead.

They were alive.

Grown.

Four of them instead of two.

And he’d had no idea.

Shuyin turned her gaze to Lu Yuze, her expression suddenly dangerous.

"Lu Yuze, how many illegitimate children do you have out there?"

The question was casual, but the threat underneath it was crystal clear.

If he lied to her, if he had any hidden children, she would disappear so thoroughly that no one would ever find her again.

Lu Yuze met her eyes steadily, his voice calm and certain.

"Honey, I have only one child. Yuyan. I’m absolutely certain she’s my only child."

He paused, then added for clarity, "My deceased wife and I were each other’s first love, each other’s first in every way. I’ve never been with anyone else apart from her and now you."

The unspoken addition, that they’d been sleeping in the same bed but hadn’t yet consummated their marriage, hung in the air.

"You better be honest," Shuyin warned, her glare sharp enough to cut.

"I am," Lu Yuze assured her simply.

She had loved her father once, completely and without reservation.

But after learning so many things, after discovering secret after secret, she felt like she didn’t know him at all.

Like he was a stranger wearing her father’s face.

Long Tian seemed to shake off his shock, straightening his shoulders with visible effort.

"Where are they? These children.... I need to find them. I need to take responsibility for them."

"I don’t know where they are," Shuyin lied smoothly.

"And why should I tell you? So you can disturb their peaceful lives? I know how our kind thinks...