Transmigration; Married to My Ex-Fiancé's Uncle-Chapter 292; Lu Yuze & Shuyin 4

Lu Yuze had been a father for twelve years. He’d raised Yuyan from birth, navigated the terrible twos, answered endless questions, dealt with scraped knees and nightmares, and the first days of school. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

And he was asking her how to handle this?

She almost wanted to laugh at the irony.

Lu Yuze was quiet for a moment, then a rueful chuckle escaped him. "Fair point. I suppose I was hoping your ability to see fate might come with some instruction manual on how to explain it to children."

"It doesn’t," Shuyin said dryly. "Fate-seeing and child-rearing are entirely separate skill sets, neither of which I’m particularly good at."

"So we’re both fumbling in the dark on this one."

"Seems like it." She shifted slightly against him, her voice becoming more thoughtful. "Though if you’re asking my opinion, unpracticed as it is, I’d say don’t tell him. Not yet. Maybe not ever."

Lu Yuze waited, sensing she had more to say.

"He’s just five years old," Shuyin continued, her tone losing its earlier amusement and becoming more serious. "He doesn’t need to know about predetermined death and fate manipulation. He doesn’t need to carry the weight of knowing his sisters and parents are dead and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it."

She paused, then added quietly, "Let him be a child for as long as possible. Let him grieve normally when the time comes, without the added burden of cosmic significance. He made a brave choice to come with us to protect his siblings. That’s the story. That’s all he needs to know."

"And when he’s older? If he asks why we took him in, why we were there that day?"

"Then we tell him we saw a good kid in a bad situation and wanted to help," Shuyin said simply. "Which is true enough. The rest, the fate-seeing, the predetermined deaths, the cosmic interference, that’s our burden to carry, not his."

Lu Yuze absorbed this, finding a strange comfort in her pragmatic approach. She might claim to know nothing about parenting, but her instinct to protect the child from unnecessary trauma was sound.

"What about his family?" he pressed. "They’re already dead.... When do we tell him that? Won’t he wonder why we haven’t said anything? Why are we keeping it from him?"

"We grieve with him," Shuyin said firmly. "We act appropriately devastated. We provide comfort and stability. And if he ever asks if we knew..." She hesitated, then continued, "We lie. We tell him we had no idea, that it was a terrible tragedy, that life is unfair and unpredictable."

"You want us to lie to a grieving child."

"I want us to spare a grieving child from an unbearable truth," Shuyin corrected, her voice hardening slightly. "There’s a difference. Some lies are kindness. Some truths are cruelties. He doesn’t need to know that his parents’ death was written in the stars, that I saw it coming, and chose to save only him. What good would that knowledge do except make him feel guilty for surviving?"

She had a point. A brutal, pragmatic point, but a point nonetheless.

"And if he finds out later? When he’s grown? If he discovers we knew all along?"

Shuyin was quiet for a long moment. "Then he’ll be an adult capable of processing complex moral questions. He’ll understand why we made the choices we made. Or he won’t, and he’ll hate us for it." Her voice softened. "But at least he’ll have had a childhood free from that particular nightmare. At least he’ll have had years of peace before learning how dark the world really is."

Lu Yuze turned this over in his mind, weighing the ethics of it. Lying to a child about something so fundamental. Letting him believe his survival was a random chance rather than deliberate intervention. Hiding the truth about his family’s impending death.

It felt wrong on so many levels.

And yet... what was the alternative? Traumatize a five-year-old with knowledge of predetermined fate? Burden him with survivor’s guilt before he even understood what survival meant?

"You know," Lu Yuze said slowly, "for someone who claims to know nothing about parenting, you seem to have given this a lot of thought."

"I’ve given a lot of thought to the burden of knowledge," Shuyin corrected. "That’s different. I know what it’s like to see things you can’t change, to carry information that does nothing but cause pain. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, especially not a child."

There was something in her voice, something old and weary, that suggested she was speaking from personal experience. How many deaths had she foreseen over the centuries? How many tragedies had she watched unfold, powerless to intervene?

No wonder she wanted to spare Chen Xiao from that particular hell.

"Alright," Lu Yuze said finally, making the decision. "We don’t tell him. Not about the fate-seeing, not about the predetermined deaths. We let him be a normal kid dealing with normal grief when the time comes."

"Good." Shuyin nodded against his chest. "And Lu Yuze? When it does happen, when we get the call about the funeral..." She paused. "We protect him from the details. We shield him from the worst of it. We make sure he knows he’s safe here, that we won’t let anything happen to him."

"Of course," Lu Yuze agreed. "He’s our responsibility now. We’ll take care of him."

"Our responsibility," Shuyin repeated softly, as if testing the words. "Strange. A week ago I had no children. Now I have two, and one of them I pulled from the jaws of fate itself."

"Any regrets?"

"Ask me again when he’s a teenager," Shuyin said dryly, and despite the heavy conversation, Lu Yuze found himself smiling.

Maybe they would figure this out after all. Two people fumbling through parenthood with absolutely no idea what they were doing, protecting children from truths too heavy to bear.

It wasn’t conventional parenting advice.

But then again, nothing about their life together was conventional.