The True Class Divide

...

This was a residential neighborhood built around the base of a half-mountain. Follow the road lined with iron railings all the way to its very end, and you'd find Mo Fan's home.

A squat little building — one and a half stories high. The outer paint had long since peeled away to expose the red brick beneath, and clutter of all kinds surrounded the place.

The neighbors' houses had mostly risen to three and a half stories, their renovations making them look like proper homes. By contrast, Mo Fan's house — already tucked into the farthest corner and lower than all the rest — looked especially shabby and run-down.

"Mo Fan! You're back — I've got great news!" Just as he reached his front gate, a boy as grimy as a mud-caked monkey leaped out, face alight with excitement.

This mud monkey was Zhang Hou — another kid from the old neighborhood, someone who had grown up alongside Mo Fan.

"What great news?" Mo Fan asked.

"The little princess is back! I saw her today at the manor gate — dude, you have no idea how gorgeous she's gotten. She's practically an angel," Zhang Hou said, practically vibrating with excitement.

Mo Fan glanced over at the estate that faced this stretch of street. It was a sweep of meticulously maintained greenery — the kind that made the entire city envious. Every inch of flowers, grass, and sculpted trees had been shaped with painstaking care, raised to the level of a true classical garden.

But all that beautiful green was now fenced off behind tall iron railings.

He remembered that when they were kids, the railings hadn't been there. He used to lead the children from this whole street into the estate to play and run wild through its grounds.

At the highest point of the estate stood several exquisitely designed European-style villas — in the eyes of their rowdy little group, they looked exactly like castles from fairy tales. And true to that image, a princess did live in that castle: someone whose beauty was enough to make you forget to breathe, roughly their own age. Mo Fan used to drag along a whole pack of neighborhood kids and coax the princess out, sneaking her away to roam all over the mountain...

But at some point, iron railings appeared around the estate. The adults on the street stopped letting children wander inside, and the princess who had once played freely among them became a real princess locked in a real castle — growing more unreachable with every passing year, seen less and less as time went on.

"You know what I heard? The little princess is some kind of magic prodigy at a top-tier school in the capital. She's got this natural talent for ice-type magic that nobody else can match — she's only fifteen and she can already cast ice spells." Zhang Hou lowered his voice conspiratorially.

Mo Fan paused. If Zhang Hou had told him the princess had won some national academic olympiad, he probably wouldn't have blinked. But an ice-type mage? That was genuinely extraordinary.

The vast majority of people didn't undergo their Awakening until they were sixteen — the first year of high school — when they received their first elemental affinity.

Even after the Awakening, it didn't automatically make you a mage. You still needed years of grueling practice, a spell tome, and constant drilling before you could actually release a single spell. For this princess to already be a true mage at fifteen — she was something else entirely.

*Is this what people call a prodigy? A magical prodigy of the highest order!*

"Mo Fan, I honestly feel so bad for you. If you'd pushed a little harder back then, you might've swept that sweet, pure-hearted little princess right off her feet. Beautiful and talented — pfft, we were all dying of envy," Zhang Hou said, one eyebrow raised and grinning.

"That was ancient history. Stop bringing it up." Mo Fan waved him off.

Mo Jiaxing, listening to the two boys banter, let out a pointed cough and steered Mo Fan inside.

The moment they got home, his father said: "I'm heading out for a bit. Xinxia is staying at your aunt's place — she probably won't be coming back tonight."

"Okay. Got it."

Mo Jiaxing left in a hurry, and Mo Fan walked a slow circle through the house, finding that absolutely nothing had changed. The same bare walls. The same worn household. The same grinding poverty.

The whole world had transformed, but his family's circumstances hadn't shifted one bit. *Why couldn't we have swapped places with the family up in that estate? The heavens went to all that trouble rearranging science into magic — couldn't they have squeezed in one small favor like that?*

The one thing still worth feeling grateful about: his looks hadn't changed. He was still dashingly handsome.

With nothing to do in the empty house, Mo Fan wandered outside to kill time, curious whether anything else around here had changed.

Following a mossy side path that almost nobody used, he was just turning onto the main street when he spotted his father's battered old pickup truck.

His father was a driver. He used to chauffeur the lord of the Mu estate — but at some point he had been reassigned to logistics, essentially running errands and making supply runs for the estate. Ever since, their family's fortunes had dropped sharply.

"Jiaxing, that's a rather unreasonable request. You should know I've always treated your family well. After what your boy did, I still kept a purchasing position open for you — for anyone else, I would have told them to pack their bags and clear out." A middle-aged man's voice drifted out, measured and unhurried.

"Brother Mu He, please — just consider this the last favor I'll ever ask of you. Getting into Tianlan Magic High School costs so much money, and you know our situation. We genuinely can't afford it." Mo Jiaxing's voice came through, low and deferential.

"You — why do you keep doing this for that useless son of yours? He couldn't get into magic high school on his own merits, so let him fend for himself. He's almost sixteen anyway. And even if I help this time, even if I get him in — knowing him, he'll still drift along without putting in any real effort. He'll never become a true mage. It's not easy to become one. It's not just natural talent and hard work — you need spell tomes, magic tools, magic implements. Can your family afford any of that? Without those supports, he can't even reach the level of a basic mage..." The man called Mu He spoke in the measured tone of someone offering fatherly counsel, but all Mo Fan could hear beneath it was unbridled condescension.

"He really wants to learn this time. Brother Mu He, if you're willing to help — about what Master Mu said, that we should move out of the Mu estate — we'll do it right away. That way Master Mu can set his mind at ease, and I'll also personally make sure my boy never goes looking for Miss Mu Ningxue again." Mo Jiaxing's voice carried from beyond the wall.

"Hmm. Now that does give me something to think about."

The moment he heard they were willing to leave, Mu He seemed to warm to the conversation considerably.

By the wall, a boy leaned against the bricks and listened. His emotions had twisted into something impossibly complicated.

He had thought that with the world changed, many of its cruelest dynamics would change along with it.

They hadn't. Not at all.

The wealthy masters of Mu Manor still sat high above everyone else, just as they always had. His father, still struggling at the bottom, still had to scrape and crawl and beg favors everywhere he turned. This Mu He was the chairman behind Tianlan Magic High School — in truth, a single word from him was all it would have taken to open the doors for Mo Fan.

But the moment he heard Mo Jiaxing agree to move out of the estate, Mu He seemed to exhale with relief — and agreed without another word.

In the end, the conversation closed with Mo Jiaxing's endless stream of thanks, while Mu He drove away in his sleek luxury car, leaving behind only that old, dust-worn pickup truck — standing alone and forlorn in the wind, just like Mo Jiaxing himself.

Was this a dream?

It was as brutal as reality itself. Leaning against the wall, his breathing heavy, Mo Fan understood it clearly: his family's circumstances hadn't changed by a single degree, and neither had the lowly place they occupied in the world.

The titles of "master" and "young miss" — relics of an older era — hadn't truly vanished in the modern age. Certain families with deep historical roots still held their positions of power. The people who served them might no longer be called servants, only workers; they might no longer be required to bow and kneel — but the lives of these people at the bottom were still held in a tight fist by the wealthy and privileged, shuffled about at will.

He had been born into exactly this — the lowest rung, living under the thumb of a family named Mu.

Something surged violently deep in his chest. His fist clenched tight, and he drove it hard into the pale, moss-streaked wall.

"Mu family — do not mistake my youth for weakness. Do not mistake my hardship for defeat."

"When I rise, I will make every last one of you repay this. Tenfold. A hundredfold."