{√}My Womb ||YiZhan FF||

Chapter 1

"Load my luggage into the car."

Prince Zhuo Cheng's voice cut through the morning air with the precision of a blade—clean, final, accustomed to immediate obedience. He gestured toward one of his guards, a flick of the wrist that contained entire histories of command.

"Yes, Your Highness." The guard responded with a bow so deep it spoke of training drilled into muscle memory, of hierarchies so ancient they had become nature itself. He retrieved the leather bags and exited with measured steps, each footfall a testament to the architecture of power.

Zhuo Cheng surveyed the penthouse with calculated precision. His dark eyes swept across every corner—the Italian leather sofa with its hand-stitched seams, the side table bearing a Qing dynasty vase that had belonged to three generations of queens, the silk-draped bed where he had spent his final night within walls that had contained his entire existence. Nothing escaped his scrutiny. He was a man who despised oversight, who considered even the smallest forgotten item a personal failure, who measured his worth by the completeness of his possessions.

The soft click of heels announced his mother's entrance before she spoke. Queen Zhuo Lee paused at the threshold, observing her son as he conducted his inspection with the intensity of a general preparing for campaign. Though she had borne three children, Zhuo Cheng had always demanded the most vigilance—a truth that settled upon her heart this morning with particular heaviness, as if she already foresaw the distance that would grow between them.

"Where have you placed the remainder of your luggage?" she inquired, noting the absence of his traveling cases, the spaces where his presence had been.

"The guards have secured everything in the car, Mother." Zhuo Cheng turned, executing a nod flawless in its formality, its distance. "I am prepared to depart."

The Queen approached her firstborn, her Chanel suit whispering against marble with the sound of water over stone. She reached up to straighten his collar—a gesture she had performed since his childhood, though he now stood a full head taller, though the collar needed no adjustment, though they both understood this was not about the collar at all.

"My son," she began, her voice soft yet carrying the gravity of her station, the weight of a mother's final opportunity, "you must exercise utmost caution once you reach your destination. The Chong Community is not the palace. Its people are not courtiers who will bow to your every whim." She held his gaze, willing him to truly hear, to understand what she could not speak aloud. "Make wise decisions. Should you encounter challenges beyond your management, do not let pride prevent you from seeking your father's counsel—either through message or in person."

Her advice flowed from deep understanding, from twenty-four years of watching this child become this man. She knew her son intimately—his arrogance, his pride, his troubling capacity for casual cruelty. Prince Zhuo Cheng possessed a demeanor that shifted between charm and menace without warning, a selfishness that placed his desires above all other considerations, a belief that the world existed to be shaped by his will.

He was the type of royal who took what he wanted and asked permission only as an afterthought, if at all.

She had watched him throughout his twenty-four years as he leveraged his princely status to attain every object of his desire, employing wealth as both sword and shield, punishment and reward. He would achieve his aims—of this, his mother had no doubt. Her fear lay in how he would achieve them, particularly now, as he prepared to descend upon the Chong Community, where he would hold absolute authority over villagers with no recourse against his power, no protection from his whims.