Silent Wheel, Fading Thorns

I was the real young master who was swapped at birth. The night I came home, my mother pointed to a red and black spinning wheel and said, “Spin red, and you can make a request. Spin black, and you obediently follow the rules.” I thought I finally had a home. But for three whole years, my younger brother always landed on red, and I always on black. All the cool toys and the sunny room went to him. Even when I was sick and bedridden, wanting a sip of water, I had to wait for his cartoons to finish. On New Year’s Eve, burning with a fever of forty degrees Celsius, I coughed blood, begging my mother to take me to the hospital. “Old rules,” she said, pulling out the spinning wheel again. I desperately exerted all my strength, secretly pressing my finger against the back of the wheel. For the first time, the pointer slid towards red. My eldest sister grabbed me. “Ethan! Even if your luck is terrible, you can’t cheat!”