The patriarch's face became livid as he said, "If we can't take care of the geniuses of our family, then what will we use to prosper and grow?"
Then he pointed at Augustus and said, "I blame you for this matter. Your wife has part of the blame, but she is not a member of this family. She wasn't raised in this family, so she is allowed to be ignorant and afraid for her child."
"But you were raised here. You know how this family treats each other. And you also knew how talented your son was. You knew that he was more talented than you and would overtake you one day. Yet you remained indifferent to him."
"Even if his talent is equal to yours, that makes him a seed for the third mortal coil. That is already more than enough to overcome his identity as a bastard. But you refused to acknowledge him. You blamed him for the sin of his mother and left him in the wilds to fend for himself."
"You didn't have to love him. No one is asking you to do that. But you should have put the interest of the family above your vendetta against your scheming wife and your innocent son. You could have at least informed the patriarchs, and we would have changed his identity into a true son."
After the patriarch was done ranting, he asked Augustus, "Tell me, was what you did right?"
Augustus was also looking down. He shook his head and said, "No, it wasn't patriarch."
He had thought about elevating Arthur's identity into a true child of the family, but he didn't do so because he didn't want Vena to win.
Vena had used her pregnancy to live and latch onto his family like some parasites. If she hadn't been pregnant for him, he might have killed her for drugging him. She would at least have been punished severely for doing such a thing.
She took advantage of his vulnerability when he was weak, and then she drugged him. If she had wanted to kill him, she could have easily done so when he was passed out after being drugged, or she could have just poisoned him. So it was a serious matter.
What she did made him very angry. So he wanted to punish her. But she became pregnant, which made her a member of the family. She became his mistress because she bore his child.
That was how far he was willing to let her get away with what she had done. Making Arthur a true child of the family would have elevated her status and made her earn more for her despicable actions against him.
He didn't do what he should have done for Arthur, so now he is being blamed for it by a patriarch of the family. He can't even defend himself because he knows that what he did was selfish and the patriarch is right to blame him.
He tried to appease the patriarch by saying, "You are right. I shouldn't have treated him that way."
Unfortunately, the Patriarch wasn't appeased. He snorted and said, "Of course I'm right. Do I need you to tell me that? Did I ask you if what I said was right or wrong?"
Augustus didn't know how to reply, so he kept his mouth shut.
The patriarch didn't need him to talk anyway. The man still had a lot more to say.
"You can become a patriarch in the future, so you should know that family is very important. A family is a mountain. It is made of small rocks, which are individuals."
"Every individual in the mountain can use the power of the mountain for themselves. So making the mountain become bigger is a good thing, and it is very important. But the bigger the mountain can get is dependent on the number, size, and quality of the rocks that make it up."
"If it were up to me, I would force every descendant of the family to give birth in any way possible, and the family would take care of all of them. But I can't do that because we don't have the resources."
"The resources we have can only take care of the true children of the family and the bastards of the true children. If we want to get more resources, we need more power, and if we want to get more power, we need more talented children."
"Yet, we got a talented child, and you let him go because you didn't like his mother. I don't care if you like his mother or not, and I wouldn't care about the boy if he weren't talented. But he is talented, so I am very angry about what you've done."
The patriarch pointed at both of them in turn and said, "I blame both of you. One of you is an opportunistic gold digger while the other is a stubborn mule who can't even let an innocent and talented child go. You're both to be blamed for the atrocity, and you will be punished for it."
Both Vena and Arthur kept their heads down and accepted the blame without any excuse.
"We lost the talented rock that should have been part of our mountain. Now it is almost too late to recover him. He doesn't need anything from the family anymore. Whatever we can give him, he can get on his own or through a sect. I can only try to make up for it with my precious bow."
Augustus was surprised when he heard that. He looked up and said, "That was your bow? I thought it looked a lot familiar."
The patriarch walked forward and knocked Augustus lightly on his head. Augustus held his head in pain while the patriarch berated him some more.
"Yes, it is my bow. It is a precious rank 3 bow. I had to give him my precious bow as an investment because of your stupidity. And you dare say it is familiar. Of course it is familiar, you stubborn mule of a man."