An old saying always struck General Guo Quan as a universal truth; a tiger would not have a dog for a son. Coming from a long line of established generals, who had been keeping the southwestern borders and feudal lords at bay ever since the start of the dynasty, he had taken pride in this fact. He was certain that if his wives had managed to bear him male heirs, they would also be exemplars of this statement.
But the reverse was also true; a dog was a dog and could not raise a tiger.
(1) Hardened wings: a saying that a child had grown independent of a benefactor's/mentor's/parent's influence and was no longer controllable.
(2) The fox mourned the rabbit's death: this strange-sounding expression comes from the story behind the idiom, where a fox and a rabbit, came together in an unlikely alliance against the humans hunting them. When the rabbit was shot to death by an arrow, the fox wept for it but also because it knew that it would not be able to survive for long too. Means to sympathise with those in the same plight.
A/N: Thank you very much for reading! <3 I am still recuperating and playing catch up with my other work but hopefully everything will be back on schedule soon! I am also trying very, very hard to finish volume 2 x.x but can promise that volume 3 (and further, uh, spicy developments between our MC and ML) are really close now!