Chapter 41 - 2#

After the spring infestation, most of the palace’s occupants had developed a particular aversion to insects of any kind — including cicadas — and servants were regularly dispatched to clear them away.

Which meant cicadas were only heard at all in a few quieter corners of the Directorate.

Jiang Jinming disliked them too, but he had been far too busy lately to direct anyone to deal with it, and the sound was left to come and go as it pleased.

Jiang Jinming was busy, and so Jingzhe was busy alongside him — out early, back late, returning in the evening dimness barely in time to catch supper.

Huiping always set food aside for him, taking care to choose things that wouldn’t spoil too quickly.

One evening Jingzhe came back to find Huiping sitting in the doorway, making use of the last of the fading light to work on a shoe sole.

The bottom of his old shoes was nearly coming off. Huiping was not particularly skilled at this kind of work, and only ever got around to repairs when he had no other choice.

Jingzhe finished his meal in a few bites, wiped his mouth, and stepped out.

“Give it here.”

He couldn’t watch Huiping hold the thing up and squint at it any longer. He took it over, held it without bothering to angle it toward the light, and by feel alone stitched it back together in short order.

Huiping put the shoe on and walked a few laps back and forth, smiling. “That’s finally comfortable. I’ve been worried about it falling off.”

Jingzhe: “You should get a new pair soon. These look like they’re a size too small.”

Huiping: “I’ve worn these so long that something roomier just feels wrong.” He sat back down and exhaled.

The air outside still held a little coolness. The evening breeze moved through pleasantly.

“What are you sighing about?”

“Ha — just thinking that things are better now than they used to be.” Huiping smiled. “Have you noticed the food has improved?”

Jingzhe was mildly surprised. He hadn’t, actually.

He had preferences about food, but he’d come up in the North Wing, where even what was served to the masters sometimes had a faint sour smell. The people who served them ate considerably worse. As long as it filled his stomach, Jingzhe had never been particularly sensitive about such things.

Huiping took one look at Jingzhe’s expression and knew immediately that he hadn’t noticed anything.

“Before — especially in summer — whatever you put in your mouth usually had something off about it. Except for the head official’s share, which was better. The rest of us were barely treated as people.” Huiping leaned against the doorframe and spoke at his own unhurried pace. “Not that you had much choice but to eat it. But now — there’s nothing wrong with the taste at all.”

Not just nothing wrong with it — it was noticeably better than before, as though they’d been assigned a different cook. There was even the occasional bit of meat.

That, for them, counted as a small luxury.

Huiping compared the memory of past meals to the present reality and felt, naturally, that life had grown considerably more worth living.

Jingzhe smiled and patted Huiping’s shoulder. “One day you’ll make head official yourself. Things will be even better then.”

Huiping laughed. “If I’m waiting for that, I’d rather wait for you.”

Jingzhe shook his head with a smile. “Don’t say that.”

By all reasonable expectation, Jiang Jinming had a good many years left in his current position, and Jingzhe would remain his right hand at best.

Besides — Jingzhe had other things weighing on him lately.

The Huang family, specifically.

Zheng Hong had apparently guessed at Jingzhe’s interest and had been quietly passing him news about them with some regularity, clearly gathering the information on purpose.

The Emperor moved fast. The verdict on the Huang family was due within days.

This occupied his thoughts, though nothing of it showed on his face.

If anything, the people in the Directorate would have said Jingzhe had been in unusually good spirits lately — greeting everyone he passed with a ready smile, not once looking downcast.

The worry was for an outcome still undecided. The good humor was the quiet certainty that whatever the outcome, the Huang family would not escape judgment.

The staffing gaps left by the infestation had been gradually filled. The chaos had settled. The strange, persistent incense smell had finally cleared from the palace’s corridors.

The Hall of Ancestral Worship was still being rebuilt. On mornings when Jingzhe passed that way, he could hear the faint sound of construction work from inside.

Jiang Jinming’s recent busyness had something to do with that, among other things.

Jingzhe kneaded his shoulder and looked out at the deepening dusk. The last of the sun dragged a strange red stain across the ground, like blood soaked into the earth.

“What are you thinking about?”

Jingzhe had been quiet for long enough that Huiping finally asked.

“I’m trying to figure out what to give as a gift.”

That remained, genuinely, a problem.

Rong Jiu had given him so many things. Reciprocating properly wasn’t something Jingzhe could avoid, and it wasn’t something he wanted to avoid — but what could you give to Rong Jiu?

Rong Jiu’s relationship with his parents was not good, and his own poison was bound up with his mother in particular, so Jingzhe had carefully steered away from any conversation about birthdays. The last thing he wanted was to try to do something kind and accidentally make things worse.

But nothing else had suggested itself, no matter how long he thought.

He couldn’t keep making clothes indefinitely — even if Rong Jiu seemed to wear them with some frequency.

The last time they’d shared a bed, Jingzhe had noticed that Rong Jiu was in fact wearing what he’d made. The fabric and stitching were unmistakably familiar.

Huiping: “What does he like? Or is there something he tends to want?”

Jingzhe’s expression went a little strange.

He likes killing things. He likes watching animals fight each other. Those were the answers Shi Li had provided, and they were entirely useless.

Jingzhe rubbed his temples. At least there was no urgency. He could keep thinking. Eventually something would come to him.

[That booklet.]

The system spoke up suddenly.

Jingzhe: “Absolutely not.”

He said it without hesitation.

Anything else — maybe. But that—

Unless Rong Jiu’s mushroom could be considerably smaller, Jingzhe felt he might not survive the experience.

He was willing to sacrifice his dignity when called for. He was not willing to go present himself before the King of Hell.

Oh, the system mused inside his head, in a tone of genuine discovery. So human mating can result in death.

Jingzhe: “…That’s not what I meant!”

The system was occasionally very stupid.

Jingzhe thought this with a blank expression.

It wasn’t that the possibility had never crossed his mind — that he might somehow be the one in the more active position. Only, first, he still hadn’t been honest with Rong Jiu, and didn’t dare reveal that he was a fake eunuch. And second — there was the matter of Rong Jiu’s presence.

Someone that cold, that dominant — however confident Jingzhe was in himself, he genuinely did not believe he could hold Rong Jiu down.

…And from the handful of near-misses they’d had, Rong Jiu clearly had no intention of offering him the opportunity.

Insufferable.

[Task Eight: Investigate the cause of Nanny Ming’s death.]

The task arrived without warning. Jingzhe and the system were both silent for a moment before the system spoke again.

[Host, this falls within the adjusted range of tasks the host should be able to complete.]

The adjustments the system had mentioned before — whatever process they involved, they had finally produced something concrete. But hearing this, Jingzhe found himself asking:

“The original main objective was to assist Prince Rui in ascending the throne. What is the objective now?”

[The system’s purpose in assisting Prince Rui’s ascension was always to prevent the Emperor’s harmful actions and halt the decline of the Hèlián dynasty."]

The goal was never specifically Prince Rui becoming emperor. That was only ever the means to the real end — preventing the catastrophe of borders overrun, the country shattered.

If “help Prince Rui take the throne” were the literal main objective, then no number of Jingzhes could ever change that outcome.

Jingzhe pressed his fingers to his temple. “But what does investigating Nanny Ming have to do with saving the country?”

[See the large in the small. See the whole in the part.]

Jingzhe pursed his lips. If the system hadn’t brought her up, he might have nearly forgotten about her.

She had died before even Chen Mingde, killed during the infestation — her body found by the guards, then quietly buried somewhere by now, in all likelihood.

Exhuming the body to examine it was out of the question. But the guard station should have an incident report, and Chen Mingde had been alive when Nanny Ming died, which meant the information would have been passed to him. Perhaps a few words had been exchanged.

Sanshun had been at Chen Mingde’s side throughout. He might know something.

Huiping watched in slight bewilderment as Jingzhe suddenly got to his feet, dropped a few words about heading to the imperial kitchens, and walked out at speed.

Huiping looked at the sky. “The imperial kitchens at this hour. That seems rather late,” he murmured.

*

Sanshun had been in the kitchens for some days now, and had become more popular there than even Mingyu.

Simple reason: he was immensely strong and guileless by nature, and when anyone asked for help, he generally just helped. That kind of strength — capable, it was said, of lifting a full-grown pig — made him an invaluable presence, and everyone wanted a piece of it.

Mingyu didn’t try to stop people from making use of Sanshun’s strength, but he did step in at anything excessive, and spent time each evening explaining to Sanshun which requests were reasonable to accept and which weren’t.

Sanshun was not the quickest, but he was biddable.

“Jingzhe. Here.”

Mingyu led Jingzhe to their quarters — conveniently, he and Sanshun shared a room. Inside, Sanshun’s large frame was folded onto a small stool as he applied himself, with careful concentration, to shelling something.

“Sanshun’s grip is too strong for fine work,” Mingyu said. “I have him practice with this. If he keeps at it, he’ll get control eventually.”

If he wanted to do more than chop wood and tend fires for the rest of his life, he needed to develop precision. His strength was an asset in the kitchen — it just needed to be directed.

Sanshun heard their voices and looked up, breaking into an uncomplicated smile. “Jingzhe.”

He seemed lighter than before. The kitchens kept him endlessly busy, but for someone like Sanshun, that was not entirely a bad thing. The more there was to do, the less there was to think about — and complicated thinking was not where Sanshun’s strengths lay.

This made Jingzhe hesitate. Asking Sanshun about the North Wing might stir up old grief.

But before Jingzhe could decide how to approach it, Sanshun brought it up himself.

He was concentrating on the beans, very careful with his fingers. “Jingzhe — will I ever be able to leave the palace and visit Master?”

By “visit,” he clearly meant pay his respects at a grave.

Ordinary palace servants — eunuchs especially — did not leave easily.

Jingzhe didn’t offer false comfort. He laid out the realistic possibilities for Sanshun and concluded: “Within the next three or four years, probably not. You’d need to find someone to tend his grave in your place for now.”

Mingyu gave Jingzhe a look that said he found this a little blunt, then patted Sanshun’s shoulder. “It can’t be done now, but who’s to say about the future? Your master cared about you most of all. He’d understand.”

Sanshun didn’t look sad. He just nodded, with a quiet certainty.

Jingzhe: “Sanshun — there’s something I want to ask you.” He raised the subject of Nanny Ming.

“I can’t work out why she would go out in the rain that day.”

Mingyu interjected dryly: “Some people did.”

Jingzhe coughed. “That was different.”

Sanshun rubbed his head — transferring some bean peel onto his forehead in the process. “The one who served Nanny Ming was always Heye. That day, she was the one who sent Nanny Ming out. They exchanged a few words at the door, and then Nanny Ming left in a hurry.”

Mingyu had spent more months in the North Wing than Jingzhe. He had some memory of Nanny Ming and the new Heye.

“Now that you mention it — after the old Heye died, Nanny Ming was low for a long time. I thought she’d stay that way. But once the new Heye arrived, she seemed to pull herself back together.” He paused. “And I always had the sense that Lidong and she were in contact somehow.”

Sanshun nodded along.

Jingzhe had noticed Lidong’s strangeness during his visit to the North Wing.

“After Nanny Ming died — who identified the body? How was it handled?”

Sanshun still remembered this.

After the infestation ended, Chen Mingde had grown worse — sitting inside all day, rarely able to rise. When the palace maids raised the alarm about Nanny Ming’s disappearance, it had been Sanshun who went to look.

Nanny Ming had gone out in the rain, into the infestation. Everyone had known what that most likely meant.

A day or so later, the guard station came to ask about her.

By the time they found her, there wasn’t much left to look at. The palace maids refused to go near it, and so Sanshun had been the one to identify the body.

Sanshun gestured as he described it: “The body wasn’t complete. The gu insects had consumed a lot of it. Her palace robe was torn open, bitten through in multiple places. I identified her from her boots and what was left of her clothing.” His expression was detached. Familiarity with the deceased had not translated, for Sanshun, into particular feeling.

Sanshun had always been slow to emotion — except with the handful of people he was close to.

Jingzhe went still. “Torn open…”

Mingyu, who had been listening from the side, looked up. “Is something wrong with that word?”

Jingzhe didn’t answer immediately. He turned to Sanshun: “When you said torn open — do you mean the kind of clean cut a smooth edge makes? Not a tear, not a snag — not the kind of damage you’d get from catching it on something sharp?”

Sanshun described things in terms of what he actually saw. He would never add words he didn’t need. If he said something was torn open, it would not be frayed or snagged — it would not be what an insect bite looked like. It would not be what branches and debris did to fabric.

Clothes did not come apart cleanly without a reason.

Unless something had cut through them.

Sanshun scratched his face, hesitating. His voice dropped. “I think Nanny Ming was killed.”

Mingyu drew in a sharp breath and looked at Jingzhe.

He had just realized, with a slight jolt, that Jingzhe’s visit to the kitchens tonight had not been a coincidence.

Jingzhe: “But you never told anyone. Not even Grandpa De.”

Sanshun nodded slowly.

“Nanny Ming’s robe was cut through from behind — a small tear, but it didn’t look like a bite mark. Up close, it looked more like a knife had gone through.” He said it plainly. “She may have been killed, or wounded, and left in the infestation.”