Chapter 41 - 3#
Mingyu said, alarmed, “Does the guard station know?”
Jingzhe’s voice was steady. “They might. Or they might not.”
The guards had been run off their feet during those days — rushing about the palace suppressing gu insects at every turn, which was where the real danger lay. No one was going to spare much attention for how an aging female official had died. As for whatever had struck them as strange about the body — she was dead and gone, and not anyone of consequence. Even if someone had noticed something, there were a dozen reasons to let it be.
The fact that Nanny Ming had been buried without further incident said as much.
Her body had been handled and laid to rest without leaving any loose threads.
If Jingzhe hadn’t come today — drawn here by the system’s task — Sanshun would never have said a word to anyone.
Why Sanshun had kept quiet, Jingzhe could roughly guess.
Sanshun had always deeply respected Chen Mingde, who had been something between a master and a father to him. Nanny Ming had spent years antagonizing Chen Mingde, which made her an enemy in Sanshun’s simple reckoning. Sanshun was a little like a wolf pup in that way — if she was an enemy, her death was something to be glad of, because it meant Chen Mingde would no longer be bothered.
As it turned out, removing the thing Chen Mingde had been fighting against only meant there was nothing left to hold onto. He had let go of his last breath sooner than he might have otherwise.
Jingzhe: “Sanshun — going forward, if Heye or Lidong ever come looking for you, don’t listen to either of them.”
Mingyu added his weight to this: “And if anyone from the North Wing tries to take you anywhere, you say you have to check with me first, and bring them to me. Do you understand?”
Sanshun nodded, straightforward as always.
Jingzhe and Mingyu exchanged a glance. Mingyu told Sanshun to carry on with his beans, and followed Jingzhe back outside.
“You’ve found something, haven’t you?” Mingyu said directly. “Otherwise why come to the kitchens at this hour. It doesn’t make sense.”
Jingzhe chose his words carefully. “I can’t say for certain what it is yet. Something wasn’t right about Nanny Ming’s behavior, but it may well have something to do with me.”
Mingyu’s voice dropped instinctively. “Because of the Huang family? Or the Empress Dowager?”
Jingzhe looked at him.
He had never talked to Mingyu about any of this — certainly not about his family’s grudge.
Mingyu gave him a sharp smack on the back of the head, not entirely gentle. “Whenever there was palace gossip floating around, you never paid attention to any of it. But the instant anything even remotely connected to Shòukāng Palace came up — whatever you were doing, your hands would go still. I noticed that a long time ago.”
A detail so subtle that most people would have missed it. But Mingyu and Jingzhe had lived and worked alongside each other for a long time, and their friendship was a real one. How could he not have noticed?
Over time, Mingyu had come to a quiet conclusion: that Jingzhe’s unwilling arrival in the palace was connected to the Huang family in some way.
Jingzhe rubbed the back of his head, embarrassed, and exhaled. “I don’t think that’s it, actually.”
Nanny Ming didn’t look like someone who could have reached all the way to the Empress Dowager. The Noble Consort and Noble Consort De were even less likely — and especially the Noble Consort. Given everything she was capable of, she had no reason to go recruiting an aging official from the North Wing. She could use gu insects to gather information.
Jingzhe had heard from Rong Jiu that some gu insects could serve as spies.
If it wasn’t the Noble Consort or Noble Consort De, then he genuinely could not think of who else could be behind Nanny Ming.
Mingyu looked nervous. Jingzhe, by contrast, had settled into calm. “The people I care about aren’t in the North Wing anymore. Whatever scheming is going on there, that’s their business.”
He had come this far. He was not without resources and connections now. Whatever type of person Nanny Ming had been, she was not, in the end, worth fearing.
What was harder to account for was whoever might be behind her.
Jingzhe didn’t think there was anything about him worth scheming over.
Except for his history with the Huang family.
But the Huang family was nearly finished. What leverage would anyone have left to use?
“Better if it has nothing to do with you,” Mingyu said, frowning. “How do you manage to run into trouble everywhere you go?”
Jingzhe said helplessly, “This one isn’t my fault.”
Mingyu made a dismissive sound. “Sure, it seems that way now. But Lidong has been practically pressing his face up against you trying to sniff out what you are — and he was Nanny Ming’s man. And you still say it has nothing to do with you?”
Jingzhe’s skin crawled at the mental image. He shuddered visibly and looked pained.
What had he ever done to deserve Nanny Ming’s attention?
“You’ve forgotten? She was the one who recommended you to the imperial kitchens originally. And then Qian Qin died, and Noble Lady Liu died.” Mingyu lowered his voice further. “She hated you for that.”
All of Noble Lady Liu’s people had been killed. Every connection Nanny Ming had built up through that link had been severed in one stroke.
She knew, rationally, that Jingzhe wasn’t the one she should be directing her anger at. But what choice did she have? She could hardly lash out at the Emperor.
Jingzhe frowned. Now that Mingyu had put it that way, something else came to mind.
“Is there anything in the imperial kitchens made with persimmons? Any dishes?”
“What kind of question is that — this is where most of it gets made.”
“No, I mean — something specifically with persimmons. Any dishes.”
“Not at all.” Mingyu shook his head without hesitation. “It’s not something the palace sources. They simply don’t make it.”
He seemed to know where Jingzhe was going with this, and lowered his voice even further.
“There’s nothing. Don’t ask. The reason Qian Qin died the way he did — I suspect that persimmon broth had something to do with it.”
After settling in at the kitchens, he had worked this out after a while.
Persimmons were a common enough ingredient — used in dishes, in pickles, in preparations of all kinds. Even ordinary households made use of them.
But in the imperial kitchens, the ingredient simply didn’t exist.
When Jingzhe had made that dish for Chen Mingde back in the North Wing, it had only been possible because the North Wing happened to have a persimmon tree — one that had, in that one particular year, finally produced fruit for the first time.
After Chen Mingde recovered, the tree had gradually died and never greened again.
Jingzhe turned this over, and a dim understanding settled in. Perhaps the reason the tree, after all those years, had not survived that winter—
Was precisely because it had borne fruit.
Chen Mingde had not been able to let it stay.
What was it about persimmons that made them something the entire inner palace seemed to quietly erase from existence?
*
Qianming Palace blazed with light.
Half a month ago, the forecourt had been a scene of wreckage. Now there was no trace of it — the dark craters in the ground, the strange oversized incense urns, all of it gone. The broad, open forecourt was quiet, with only the soundless passage of patrolling guards to mark the time.
Shi Lijun moved through the corridor with a few attendants at her heel, making no more noise than the guards. That was what years of service in Qianming Palace required.
The Emperor’s temper did not flare often. But when it did, it cost lives. Apart from those immediately useful to Ning Hongrú and Shi Lijun, almost no one could count themselves safe from it.
Today’s court session was a case in point — the final ruling on the Huang family.
The Empress Dowager’s guess had been right.
Huang Yijie’s origins had misled many. She was not, in fact, truly of the Huang family, and a sentence of execution of the entire clan would rarely extend to a married-out daughter’s natal family. Especially when her mother had been a minor branch daughter born out of wedlock.
Even with some measure of punishment, it would not reach the degree of nine generations.
Once the person being tried was established as not a Huang by blood, the ministers speaking in the Huang family’s defense multiplied again. The Huang family itself seemed to feel there was room for hope — that this time, perhaps, they had a margin.
Today’s verdict in the imperial court had surprised everyone.
The Chen family: full execution. The Huang family’s main line: exiled without exception.
As sentences went, exile sounded considerably more humane than execution — life was preserved, which could be read as a kind of clemency.
But exile was a punishment that killed by degrees. Prisoners typically suffered cold and starvation on the road, and many never survived the journey. Those who survived had characters branded onto their bodies, a mark that could never be removed — something that, for the sons and daughters of noble families, would be a lifetime of degradation they might genuinely consider worse than a quick death.
And for a crime like attempted regicide, the exile was set at three thousand li. With a special clause: no pardon under any amnesty.
This was effectively a permanent death sentence for the Huang main line.
As for the collateral branches — the Emperor showed mercy. A handful of lesser Huang officials retained their posts.
On the surface, this was the Emperor being generous.
But anyone paying attention felt a chill run through them.
The Emperor had deliberately split the Huang family apart from the inside. The main line was entirely crushed. The collateral branches — who had always competed with the main line for resources — now saw an opening handed to them, and they would fight each other over it with far more ferocity than any outsider could. They would be the ones most invested in ensuring the main line never came back.
It was not a punishment. It was a dismantling.
Word had it that the Empress Dowager, upon receiving this news, smashed everything in her palace a second time.
The outcome was harsher than anything she had imagined.
Shi Lijun thought of this and felt something very close to satisfaction.
She rarely allowed herself emotional reactions. But in the entire inner palace, there were three people Shi Lijun had hated most.
One was the current Empress Dowager, still resident in Shòukāng Palace. The other two were long dead — the former Emperor, and Empress Dowager Cisheng.
The hatred for the latter two ran deeper than the first.
Speaking hatred for figures of such standing might seem beyond a female official’s place. But among all those who had stayed by the Emperor’s side long enough to reach today, who among them did not carry some form of grievance?
A grievance against the former Emperor. Against Empress Dowager Cisheng.
When the Emperor was young, he had not yet become what he was now. His temperament then had been cool rather than warm, but it could still be called gentle.
Shi Lijun had watched, with her own eyes, as the Emperor became what he was today. Watched him lose interest in everything, one thing at a time.
There was much the Emperor had known. Much he had understood. And yet beneath that cold and imperious exterior, something at the core had long since stopped caring. He held his own death with a strange ease, and sometimes Shi Lijun was gripped by a terrible intuition — that this Emperor was, perhaps, waiting for it.
But that intuition was too brutal to sustain, and she could never hold it long enough to apply it to him.
Even poisoned by something that should have killed him before twenty-five, the Emperor had kept walking forward, step by step. If not for Zong Yuanxin’s diagnosis, who could have detected what was wrong with him?
Zong Yuanxin had said: it is because he is too good at enduring. So good that he no longer notices.
Shi Lijun, in her waking hours and in her dreams, had spent years hating Empress Dowager Cisheng.
She entered the main hall. Crystal lamps hung throughout, filling the room with clear, brilliant light.
The Emperor was reading through memorials.
“Your Majesty.” The female official bowed with perfect deference. “This servant has brought the persons as requested.”
Behind Shi Lijun, in addition to the usual attendants, were two grandmotherly-looking women, each holding a red lacquered tray. Whatever was on the trays was not visible.
“Leave the things.”
The Emperor’s desk was stacked with documents — most of them, in truth, saying nothing of substance, though the Emperor had evidently read through all of them before setting them aside. The other stack, thinner, was what remained.
In matters of governance, the Emperor operated with a care that contradicted his temperament. Whatever his faults, he completed his official business before sleeping.
…Perhaps also, at some level, to ensure no one would wake him from it.
“Yes.”
Shi Lijun bowed and made to lead the attendants out, but caught a slight pause in the Emperor’s movement and stopped.
Read the room. Watch what is said and unsaid.
The Emperor’s cold gaze moved over the two red lacquered trays and settled on the two women behind Shi Lijun.
These two were, in fact, instructors — specifically, women assigned to princes and princesses upon their coming of age at fifteen, tasked with educating them in certain matters between men and women.
For a prince, such an occasion would typically also include several carefully selected, pleasant young palace maids. They would guide the prince through his education in these things.
But the Emperor had an extreme aversion to close contact with other people — women especially.
That was entirely the work of Empress Dowager Cisheng.
The emperor before him had paid no attention to any of this, and when the Empress Dowager of the time had dispatched the usual people, the ninth prince at the time had simply sent them away. Nothing further had come of it.
Which meant that in this particular area, the Emperor’s experience was, as Shi Lijun knew very well, entirely blank.
Today, the Emperor had apparently decided to address this. Which meant, Shi Lijun found, that she was unexpectedly moved.
However little interest the Emperor took in things of the flesh, he had at least been brought to accept a physician’s examination — perhaps the next step was, after all, possible. Could there be young princes and princesses?
Then she heard the Emperor ask: “When it is two men — what does one need to be mindful of?”
A voice that was always cold, but now carrying something unmistakable. Curiosity.
The two women’s expressions flickered, then settled. One of them stepped forward, bowed respectfully to the Emperor, and began to explain.
The Emperor appeared to be listening attentively.
Shi Lijun: “…”
Right. That had been foolish of her.
The “plaything” that had managed to stir something in the Emperor — enough to produce small, observable changes — was right there. The Emperor still carved out time to see him every month even during the most demanding stretches, maintaining that slightly ridiculous pretense of disguise.
Calculated that way, the effort the Emperor had invested in Jingzhe was considerably more than Shi Lijun had previously supposed.
This person had moved him.
Naturally, it was also this person who had given him desire.
Shi Lijun put away all thoughts of young princes and princesses and turned her mind to a different problem.
If the Emperor truly had his whole heart set on Jingzhe — when the day came that his identity was revealed, how could she help the Emperor hold onto this infinitely precious “plaything”?
This was not the kind that could be broken and replaced. This was a person — fragile, unpredictable, impossible to fully control.
Keeping a person alive, keeping a person close, was far harder than destroying or breaking something.
Shi Lijun had learned this the hard way, more times than she could count.
It came to her all at once, then — why an Emperor of this temperament had not, even now, shattered the ambiguous pretense between them.
In learning what it was to want something, the Emperor had also learned what it meant to protect something.
The Emperor’s favor, if revealed, would call down endless malice onto Jingzhe from every direction.
*
Author’s note:
Rong Jiu: (honestly, without all those other reasons) — because he’ll run.
Jingzhe: (blankly) Huh? Who’ll run?