Chapter 50 - 1#

Jingzhe moved fast, mind already working through his options. Where was the best place to hide for a few hours?

The Hall of Ancestral Worship was absolutely out.

His history with that place was nothing but disaster, and now whenever he so much as thought of it, something in him recoiled. He had managed to form no positive associations with it whatsoever across his entire time in the palace.

The Hall and he were simply enemies.

He’d come out of the imperial kitchens, and heading back toward the Directorate wasn’t ideal either — he’d pass far too many people on the way.

Jingzhe stopped short and turned left.

He needed somewhere to disappear for four hours, which meant until evening — just barely possible to slip back under cover of the approaching curfew.

Though by that point it would almost be midnight, and thinking about that gave him a headache.

“Hey. Who are you?”

A voice cut across him without warning. A man stepped into his path — from his dress, a senior eunuch from one of the palaces.

“What in the world are you wearing?”

Through the layers of handkerchief Jingzhe peered at the man’s face.

He didn’t recognize it.

But he recognized the voice.

The man he had heard that night — the one addressed as Kangman.

…Of all the coincidences.

“I have a growth on my face,” Jingzhe said. “It’s not pleasant to look at.”

What was Kangman doing here? This area was mostly the residential quarters of staff from the Directorate of Cleaning, the imperial kitchens, the Office of Miscellaneous Purchases — low-ranking servants. A senior eunuch from Yongning Palace had no obvious reason to be wandering through.

“A growth? Take those things off your face. Let me see.” Kangman’s voice carried a note of suspicion. “And where are you posted? Where is your identity token?”

There was a naturalness to his authority that expected compliance without effort.

Jingzhe took a step back. “It really is unsightly, and I would rather not. This is not a restricted area. I’m simply passing through and have violated no palace rules. I don’t understand why you’re pressing me like this.”

This was not Yongning Palace, and Kangman was not his superior. On what grounds did he have the right to demand anything?

A thin anger moved across Kangman’s face.

He was not unpleasant-looking, in truth — high-bridged nose, clean features. Only the cruelty in the set of his brow undid the effect.

Footsteps, and two junior eunuchs came hurrying up.

They saw the standoff between Kangman and Jingzhe, hesitated for just a moment, then lowered their heads and moved to stand behind him.

“Sir. It’s done.”

Kangman didn’t look at them. His eyes hadn’t moved from Jingzhe. “You two — go. Pull whatever that is off his face.”

The two junior eunuchs exchanged a glance and walked toward Jingzhe. “Excuse us,” one of them said, reaching out to grab at the handkerchief.

Jingzhe stepped back, frowning hard. “This is completely unreasonable. Stay away from me.”

The two eunuchs stopped. Then took a step back. Then another. Several steps, before they came to a halt.

Both of their expressions had shifted into something odd — and then, almost immediately, into something warmer and stranger still.

Kangman: “What are you two doing?”

Nothing in his voice indicated emotion. But the two eunuchs who knew him had already begun to tremble.

Kangman was angry.

One of them said, his voice unsteady: “I — I can’t refuse him.”

The other said nothing, but his body was shaking too, caught between impulses — his mind trying to follow Kangman’s order, to go grab this stranger, while something else in him had thrown up a sudden, irrational resistance.

He didn’t want to disobey a single word this stranger said.

Kangman’s expression darkened. He began to walk toward Jingzhe, eyes unblinking, fixed, as though trying to bite a piece out of him. “I suppose I’ll see for myself what’s so compelling about you… What’s the matter — are you frightened?”

He smiled when he saw Jingzhe instinctively step back.

Jingzhe’s face was blank. He was not, in fact, frightened. He wanted to be sick.

He had initially thought Kangman was relatively unaffected, but that sensation of being watched — fixed on him, unbroken — made him look more carefully, and he saw it: Kangman’s eyes had barely moved at all. Whether he was issuing orders, or walking, those eyes had stayed on Jingzhe the entire time.

That particular rigid quality of attention was deeply unpleasant.

…He was leaving now.

His face hadn’t been seen. Jingzhe turned and prepared to walk away quickly.

“And where do you think you’re going? Careful I don’t break your legs, and then just keep you fed—”

The sentence was foul enough that Jingzhe shuddered. He’d been holding himself back, but this finally used up his patience. He turned and put his fist into Kangman’s stomach.

The blow came without warning. Kangman’s eyes went wide. He reached out to grab Jingzhe’s arm — Jingzhe had already kicked the side of his knee, folding him down, and followed up with a punch to the head.

Kangman went down without another word.

Jingzhe exhaled. That felt good.

He’d been grinding his teeth through Kangman’s condescension from the start, and what came after had been even worse to listen to.

“You — you just knocked out Kangman…” one of the junior eunuchs said, stunned, and then looked up at Jingzhe. The expression on his face immediately softened into something else entirely. “Well. If it’s you…”

“Kangman has a very bad temper,” the other one added. “You — you should probably go quickly.”

Jingzhe closed his eyes briefly. These two were considerably softer than Kangman, and he couldn’t bring himself to do anything to them.

But the way they were looking at him was extremely strange.

“Then I’ll go now.”

He gave them a nod, stepped over Kangman, and moved on at speed.

“Um — do you want something to drink?”

“…Blood. Do you — do you like blood?”

Such an abrupt, awkward, skin-crawling question — even Jingzhe’s heart flinched.

“I’m not thirsty. Thank you. Goodbye.”

Jingzhe dropped these words without looking back and walked away.

What a mess.

He’d deal with the questions later, he thought. Once those few hours were up and he could go back, he was finding Shi’en and getting the full story.

About Kangman, and about the autumn banquet.

Especially the latter.

His visit to Zhu Erxi had been a last resort, and getting locked in a room afterward was understandable enough. But the events had unfolded in the afternoon — which meant Zhu Erxi had also been detained for several hours first, even though the poisoning hadn’t ended up in the food.

The poison had been in the tea.

Zhu Erxi had followed Jingzhe’s warning and kept a tight watch, leaving no openings. But the poison still went in — which meant the person behind it hadn’t specifically been targeting the imperial kitchens. The food had only been the chosen vehicle. When that route was blocked, the tea had served just as well.

That was why Task Ten had failed even after Jingzhe’s warning. He hadn’t stopped it from happening at all.

It didn’t particularly trouble him, in the end.

As long as the kitchens hadn’t been implicated.

But why poison the consorts?

How serious was the toxin?

He didn’t know any of it — Zhu Erxi had pushed him out before he could ask. That man and his refusal to answer questions.

Jingzhe had been carrying a stomach full of unanswered questions, planning to get back to the Directorate and find someone — Shi’en, most likely — who would have heard something. There was always someone who had heard something.

But the buff was still on him, and answers would have to wait until it wore off. Tonight, or tomorrow.

He was walking quickly, irritated, when he stopped dead.

Outside Zhengyang Gate, a tall figure stood with his back to the wall, looking up at a branch beyond the palace rampart. The leaves there had started to turn — the green giving way to pale yellow at the edges, that particular color that would hold through the whole of the coming season.

At the sound of footsteps, those dark eyes turned.

“You’ve kept me waiting.” Rong Jiu’s voice was perfectly unhurried. “At your usual pace it shouldn’t take this long. What got in your way?”

His face was very pale — that cool, bloodless kind of pallor, with just a trace of cold sharpness underneath.

A simple statement. And yet it landed with considerable force.

Jingzhe said weakly, “I ran into a few people. We had a friendly exchange. That’s what delayed me.”

“Friendly.” Rong Jiu weighted the word. “Come here.”

Jingzhe did not want to.

Firstly — was Rong Jiu not going to say anything about what was on his head? The fact that he hadn’t already commented was itself suspicious.

…Well. It couldn’t be anything good. Every previous encounter with the buff had produced a reaction.

Jingzhe moved toward him in small, hesitant steps.

“Doesn’t this look a little strange to you?” He gestured vaguely at his own face.

Rong Jiu’s hand closed around Jingzhe’s arm and pulled. “When are you not strange?”

The cool fingers plucked away the assorted coverings. Jingzhe, who had been prepared to defend them, let his hand twitch and then drop, muttering, “When am I strange?”

Fingertips traced lightly along Jingzhe’s jaw. “Why did you run when you saw me?”

This had been a chance encounter. Genuinely unplanned, and on Rong Jiu’s part, rare.

Had Jingzhe lingered a moment longer, he would have noticed that Wei Haidong — nominally Rong Jiu’s superior — was following behind him with careful deference, and that Qianming Palace’s head eunuch Ning Hongrú was in attendance as well. Jingzhe might not have recognized Ning Hongrú’s face, but he would have recognized the Qianming Palace livery.

A pity, Rong Jiu thought, brow lowering faintly. After holding himself back and suppressing the urge to test something, an opportunity had fallen into his lap from nowhere—

And Jingzhe had been too quick, and slipped away.

A rare flicker of frustration. Which expressed itself in a fingertip pressing more firmly into the side of Jingzhe’s face.

Jingzhe, with a thumb and finger dimpling his cheek, found that talking had become a challenge.

“You looked like you were in the middle of something serious. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

Said with complete sincerity, genuine thoughtfulness, absolute consideration for Rong Jiu’s time.

“Is that so.” Rong Jiu’s usually flat voice picked up, just barely, at the end. “Not because you didn’t want to be seen with me in public?”

The suggestion of a smile that wasn’t quite a smile — Jingzhe felt a small tremor move through him.

He knew where this man’s limits were. He was not going to nod.

“Of course not,” he said, definitively.

Rong Jiu inclined his head. “Then come and eat.”

…What?

The sudden pivot left Jingzhe scrambling.

“Eat — what? Where?”

“You’ve been in the imperial kitchens since this morning and still haven’t eaten anything, have you?”

Jingzhe had long since been forced to accept Rong Jiu’s awareness of his movements as a fact of life. The first few times it had been unsettling. By now he was mostly numb to it.

He had told Rong Jiu, more than once, to stop this. Rong Jiu had not changed in the least. There was very little room for negotiation on that front.

He let Rong Jiu lead him and studied his expression several times on the way, looking for something out of place.

Nothing.

Was it possible that this time, Rong Jiu was genuinely unaffected?

No, Jingzhe corrected himself before the thought could fully form. He had made this mistake too many times. Every time he’d thought that, he’d been wrong.

The buff left no angle uncovered.

The place Rong Jiu brought him to was not far — the guard quarters, of all places. For some reason, apart from the two men at the door, not a single person was inside.

Jingzhe gave him a questioning look.

“There was an incident at the autumn banquet,” Rong Jiu said. “Wei Haidong is with them, dealing with it.”

That made sense. An incident of that scale would generate considerable turbulence.

“Rong Jiu — what actually happened at the autumn banquet?”

Jingzhe followed him into a wide room. Rong Jiu had him go in and wait, disappeared outside briefly, then returned and finally answered.

“No one died at the autumn banquet.”

Only — while no one had died, a great many people had been seized with violent nausea, too weak to stand.

Noble Consort De herself, the event’s host, was not spared.

With nearly every consort who had attended incapacitated, and the Empress Dowager pleading illness and unavailable, the matter had been referred to Qianming Palace.

The Emperor had ordered the arrest and questioning of the imperial kitchens, the imperial tea and confections office, and all the florists and garden staff. Every person involved had been detained for separate interrogation.

The imperial physicians, meanwhile, had thrown their full effort into treating the consorts — checking pulses, dispensing medicine, administering salt and sugar water — and had, by degrees, pulled all of them back from the dangerous edge.