Chapter 50 - 2#

Uncontrolled vomiting and purging might look ordinary at first glance, but if it couldn’t be stopped it would quickly become life-threatening.

Autumn crab, however cold in nature, would at most cause discomfort in someone with a delicate constitution. It would not produce a reaction of this scope.

A wave this sweeping had nothing to do with ordinary food incompatibility.

While the other physicians were occupied with treatment, Zong Yuanxin wandered through the banquet hall at his own pace — pausing to smell the lingering crab fragrance, tasting a piece of the flower arrangement, dipping a chopstick into cups of hot wine and cold tea in turn. The sequence of behavior struck everyone who saw it as deeply peculiar.

Wei Haidong came over, frowning. “Imperial Physician Zong — have you found anything?”

The interrogations were still underway, but the number of people present at the autumn banquet was enormous. Just counting the servants brought by the individual palace households ran into the dozens, to say nothing of the imperial kitchens and tea service.

Zong Yuanxin: “I’m not fully certain yet, but the agent isn’t in the food. The imperial kitchen interrogations can be moved to the back of the queue — start with the imperial tea service.”

Wei Haidong, sharp: “The poison was in the tea?”

“I said I’m not fully certain.” Zong Yuanxin gave him a flat look. “Don’t try to extract a definitive answer from me.”

He wanted no part in the palace’s sordid business. If Wei Haidong acted on his tentative suggestion and it turned out to be wrong, the blame would land on him.

That said, Zong Yuanxin had indeed tasted something familiar in the tea. Very faint, folded into the fragrance of the tea leaves themselves, almost impossible to catch.

Wei Haidong exhaled. “Even if it was in the tea, that doesn’t mean the person who put it there came from the imperial tea service.” With this many people at the autumn banquet, someone could have slipped past the tea service’s precautions and added something without being caught. Finding them would not be easy.

Wei Haidong left with a headache.

By the time the interrogations concluded, the imperial kitchens had the smallest degree of culpability, which was why Zhu Erxi had been released first. Most of the tea service staff had also been allowed to return, but the remainder — along with the servants brought by the various palace households — were still being held.

Jingzhe listened, then couldn’t help saying: “That imperial physician — it sounds like he never actually called it poison.”

He had consistently used the word medicine.

Rong Jiu reached over and patted Jingzhe on the head with something like approval. “It wasn’t poison. Autumn crab is cold in nature and already likely to cause discomfort in excess — the women of the inner palace are delicate, and when you add the impact of an extreme-cold substance on top of that, the reaction comes quickly.”

Jingzhe: “But this… administering medicine like this served no real purpose.”

No one had died. Everyone was just unwell.

Causing this much disruption, on top of so much public embarrassment, would earn whoever was behind it nothing but the bitter hatred of every consort involved. All that trouble with nothing to show for it — unless the person simply wanted to vent their malice? Just wanted to watch others humiliated?

Jingzhe could be perceptive in some areas and, in others, almost naïve.

Rong Jiu’s voice was even. “This autumn banquet was the first major event Noble Consort De has hosted. She put a great deal of effort into making it go smoothly.”

This was nearly an explicit statement.

Jingzhe looked up, surprised. “Is that the only reason?”

To undermine Noble Consort De’s reputation?

Rong Jiu: “Perhaps there are other reasons.”

He didn’t commit to it, but even this was enough to make Jingzhe quiet.

An incident like this at an event she hosted would humiliate Noble Consort De thoroughly — made worse by the fact that she had fallen ill herself, her dignity in ruins before her own guests.

And the first choice had been to put it in the food.

If that had gone through cleanly, it would have looked as though the food at the autumn banquet was simply bad — most people didn’t have Zong Yuanxin’s ability, and outsiders would never have known the difference.

If everything had gone as planned, then: the food at the autumn banquet was substandard, leaving the consorts violently ill, their lives at risk. The host, Noble Consort De, would be stripped of her standing, and the entire imperial kitchen would be implicated.

That was why the system, the moment it had energy to spare, had chosen to warn Jingzhe.

It had run the calculations and determined that this was something the host would care about.

Jingzhe couldn’t imagine losing Mingyu.

Or Zhu Erxi, or Sanshun.

Jingzhe said quietly, “How does it come to this? Just for a position in the inner palace?” There was something almost lost in his voice.

Because the Emperor found it amusing.

Qianming Palace had, in its way, always permitted this kind of madness to flourish. Noble Consort Zhang with her affair. The ambitions that followed. The chaos of the autumn banquet today. All of it, at its root, was the atmosphere that permeated the inner palace — that invisible, distorting pressure.

Twisted beyond recognition. Strange beyond comprehension.

“With Huang Yijie stripped of the Noble Consort rank, Noble Consort De is now the highest-ranked consort in the palace,” Rong Jiu said. “Pull her down, and there’s room for someone else to rise.”

Jingzhe found this hard to follow. “But you said the Emperor doesn’t care about the inner palace at all — so what does it matter who’s at the top?”

“Whoever climbs over the others’ bones holds more power within these walls.” Rong Jiu’s smile had nothing warm in it. “The Empress Dowager is claiming illness. If Noble Consort De loses her position, someone needs to manage the inner palace.”

Jingzhe exhaled and admitted, privately, that his own capacity for this kind of thinking was woefully insufficient.

Just then, footsteps outside. A person in guard’s clothing walked in, carrying an enormous food hamper.

Jingzhe instinctively started to stand. Rong Jiu’s hand closed around his arm, holding him in place.

He paused and looked at Rong Jiu questioningly. The guard had already come forward and was setting the hamper on the table.

“Shi Li?”

Jingzhe recognized the face and felt some of the tension leave him. At least it was someone he knew.

Shi Li: “I brought food.”

His expression was somewhat rigid. He opened the hamper and, with practiced efficiency, produced dish after dish from within, filling the table completely before he was done.

Jingzhe: “…This is too much.”

There were only two of them.

Jingzhe glanced at Shi Li. Shi Li, alert to the look, said immediately, “I’ve already eaten.”

He set out two sets of chopsticks and bowls, and then vanished through the door at something very close to a run.

Jingzhe hesitated. “Is he very afraid of you?”

Shi Li’s behavior had shown no sign of buff influence whatsoever. What it showed instead was reverence — unmistakable, deeply felt, fully expressed.

He had wanted to ask about this earlier and hadn’t had the chance. Seeing Shi Li again, he couldn’t hold it back.

“Is he?” Rong Jiu reached for his chopsticks with no particular concern. “I’m fairly easygoing, most of the time.”

Ha. Most of the time.

Jingzhe coughed and let it go. The more he said, the more he’d be throwing Shi Li to the wolves. If anything, the young man was probably happiest the less Rong Jiu thought about him.

Jingzhe picked up his chopsticks.

He filled Rong Jiu’s bowl first, then began selecting things for himself at a leisurely pace.

Rong Jiu looked down at his bowl and seemed, for a brief moment, genuinely surprised.

Their shared meals were rare — only two or three occasions — and Jingzhe had been wary of him even then. And yet he had remembered.

Jingzhe felt the man watching him and looked up. Rong Jiu raised his chopsticks. “Eat.”

Which somehow made Jingzhe eat slower.

He couldn’t explain it, but the words always gave him the feeling that once he’d finished, he was going to be slaughtered.

He was taking his time working through his bowl when he noticed something odd on the table beside Rong Jiu’s hand — a dish that appeared to be made with blood.

What blood, it was hard to say.

But surely this kind of thing was something most people found off-putting? And Rong Jiu—

Jingzhe couldn’t picture Rong Jiu actually wanting to eat this. From what he’d observed, Rong Jiu tended toward lighter flavors. Not fond of sweet or oily. Not fond of spice.

When he watched Rong Jiu pick up another piece, he couldn’t help himself.

“You’re not — you actually like this?”

His gaze indicated the dish.

“Isn’t there an old saying — you are what you eat?” Rong Jiu said, with a slightly peculiar smile. “Better to be prepared.”

Jingzhe’s chopsticks suddenly felt like they weighed a thousand catties.

…What did that mean?

Jingzhe: “That saying isn’t exactly reliable. If I eat a lot of chicken wings, I don’t expect to fly.”

Rong Jiu’s voice carried something cool and mocking. “If you could fly, I’d have to net the entire inner palace first, to stop you from flapping your way out.”

Right. Food. Focus on the food.

Jingzhe went back to his bowl.

His eyes kept drifting back to the dish regardless.

“You want to try it?”

Jingzhe shook his head immediately.

Rong Jiu: “Then if you ever want to—” From somewhere below the table, he produced a short knife. The cold sheath came away; the blade turned slowly at the tip of his fingers before settling flat on the table.

He angled the blade toward himself and nudged the safer handle end toward Jingzhe.

“You can always try.”

His voice was perfectly calm. But in the dark of his eyes, something burned — the fixed, hungry patience of a predator.

Jingzhe looked at the full table of food and felt a deep sense of unease.

“I,” he said, with some difficulty, “prefer things warm.”

Rong Jiu said, softly: “Blood from a living body is also warm.”

Those pale fingers moved along the blade’s edge. Jingzhe watched, afraid to blink, half-convinced the next moment would bring a sudden gash.

“I — no. I’m not going to drink human blood.” He shook his head definitively. “Even if it’s warm.”

Rong Jiu seemed to consider this, and withdrew the blade.

Jingzhe had just started to breathe again, assuming the matter was settled, when Rong Jiu rolled back his sleeve, exposing a pale stretch of forearm.

A premonition hit Jingzhe like a hand to the chest. He was on his feet before the thought was fully formed.

The blade opened the skin in near-silence. The smell of blood reached him immediately — a sweet, sharp, impossible thing.

The craving came first. Then a thirst he couldn’t place. Before he could work out what either of those feelings meant, he was already moving — standing in front of Rong Jiu, staring at what was dripping from his arm, somewhere between compelled and appalled.

The cut wasn’t deep, but the blood came freely.

Jingzhe pressed his fingers to his own temples, furious and faintly dazed. He turned for the door.

“I’ll get someone.”

He made it two steps.

Shi Li, faithfully stationed outside, felt his foot shift — then heard a voice like cold water.

“Anyone who enters dies.”

Shi Li became, as his name suggested, a stone. Rooted to the spot outside the door.

He suppressed the urge to charge in. Closed his eyes against the strange pull from inside.

Don’t move.

If he went in, the Emperor would actually kill him. Shi Li was quite certain of this.

Whatever the Emperor felt toward the person in that room was unlike anything he showed anyone else — that unsettling, consuming possessiveness was frightening to witness.

Inside, the scene had taken on a quality of its own.

Jingzhe was pressed into the chair. Rong Jiu stood before him, cutting off every direction of escape. One finger traced the wound and came away red. “Why won’t you drink? You want to.”

The smell was thickening. Jingzhe felt it with every breath — that warm, strange sweetness curling through his lungs, filling him with something he could not name. He clamped his teeth onto his lower lip and held down the urge to shout.

“I’m not going to.”

He knew now that he was affected too.

Not just the others. Him.

His hands had locked around the arms of the chair, white-knuckled, tendons standing out sharply. He had not moved an inch.

Rong Jiu’s voice became something almost tender — cold still, but with warmth moving beneath it, soft in a way that was more dangerous than anything louder. “Don’t you care for me? Don’t you want to have me?”

For one unguarded moment Jingzhe felt his mind beginning to give — to the face, the voice, the tone of it, all of it pressing in at once. This man, when he chose to be, could be devastating in ways that bypassed reason entirely.

Jingzhe shook his head hard. He stopped speaking. He pressed his hand over his own mouth and nose, afraid to breathe in again.

The fact that he could honestly describe the smell of blood as sweet was enough to make him feel sick with himself.

He held his jaw shut, tasted the flood of wanting behind his teeth. Madness.

He shook his head again, exhausted, and still could not bring himself to give in.

Rong Jiu exhaled — a sound that contained something held down with effort. His teeth shifted slightly; a tremor, brief. Something voracious surfaced in his eyes for just a moment, a creature glimpsed.

Wet, cold fingers pressed over Jingzhe’s white-knuckled hands, blood-stained, with a grip that could have snapped something. Jingzhe felt the pressure to the bone.

His hands were wrenched away. Rong Jiu gripped his face. “You need this—”

Jingzhe grabbed at Rong Jiu’s arm, struggling. “I don’t—” Two blood-slicked fingers pushed past his teeth, and the taste of blood landed on his tongue.

The hunger that ignited was total. It scoured through him like fire through dry wood — every nerve, every reflex — and his body shook with the force of it.

The tongue pinned flat, the little resistance he had left overwhelmed, Rong Jiu raised his wrist and pressed the wound to Jingzhe’s mouth. The blood that reached him in that instant sent a tremor through his whole body.

No—

Jingzhe’s fingers had gone white, gripping so hard they had no strength left. The frenzy of wanting and the last scraps of resistance flickered in his eyes, his breathing uneven, burning.

And still, by some inch-by-inch effort, he managed to pull Rong Jiu’s arm away.

The wet fingers withdrew. The blood on them was gone.

Jingzhe had swallowed a first mouthful.

He doubled forward, the slick heat of it making him want to heave — and yet an unnamed longing pulled in exactly the opposite direction, needing more, needing—

Rong Jiu watched Jingzhe’s struggle and made a sound that was almost a sigh of patience.

“Not enough?” he murmured to himself. The blade appeared in his hand again, as if from nowhere. “Truly remarkable, Jingzhe. Your endurance is something I genuinely respect.”

It sounded like a compliment. The cold behind it was edged with something sharp.

Not enough—

Whether it was Jingzhe’s craving that hadn’t been satisfied, or Rong Jiu’s own feral desire that hadn’t been appeased — he wanted to see more. He hungered for it. Wanted Jingzhe more unraveled, more desperate, more utterly beyond his own control.

The blade touched the side of Jingzhe’s neck. The fine skin opened. Jingzhe’s head jerked up.

He looked at Rong Jiu with something lost in his eyes. And blood ran down from the cut at his shoulder, brilliant and vivid as flame.