Chapter 33#

If everything I’m thinking right now could somehow take physical form, it would be a wall of words so dense you couldn’t even make out my face behind it.

Setting aside the absolutely catastrophic matter of me carelessly revealing that I’d been reborn — Chu Ruiyuan’s current state alone was enough to confound me even if you swapped my brain out for a supercomputer.

If he only had memories from the first life, there was no reason for him not to have saved his mother, since he’d done exactly that in the second life.

But if he had memories from the second life, there was no reason for him to be treating me this well — even better than he had in the second life, at that.

His situation was Schrödinger’s cat. My question was Schrödinger’s rebirth.

Whether Schrödinger should open the box to check on the cat, I couldn’t say. What I could say was that I had absolutely no intention of bringing things into the open just to observe exactly how Chu Ruiyuan had been reborn.

A cat, at its most annoyed, gives you a scratch or two. The soon-to-be CEO of an entire dynasty, at his most annoyed… well.

Still, after sitting on the bed hugging the blanket for a while longer, I ultimately decided to just let it go.

If he had memories of the second life, or had finally figured out what the Fate-Binding curse had done in the first — no amount of explaining or performing on my part would make any difference. But if he only had memories of the first life and still hadn’t worked out how I’d died, he might well be blaming himself — convinced that his broken oath was what had killed me, carrying a guilt that made him want to make it up to me.

Not that I was arrogant enough to think he’d placed me among his most precious things.

It was just that the timing of my death in the first life had been rather suggestive, and ancient people tended toward superstition — the higher the imperial bloodline, the more susceptible they were to mystical thinking. If he hadn’t figured out the curse angle, there was a ninety-nine percent chance he would have had a sudden “revelation” about just how much I meant to him.

Believe that long enough, and you start to believe it for real.

That’s how superstition works, isn’t it? You follow the belief far enough, and eventually it becomes true.

The same way some devoted fans of a certain idol can convince themselves they see literal stars in their idol’s eyes.

I thought carefully back over Chu Ruiyuan’s attitude toward me these past months, and while I still couldn’t understand why he hadn’t saved the Empress, I concluded it was more likely he only had memories from the first life.

Whatever the truth was, I decided to let things unfold as they would.

The worst outcome was him quietly having someone from outside the Prime Minister’s household dispose of me.

I’d just close my eyes, open them again, and probably find myself reborn once more.

Besides — if I ran to him trying to “explain” why I’d pretended not to be reborn, wouldn’t that just be digging a hole and jumping in? Protest too much and you only confirm you have a guilty conscience.

Once I’d reasoned through all of that, I changed into the clothes my family had sent over the night before — after being informed I’d be staying in the palace — and went to find Chu Ruiyuan, who had already left me sitting there bewildered.

He was seated at the breakfast table waiting for me. When I came in he waved me over to sit beside him.

The palace attendants brought out a breakfast spread, course by course — Eastern Palace standard, which meant extraordinary. Every dish looked more enticing than the last.

I’d spent two lifetimes as his companion and eaten my share of head-of-state cuisine, but good food is always welcome in any quantity. Having made up my mind to let everything go, I found my appetite entirely restored, and helped myself without the slightest ceremony.

He sat there smiling the whole time, occasionally reaching over to put something in my bowl, and touching my face under the guise of wiping the corner of my mouth.

Before — when he’d thought I hadn’t been reborn — he’d treated me with that warm, doting energy, patting my head like a beloved little grandchild. But now that he’d somehow seen through my act this morning, his hands had taken on a rather different character and were decidedly less well-behaved.

If his face weren’t so beautiful, and his body weren’t still that of a child, I might have started to feel like I was being harassed by a classmate.

I won’t lie — I was a little unsettled.

I had no attraction to children. Even knowing his soul was ageless, looking at that flower-fresh young face simply extinguished any such feelings in me entirely.

As for him, well. That was harder to say.

The ancient understanding of age was rather different from the modern one, as you know.

Du Mu’s famous lines about a thirteen-year-old beauty were considered immortal poetry. Imagine a modern poet writing the equivalent — describing a child in those terms, gloating about finding her in some seedy establishment.

You think the authorities wouldn’t come knocking?

Fortunately, whatever the cultural gap between ancient and modern views on age, the timing of physical development doesn’t vary all that much across eras.

Chu Ruiyuan’s current body hadn’t even finished growing yet. Whatever he might want to think about, it would have to stay as thoughts.

And sure enough, all through the carriage ride out of the palace, the Crown Prince — not yet fully grown — seemed perfectly content just holding my hand.

Though neither of us said it aloud, we’d both arrived at the mutual understanding of I know that you know that I know that you’ve been reborn. So he also dropped any pretense of wanting me to show him street performers or folk craftsmen, the way he’d talked about before.

I figured that thinking back on all those things he’d said to me, and the whole spinning-top episode, probably made him want to cringe.

But he seemed to have come back this time with a considerably thicker skin than before. He managed to act as though absolutely nothing had happened and, with complete composure, took my hand and led me to the finest teahouse in the capital — the finest, that is, before I opened my own tea establishment.

We were shown into the premier private room, and ordered a full spread of teas and pastries.

Chu Ruiyuan sat close beside me for a while, then suddenly called for a pair of female performers from downstairs — one who played the guqin, one who played the xiao — to come up and perform. With what seemed like genuine high spirits, he also ordered refreshments for the escorting guards and bade them sit down and eat.

I found this quietly remarkable.

Chu Ruiyuan had been raised from birth for the throne and had actually been emperor. His sense of hierarchy was more immovable than the stones in a city wall.

For him to invite guards to share a table, under ordinary circumstances — that was the sun rising in the west.

Modern science, of course, tells us that due to the Earth’s rotation and orbit, the sun rising in the west is a physical impossibility.

Which meant these were not ordinary circumstances.

The guards who had just drunk from the freshly poured tea hadn’t had long to enjoy it before they began clutching their chests and sliding from their chairs one by one. The captain of the guard managed to cry out — “Your Highness, there’s poison!” — before his eyes closed, his head dropped sideways, and he went completely still.

My heart lurched. I was just rising to pull the Crown Prince toward the door and out of there when the two performers — who had been playing a perfectly harmonious duet moments before — stopped abruptly. Each of them reached into a hidden compartment at the ends of the guqin and drew out a sword.

“The dog emperor slaughtered one hundred and thirty-four souls of our Holy Nation. Today we offer his son to the heavens as sacrifice!” The woman who had been playing the guqin raised her sword and shouted.

The Heavenly Fire Sect.

History, particularly ancient history, never runs short of criminal organizations — sorry, peasant uprisings — committing acts of rebellion under the banner of religion.

The dynasty had seen a century of good harvests and relative stability. It wasn’t exactly a golden age of enlightened governance, but it was far from collapse. Organizations like this — cropping up like weeds, cut down and sprouting back — had come and gone, but none of them ever amounted to much.

The Heavenly Fire Sect was the largest, the most persistent, and the only one that had ever managed to briefly declare itself a nation.

According to the childhood friend who used to gossip with me in my second life, the Sect had started in some northern village after an earthquake, and within about half a year had gathered the local rabble — drifters, ne’er-do-wells, the dispossessed — from a dozen surrounding villages and counties, raised the banner of the “Heavenly Fire Holy Nation” with considerable fanfare… and then been reported to the court by the local magistrate, who sent in a single battalion, and the “nation” was extinguished.

It had never occurred to me that a decade after the Sect’s destruction, someone might come seeking vengeance for that “Holy Nation.”

Not only had they managed to track the Crown Prince’s movements — they’d assumed false identities and succeeded in poisoning the guards. This was not as simple as it appeared on the surface. There were almost certainly court conspiracies woven through this, layers of scheming that went far deeper than two assassins in a teahouse.

And those two women — their identities as Heavenly Fire Sect members might well be a disguise themselves.

Watching them advance with their swords, I felt a cold dread settle in, and found myself hoping — desperately — that the reborn Crown Prince had spent these past months quietly cultivating a network of shadow guards, because if he hadn’t, the two of us might well be headed for a fourth life.

Chu Ruiyuan’s expression was grave, but he was utterly calm. He moved me behind him and we backed together toward the window.

Our private room was on the third floor by the teahouse’s reckoning, but ancient buildings had high ceilings — it was effectively the equivalent of a modern fourth or fifth story. I looked down at the ground below and started calculating the odds of surviving a jump.

Then the Crown Prince, still shielding me, suddenly spoke.

“What kind of ‘sacrifice to the heavens’ is it to kill me in a teahouse in the capital? Why not take me to the graves of your Heavenly Fire faithful and do it there properly?”

The guqin player was clearly the one in command. She considered this and replied: “Not a bad idea. But taking you alive is too much of a variable. Safer to just bring back your head.”

Up to that point, Chu Ruiyuan had been gripping my hand tightly. He let go.

Then he raised his voice and said: “If you will spare the person behind me, I will surrender quietly and go with you. Otherwise, we both go out this window right now, and you leave with nothing.”

The two women exchanged a look. The guqin player nodded slowly. “You have a sense of loyalty. Pity it’s wasted on the wrong family.”

The one who had played the xiao came forward to bind me.

I was caught between gratitude for what Chu Ruiyuan had just done and genuine fear for his life, and finally made up my mind — I would jump from the window to raise the alarm outside.

At that exact moment, the door to our private room was kicked open with a crash.

Standing in the doorway was Guan Mingyue — my good friend, whom I hadn’t seen yet in this life since being reborn.

He must have already heard the commotion inside. He drew his sword in a single motion and came straight for us.