This body had been raised in boudoirs for years and lacked exercise, making her pant for breath after running just a few steps. When she rushed to the bedchamber, a dense crowd of people was kneeling outside in utter despair.
Anxious to see Pei Yu, she bypassed the crowd, pushed open the door, and prepared to walk straight in. Qing Yue at the doorway instinctively raised a hand.
For a concubine to enter the bedchamber privately without a summons was a major taboo, and furthermore, Pei Yu’s current condition was extremely precarious.
The child in her womb was only one month along, making it a time extremely vulnerable to miscarriage, and she had suddenly ingested musk. Though the amount was small, it was absolute poison to the unformed fetus.
The diagnosis given by the imperial physicians was to use a specially formulated abortive decoction to purge the unformed child.
Given the current situation, Pei Yu’s life was a thousand times more important than the child’s, but Pei Yu refused.
She had ordered everyone to be driven away, and without her command, no one was allowed to step foot into the bedchamber.
Yet even if they dragged it out, losing the child was only a matter of time, and she would simply endure such prolonged torment in vain.
Qing Yue raised her eyes, locking onto that pair of deep obsidian pupils. The alpha bit her lower lip, forcibly shoving Qing Yue’s hand aside to push her way inside. The guards on both sides immediately drew their swords, the cold flash of the blades shimmering at the edge of her angry gaze.
“What is the use of kneeling and waiting?” Jiang Wu frowned, her heart twisted into a messy knot. If she couldn’t get in, she wouldn’t be able to feed the medicine to Pei Yu.
That child… does Pei Yu even care about the child?
A trace of uncertainty flickered in the depths of those obsidian eyes.
Suddenly, something was pressed into her palm. She lowered her head to see a bottle of medicine thrust into her hand. Qing Yue’s calm eyes blinked with a flash of calculation, and then she turned sideways, signaling the guards to clear the path.
“Please, Concubine Jiang, feed this medicine to Her Majesty.”
According to Pei Yu’s original intentions, Jiang Wu was supposed to be executed after the child was born. With the child gone, she would only die even sooner.
Death awaited her either way, so she might as well let her do one last good deed before she died.
Jiang Wu had no capacity to ponder those schemes. Clenching the medicine bottle, she pushed open the doors to the bedchamber. Her blue-and-white gold-threaded robes billowed and fluttered, carrying the oppressive mugginess of July and the clean scent of peppermint straight toward her.
The person curled into a ball on the bed poked half her head out from under the blankets. Her pretty, light amber peach-blossom eyes were soaked through with moisture, teardrops trembling with pain sliding down one by one, the corners of her eyes flushed red.
She retreated backward slightly, instinctively shielding her lower abdomen.
“Get away! Don’t come near me!”
Her voice remained soft, carrying a weeping tone of endurance against pain.
She looked at the medicine in Jiang Wu’s hands, a chilling intent flickering within her moisture-laden eyes.
“I know. You do not care, but,” the woman took a deep, shuddering breath before biting her lower lip and speaking slowly, “even fierce beasts do not eat their own offspring.”
“Jiang Wu, how can your heart bear it?”
How could she bear to bring an abortive medicine over? How could she bear to defy her wishes, force her way into the bedchamber, and personally kill the child belonging to both of them?
Does she have no heart at all?!
Jiang Wu lowered her gaze, retrieved the pregnancy-preservation medicine with her other hand, knelt one knee onto the edge of the bed, and pried open the bottle stopper with her fingertips.
Bear it or not bear it, fierce beasts not eating their offspring.
Everyone was going to drink her medicine first.
At the very least, they would wait until the pain subsided before talking about anything else.
As for the bottle Qing Yue had given her, she had no intention of feeding it to Pei Yu.
Though she didn’t know what its purpose was, if the woman had wanted to drink it, why would she make her feed it, let alone leave that crowd of people outside kneeling and begging her to drink it?
She wrapped her arms around the empress’s slender, soft waist, intending to pull her into her embrace. But the person, despite having no strength left from the pain, summoned a burst of determination from goodness knows where and struggled violently in her arms.
She let out a soft sigh, just as she was about to tell her to stay still, when a tearing sound echoed across her chest. A piercing pain and the sensation of being impaled radiated right through her chest and out toward her limbs.
Jiang Wu looked down and saw a dagger stabbed directly into her chest.
The location of the heart was concealed; a first strike was not necessarily fatal. Pei Yu gritted her teeth and pulled the dagger out, the blood clinging to the blade scattering across the alpha’s blue-and-white robes like blooming red plum blossoms in a snowy night.
She raised her eyes, colliding with a pair of furrowed pupils swimming with moisture and overwhelming pain.
Following that, the alpha leaned in even closer. The scent of blood surged into her nasal cavity, and she froze for a single second before the other’s fingers pinched her chin, forcing the liquid medicine down her throat.
To prevent the empress from spitting it out, the moment Jiang Wu loosened her grip on her hand, her lips pressed down firmly over the other’s.
The woman’s struggling movements instantly softened, the moisture and anger in the depths of her eyes gradually blurring into a trace of desire. Until no more liquid could be found within her mouth, Jiang Wu finally released the thoroughly flushed person, raising a hand to press against the wound on her chest that continued to gush blood.
The person leaning against the edge of the bed parted her lips slightly. As Jiang Wu withdrew, the tip of her tongue instinctively chased after her for a fraction, revealing a sliver of wet, red warmth between her seams.
She closed her eyes, one hand tightening over her lower abdomen while the other still tightly gripped the blood-stained dagger.
How could Jiang Wu dare to humiliate her like this?
Feeding her medicine by using such a method, it was so dissolute, so sickening.
Had she known, she should have killed her on the first night.
The pain in her abdomen receded bit by bit. The woman slowly opened her light amber peach-blossom eyes, and with her softened body, inched off the bed inch by inch. Unable to stand, she collapsed alongside Jiang Wu, half-kneeling on the carpet.
Blood dripped downward drop by drop, accompanied by the alpha’s irrepressible physiological tears of pain. She whimpered, not daring to cry out loud, resembling a little puppy about to be slaughtered.
Pei Yu curved her lips, using the flat of the dagger to hook up the alpha’s chin, her sharp eyes fixing upon her pain-stricken expression.
She would cry from being stabbed, cry from hunger if she went a day without food, and be scared to tears in front of her, what about their child, then?
Would Jiang Wu cry for their child?
What was she thinking when she personally fed her the medicine?
Was she finally free of that accident from that night, or was she determined to humiliate her even at the cost of her life?
The prime minister’s daughter truly possessed a spine of unyielding pride, as utterly pedantic as her mother.
She lowered her eyelashes, and the threads of the night her mother was forced to undergo an abortion wrapped tightly around her once more.
The eunuch by the late emperor’s side had pinched her mother’s lips, ferociously forcing the imperial abortive decoction down her throat, ignoring all her pleas and her promises that the three of them, mother and daughters, would never appear in the palace or be an eyesore to anyone.
To kill his own flesh and blood, the reason given by that cold-hearted alpha was simply that his legal wife disliked it.
If she didn’t like children born to her and other consorts, why touch her mother in the first place? Why wait until now, when they could already clearly hear the heartbeat of that tiny life?
An alpha who did not carry the child herself, who could not feel its ten months of heartbeat, how could she possibly love a child that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere?
How could Jiang Wu possibly love a child that had only existed for a brief month, that had stayed obediently in her womb, felt only by her?
“Jiang Wu, I will carve out your heart and bury it with my child.”
The woman curved her lips, gentle yet cruel, speaking in a whisper as if afraid of disturbing something.
The person in too much pain to think clutched her continuously bleeding chest while trying with blurred consciousness to make out the person before her.
“What. Burial together?”
She really wished Pei Yu would just give her a clean end right now. When you want to kill something, a fatal single slash was basic manners, could Pei Yu understand that?
Torturous murder was a profoundly unethical behavior.
Thinking of Qing Yue, she suddenly raised her hand, waving the abortive medicine she was still holding.
“Pei Yu. This is what Qing Yue gave, telling me to feed you.”
She coughed up a mouthful of blood, failing to notice that the dagger in the woman’s hand trembled. The peach-blossom eyes looking down at her, previously devoid of all emotion, gradually flooded with a layer of moisture once again.
I did not know what it was, so I did not feed it to you. Watch me drink it.
With that, she could no longer sustain the swaying scenery before her eyes. As she collapsed, in a daze, she felt as though she were falling into a warm, soft embrace.
If she managed to survive this, she would definitely have a proper talk with Pei Yu about this matter. Killing people casually just because you felt unwell was unacceptable behavior, but if she couldn’t make it, she still decided to leave instructions for her only final arrangements.
The light cluster behind her flickered, splitting off a beam that flew toward Jiang Wu’s chest. It circled around her a few times before collapsing entirely onto the top of Jiang Wu’s head, trembling.
The woman’s panicked, hurried voice pierced through the bedchamber.
“Someone come, summon the imperial physician!”