After letting that foolish hound out to take a walk by herself, she didn’t come back for the entire morning.
Such a grown person, could she really manage to get herself lost on a stroll?
Pei Yu suppressed a few flickers of mounting irritation, left with no choice but to have someone bring over a soft cushion to prop up her lower back. With one hand massaging her aching, sour lower abdomen and the other holding a brush, she set to work processing the day’s state affairs and memorials.
After finishing the batch in the afternoon, she casually and seemingly nonchalantly turned her head to ask Chunya, “Where is Jiang Wu?”
“Your Majesty, Lord Jiang should have returned to the quarters for kept men.”
“Who told her to go back?”
Chunya froze for a moment before speaking slowly and thoughtfully, “Your Majesty, on the day after a kept man attends to Your Majesty, he is naturally supposed to return on his own in the morning. Without a summons, he is not permitted to enter the inner sleeping quarters.”
The person seated straight upon the daybed lowered her gaze, suppressing the layer of moisture lingering at the bottom of her eyes.
She understood all the reasoning. Yet, after so many outrageous things had already transpired, she had even given Jiang Wu her personal jade pendant, which granted entry to anywhere within the palace. Why couldn’t that foolish Alpha be a bit bolder and cling to her more?
Didn’t she like her?
If she liked her, how could she bear to leave her alone to endure the aching, swollen burden of the child growing inside her?
She even found herself thinking, why couldn’t Jiang Wu just crawl inside?
To grow alongside their child, to stay by her side every single moment, clinging to and relying entirely on her.
Her waist and abdomen had already softened considerably compared to before, and looked somewhat more rounded as well. When Jiang Wu held her, could she feel the difference?
Or was that foolish hound only capable of holding her, completely indifferent to the physical changes happening to her body on account of her?
Clearly, nurturing and bearing a child was something for two people to share.
Was it because of pregnancy hormones? She felt so aggrieved, and she desperately wanted to see Jiang Wu.
Heading out wearing a bite-lock, Jiang Wu had been mocked by a few of the other Alpha kept men. Tilting her head, she extracted scraps of information from words like slave, Her Majesty, and disdain.
Zhang Lingzhou hauled over a bucket of ice she had been coaxed into buying, poured it expressionlessly into a barrel filled with watermelon chunks, and added a splash of water.
She turned her head, glancing at the person sitting by the windowsill with lowered eyes.
When Jiang Wu wasn’t speaking, she carried a very faint, detached aura. The silver metallic bite-lock extended forward from the clasp at the back of her neck, wrapping around her jawline and curving up along those exceptionally smooth, clean lines toward the bridge of her nose.
The chilling texture rendered that gentle detachment sharp, while her moon-white, gold-threaded sleeves fell loosely across the table, exposing a stretch of pale arm where faint greenish veins were faintly visible.
The slight irritation in her chest, along with the speechlessness caused by the ugliness of the other three kept men, completely vanished in that single instant.
The pretty little puppy turned her head to look over, her obsidian pupils as clear and pure as spring water, her eyes curving as she smiled at her.
“Why do they all look down on people who wear bite-locks?”
Zhang Lingzhou’s heart skipped a beat rather unworthily before she finally snapped out of the spell cast by those smiling eyes.
“Bite-locks originally appeared as instruments of punishment, and later gradually evolved into something resembling collars used by nobles to raise slaves and lowly lovers.”
As the Prime Minister’s daughter, Jiang Wu had been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, cherished like gold and jade since childhood. Even upon becoming a kept man in the palace, she had nothing to do with such things as bite-locks.
Yet since the Empress had done this, she certainly had her own reasons.
For now, Zhang Lingzhou could only assume Jiang Wu hadn’t exercised self-restraint, biting too deeply and too painfully, which was why she had been summarily tossed back out.
Jiang Wu thought so too.
She let out a soft sigh, went outside to pick up a piece of wood, washed it clean, and began carving a wooden teething token for herself.
She couldn’t possibly bite Pei Yu every single day; the moment the other person grew sick of it and decided to behead her, she would be completely finished.
Carving a wooden token was delicate work. With her nimble fingers, she finished the greater part of it by the afternoon. That evening, after sharing a watermelon with Zhang Lingzhou and waving goodbye, she lit an oil lamp and continued carving.
Until the wooden door was shoved open with a sweep. Turning her head, Jiang Wu caught sight of a pair of wet, red-rimmed peach-blossom eyes silhouetted against the moonlight.
Iris pheromones rushed toward her, seamlessly wiping away any lingering foreign scents on her body and wrapping her entirely inside a transparent cocoon of a room.
“Your Majesty?” Jiang Wu paused for a moment before uncertainly spitting out the two words.
The woman walked in, closing the door behind her with a casual flick. Aside from the lingering moisture and red tint at the corners of her eyes, not a single trace of emotion could be read on her face.
“What are you doing?” Her gaze fixed upon the mostly completed wooden token on the table. Was this what kept Jiang Wu from coming to see her for the entire day?
“I’m carving a wooden token for myself. I’ll bite this from now on, so it won’t hurt Your Majesty anymore.”
Jiang Wu looked up at Pei Yu with shining eyes, wearing an expression that practically screamed for praise.
Yet right before her, the moisture swimming within the woman’s eyes seemed to grow even denser.
She reached out, pinched the wooden token, examined it closely for a moment, and then tossed it casually onto the floor.
“Ugly.”
And far too hard.
She had only turned Jiang Wu away a few times, and this person had already found a substitute.
Was a piece of wood better than her?
Was the rigid texture of wood softer than her abdomen, her waist, or her chest?
Jiang Wu was truly outrageous.
On one hand, claiming to love her deeply, that she couldn’t live without her, even willing to kneel in the ancestral hall for three days and go on a hunger strike just to enter the palace.
Yet once inside the palace, she stopped clinging to her so easily.
Things that are easily obtained are never truly cherished, after all.
She looked at the dazed little puppy before her and spoke with feigned indifference, “Where is my jade pendant?”
The jade pendant?
Jiang Wu’s brain stalled for a few seconds before she remembered the piece of jade she had buried beneath the tree on that very first night.
What the?!
Turns out Pei Yu knew the original owner was the one who stole it?
“It’s outside, Your Majesty. I, I’ll go dig it up right now, er, go get it.”
The Alpha turned around and threw open the door. The chirping of summer cicadas leaked in through the gap, and Pei Yu lifted her gaze, watching Jiang Wu’s fluttering moon-white long robes.
A sudden wave of intense anxiety washed over her. It felt as though this person might vanish into thin air one day just like this, never to return again.
She lifted her feet, almost hurriedly following her out, and then came to a halt upon seeing Jiang Wu half-kneeling on the ground, frantically digging into the soil with her bare hands.
Her nose stung with soreness. She hurriedly lowered her head, wiping away the teardrops spilling over the corners of her eyes.
She walked over, her shadow blocking the moonlight and casting a gloomy patch over Jiang Wu.
“If it’s buried, don’t dig it up.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
With that, she turned around, her dark red robes trailing behind her like they were being swallowed up bite by bite by the heavy night.
That piece of jade had been commissioned by Pei Yu herself upon ascending the throne.
Right after her ascension, someone had specifically come to ask her whether she wished to change her given name.
Regardless of how one interpreted it, the character Yu simply did not suit an Empress.
Yet not only had she refused to change it, she had even ordered the finest piece of imperial jade to be carved into this pendant, wearing it on her person at all times so that seeing the jade was equivalent to seeing her.
Why would she change it?
Wasn’t her name the heaviest curse personally bestowed upon her by the late Emperor?
Pei Zhao, Pei Cheng, which of them didn’t signify a legitimate claim to the throne? But so, what? In the end, wasn’t she the one left standing?
If a dynasty could be ruined simply because of an emperor’s name, that would be laughable indeed.
Yet the two most precious things she had handed over on that very first night meant nothing at all to Jiang Wu.
So how could Jiang Wu possibly not recognize that piece of jade? How could she possibly not know that she wanted her to come find her?
She simply didn’t want to come. She simply didn’t want to take responsibility, preferring to act as if nothing had ever happened.
If not for this child, the two of them would never have crossed paths in this lifetime. Three years from now, Jiang Wu would quietly leave the palace with her secret, to take another husband or marry an Omega elsewhere.
Then she would let her have her wish.
She would bear the child alone. She didn’t care anymore.