"Please, Your Majesty, help this servant."
The Emperor had merely asked in passing.
When a stranger appeared among those serving in imperial attendance, he naturally had to know who they were—he couldn't be left saying "that one there" when he needed someone.
In truth, a sovereign need not trouble himself with explicit orders. A glance, a gesture, and the servants would grasp his meaning through tacit understanding, no words needed, scurrying to get things done ahead of time. If one truly had to wait for the Emperor to call out names and give instructions, that servant was not far from being beaten with canes.
Hanzheng gave a slight nod, his long sleeves sweeping through the air like a gust of wind.
Xiansi stood rooted to the spot, her mind blank, not knowing whether being asked her name by her master was a blessing or a curse. Had she failed to serve properly in some way, and displeased him? She carefully combed through her recent conduct, and it seemed there was nothing amiss. Her heart churned with anxiety, yet her expression remained deferential as ever.
Dusk closed in on all sides, the sky deep and faintly dark, heavily shrouding the resplendent imperial palace. Lightning crashed down from the clouds with a rumble, streaking arcs of pale purple, and before long a dense rain fell like scattered pearls. Spring rain was as precious as oil. The open window let in dampness and coolness, the fragrance of earth drifting through the solemn, stately great hall, bringing a trace of liveliness to the palace servants' monotonous, rigid lives.
Inside the hall, at the start of the hour of the Tiger, horn-shaped lamps were lit in the alcove.
The pattering rain enveloped the small chamber, the shadows deepening, creating a cozy atmosphere like gathering around a hearth for warmth.
The candle was burning low. Xiansi trimmed the wick, wiped away the excess lamp oil, then respectfully returned to her place in the corner.
Hanzheng held a white jade cup, sipping lightly at his chilled wine, watching the rain by the window—drip, drip, drip. A state of slight tipsiness seemed best suited for sleep.
The candlelight reflected off the painted eaves and the rain, blending into a deep blue, winding and twisting through the tranquil night.
Wind and rain drifted in through the gilded six-pane diamond lattice window, wetting the red lacquer, like dark-patterned flowers blooming across the wood.
The damp, fresh air billowed Hanzheng's sleeves, making him look all the more like a figure of ethereal, transcendent air—a living immortal.
Half of his sleeve had been soaked.
The rain was clearly growing heavier.
Xiansi stepped up behind him and reminded him softly, "Your Majesty, the wind has turned cold."
Only after finishing the wine in his cup did Hanzheng abandon his interest in watching the rain.
Xiansi then walked around the Arhat couch and, with proper decorum, used the pole to close the six-pane diamond lattice window. Her figure was slender and trim; as she leaned forward and stretched, the curve of her waist was like a crescent moon hook, thin enough to catch the eye.
Hanzheng rubbed his slightly aching temples.
Xiansi soon had the window shut, the sound of rain sealed away, the wind stilled. Calculating the hour, she came before him, knelt, and kowtowed, her lips curving neither too deeply nor too shallowly, with the particular meekness of a servant: "Your Majesty, shall this servant help you change for the night?"
"Mm." Hanzheng gave her a soft sound of assent.
"No need to always perform such grand courtesies."
The meaning of these words: Xiansi was now officially a familiar face in imperial attendance.
Xiansi was utterly compliant, a hint of joy in her voice: "Then this servant presumes—standing while attending you would be more efficient."
"So afraid of me?" He narrowed his eyes, studying her, those fearsome eyes veiled by a haze of wine. "You're not very efficient."
Xiansi pondered his unreadable words, offering a pale, placating smile: "With the Imperial countenance before me, how could a foolish servant like me not tremble? This servant fears Your Majesty, and reveres Your Majesty all the more…"
He cut her off flatly: "I remember you."
Xiansi's belly full of pretty words jammed to a halt. His gaze did not waver; he was waiting for her reaction.
Long, long ago, she had shattered a jade vase and was about to be dragged out by the senior maid to be caned to death, when he happened upon the scene. He had once shown her a kindness.
"Your Majesty's kindness is boundless. This servant would repay it even beyond death, yet has no way to do so."
She knelt once more, acknowledging that debt of kindness, her loyalty complete and utter, like a pool of still, quiet water.
The air was filled with the rustle of rain and loneliness.
"Change my clothes." After a long while, he said it lightly, letting the matter pass.
His emotions dissolved into the color of the rain.
Xiansi swallowed, rose gracefully, and stood half a step in front of him. He showed no intention of getting up, his long frame reclining on the narrow kang bed.
Xiansi carefully reached out, touched the two lapels of his outer robe, and slid it off toward his shoulders. His raven lashes closed, his breathing deep and shallow by turns, as if he were still steeped in the wine he had drunk.
Such an intimate act, yet they performed it with utter detachment.
One of his elbows was pressing the sleeve down, right on target.
Xiansi tried several times in silence, all in vain. Her mouth felt stuffed with cotton; she could hardly speak.
He seemed deep and sharply defined, his edge deliberately concealed—nothing like Liu Sheng's simple scholarly frailty. His cold white skin, when he was still, was like the vast deep sky of a rainy night; on the surface he seemed as mild as cold mist, but up close he was frightening, enough to make one's hair stand on end.
As ever, he was like a sword—a desolate blade tempered in cold, its edge sheathed and hidden—not a scroll of books.
The robe could not stay stuck like this forever.
Xiansi pressed her lips together, her words carrying the meticulousness of one who had served others for years. "I beg Your Majesty to help this servant."
Listening closely, her voice carried a barely perceptible tremble.
Hanzheng paused for a long moment, then slowly, slowly lifted his arm.
Xiansi, as if granted a pardon, received it steadily and drew the long, dark-patterned outer robe off him. She prided herself on how much her skills had grown after more than a month attending him, yet somehow she could never get past the hurdle of changing His Majesty's clothes—it only grew harder, as if she were bewitched.
And that was only the outer robe.
Undoing the silk sash at his waist and removing his upper and lower garments would take time even if His Majesty were standing. Now, with His Majesty lying on his side after drinking, she had no choice but to grit her teeth and rely on her own care.
A familiar chill crept into Xiansi's fingers; she was terribly nervous. She reached for the silk sash at his waist—his waist, lean, with a terrifying core of strength, lean, harboring innate power, even a dreadful killing intent… He was calm, but also fierce. She drifted off course despite herself, shrinking, restraining herself, as if standing on the brink of an abyss. She had done this many times before, yet remained as spineless as ever.
Hanzheng waited quietly for her to continue—not with patience, and yet like patience. His thoughts were a riddle, elusive and bewildering.
When it came to the straight-collared jacket embroidered with the Taiji Yin-Yang motif, the fabric at his back was pinned entirely beneath him, and Xiansi had no choice but to beg him again. Like grass bent by the wind, her voice was almost inaudible: "I beg Your Majesty… to help this servant."
This could not go on, again and again.
His brow arched. "And what am I helping you with this time?"
Xiansi broke into a cold sweat.
Clashing wits with the Emperor, she tasted speechlessness for the first time. Facing the Emperor was truly no ordinary matter. She could not order him to rise, yet for the changing of clothes, he would have to get up.
As a servant, she was caught in a dilemma. She was nowhere near as much in her element as Eunuch Liu, who could coax his masters into good humor—serving people was a great skill in itself. She did not even dare imagine that His Majesty was making things difficult on purpose.
Her old knack for pleasing everyone on all sides had vanished into smoke. The tongue she had thought so clever—adequate for managing little palace maids and little eunuchs—had become a clumsy tongue stuffed with cotton in the Emperor's presence.
"Please rise, Your Majesty. It will only take a moment."
Her face had gone pale in patches; who knew how much courage it had taken her.
Hanzheng rose slowly and, as instructed, showed her how it was done.
His gaze stayed fixed on her the entire time, never leaving, every movement laced with unspoken meaning:
"Will you change my clothes yourself, or shall I undress you myself?"
The rain had stopped. In the dripping silence beneath the eaves, that single sentence struck with extraordinary force, all the more chilling.
Xiansi's knees began to go weak, yet she dared not kneel too readily—being overly stiff and timid would only earn her master's disgust.
"This servant was wrong." The words escaped her pale lips, the posture of one accepting blame and punishment.
"Wrong in what?"
Xiansi weighed his tone. His Majesty wasn't truly angry. Her master had thrown out a line, and she had to catch it.
So she said, "I was wrong to have let Your Majesty get caught in the rain—half a sleeve is soaked. This servant deserves ten thousand deaths."
Was that really where the fault lay?
That wasn't what he was asking. She should not have answered that way.
Hanzheng, in his great mercy, stepped aside to give her room.
The veins at Xiansi's temples throbbed alarmingly, but she managed to complete the changing of his clothes.
His Majesty's presence was like morning mist, drifting against one's face in wisps—cool, silent, a feeling hard to describe.
Serving a monarch is like keeping a tiger as a companion. Attending the Imperial Presence was both boundless favor and boundless peril—those words were no lie.
Hanzheng, dressed in plain white sleeping robes, pushed open the window. The moon drifted in the freshly cleared night sky, spilling bright pools of light across the ground. The eaves still dripped, faint and distant, and one or two stars glimmered faintly.
He stood there a while, until the wind cooled his temples, before entering the inner bedchamber. His tall, upright figure stood like a snow-white banner on a pole.
The night fell utterly still.
Brushed by the wind, Xiansi still felt his scent lingering around her.
…
Xiansi leaned against a thick felt cushion, eyes closed, listening all night to the rain sliding off the rooftop.
Visible rules and invisible rules swirled in her head. That night she a light doze, trapped in nightmares.
The next day, in the courtyard before the Palace of Heavenly Purity, two alchemy tripod censers sent up curling wisps of smoke, suffused with a Daoist purple aura. The great tripod bodies were carved with patterns of immortal cranes and pine, and the smoke rising skyward was said to be able to draw the attention of the Supreme Lord Lao.
Since the current Emperor's accession, the Palace of Heavenly Purity had taken on an ethereal, immortal-realm air; when alchemy was being performed, the palace maids and eunuchs moved as if threading through clouds and mist.
The Emperor suspended court for a day.
After the Emperor left the Daoist temple, someone from the Directorate of Ceremonies came to present a scroll-shaped register, held above his head, kneeling as he said, "Begging Your Majesty to review it."
It was nothing of importance—the register of palace maids leaving the palace after autumn this year, an annual routine. And since the position of Empress was vacant, the affairs of the Six Palaces were all managed by the Empress Dowager; this stack of registers bore her phoenix seal, granted with her approval.
The Directorate of Ceremonies man was sharp-witted, cunning as a fox, and had left himself a margin: even things approved by the Empress Dowager still required the Emperor's final review.
Because of the matter of his birth mother Lady Cao's status, the Emperor and the Empress Dowager were at odds. The Great Ritual Controversy of those years had shaken court and country—the Emperor, as a lone sovereign, had battled the Grand Secretariat's assembled ministers and the Empress Dowager, and in the end he had won.
The Directorate of Ceremonies regarded the Emperor as their one and only master, so even in a small matter like the register of maids leaving the palace, they would not presume to overstep by half a step, but begged the Emperor to decide.
Not only the Directorate of Ceremonies—the Embroidered Uniform Guard and the Imperial Guards as well were all the Emperor's private instruments, his deadly agents, loyal instruments of execution. Even the Grand Secretariat, after its personnel had been thoroughly replaced, had become the Emperor's puppet, bound by invisible puppet strings.
The current Empress Dowager had been sidelined, stripped of all real power—merely an old woman in the deep palace.
The register lay plainly before him. On an ordinary day, that Emperor, sunk in his fasting and devotions, would not have looked at it at all.
Palace affairs were trivial and tangled. If he had to manage even maids and eunuchs leaving the palace, he would surely be overwhelmed.
The eunuch from the Directorate of Ceremonies had expected to leave at once, but who could have expected that His Majesty would choose this very day to make his move.
"Present it."
The chief eunuch at the imperial side, Liu Lun, respectfully received the register.
Sandalwood incense burned before the statue of the Three Pure Ones, its smoke rising in a single straight line—utterly pure, utterly still.
Hanzheng opened the register at his leisure, took up the cinnabar brush in hand, and drew a cross through one of the names. Like the King of Hell's ledger of life and death—blood-red, without a word of explanation.
He had planned this. His stroke was swift and clean.
With that stroke, the Empress Dowager's supposedly final decision—and the authority of her phoenix seal—was nullified.
The register was tossed back.
The eunuch from the Directorate of Ceremonies examined it, his heart full of shock and doubt.
The name that had been crossed out was Xiansi.