At the palace gate, Consort Xi had long since sent a soft sedan chair to receive Xie Zhaozhao. Yuanyuan was the first to step down from the carriage, then reached out to help Xie Zhaozhao descend.
Seeing her get down, Gu Shaoyu instructed his guard Nanxing to slow their pace and stop at a distance, so as not to intrude upon her.
Xie Zhaozhao observed proper decorum with meticulous care in every step. Even when alighting from the carriage, her back remained perfectly straight, and the hairpins and earrings in her hair did not sway in the slightest—much less did she glance around.
Gu Shaoyu caught only a glimpse of her profile.
Skin like ice, bones like jade, an aura beyond compare.
Not a trace of worldly dust—pure, elegant, and yet startlingly beautiful, like a snow lotus atop a high mountain, so lovely that she seemed beyond reach.
Only after she had departed in the soft sedan chair did he tell Nanxing to bring the carriage forward and proceed into the palace.
Xie Zhaozhao entered Consort Xi's Xingning Palace and knelt to pay her respects.
The Emperor was not present, so Consort Xi directly pulled her to her side, ordering the maids and Yuanyuan to wait in the courtyard while the aunt and niece spoke privately.
Consort Xi was just as Xie Zhaozhao remembered—dignified and graceful, young and beautiful. Because she harbored no grudges or ambitions, her aunt's face appeared especially serene and kind.
"I heard you've been betrothed to Grand Secretary Gu. I'm very pleased, Auntie. He has a good reputation."
Her aunt spoke like an old mother, thoroughly satisfied with this marriage.
"Your grandfather owed a debt of gratitude, and it truly has put you at a disadvantage. I originally thought you would be betrothed to the Young Marquis of Pingyang, but when I heard it was the third son of the Gu family, I felt relieved."
"Auntie doesn't care for the Young Marquis of Pingyang?" Xie Zhaozhao was surprised.
In her previous life, she and Gu Chengyan had exchanged Birth-date Marriage Proposals, and her aunt had also brought her to the palace. At the time, she had only said the man was worthy—a promising young talent.
She had never known what Gu Chengyan truly meant to her aunt.
"I always felt there was something hollow about him." Consort Xi was hardly intimidated by a young marquis, and she cut straight to the point. "I suspect his poetry and prose were plagiarized, or that someone else wrote them for him."
"Whenever his writings appeared, they were always breathtakingly brilliant and circulated by thousands. I, too, once believed he was an extraordinary talent. But at one palace banquet, when poems were assigned on the spot, I saw him grow extremely nervous. In the end, he drank himself into a stupor and never produced a single verse."
From that time onward, Consort Xi had taken note. She gathered all of Gu Chengyan's poems and essays and invited several great scholars to analyze them.
The scholars unanimously concluded that although these poems were all stunning, they could not possibly have come from a single hand. Among them were works bearing the weight of a lifetime's vicissitudes—the kind that a man of Gu Chengyan's age and experience could never have written.
"To be honest with you, once I learned the two houses would be joined in marriage, I sent someone to test his learning. It was exactly as I suspected—those poems and essays of his all seemed to be chance acquisitions. As for true scholarship, he barely qualifies as a licentiate."
Consort Xi's meaning was that His Majesty shared the same suspicion—he praised the young man's essays but did not employ him as heavily as he did Grand Secretary Gu.
Xie Zhaozhao pressed her lips together in silence. Many things she had failed to understand in her previous life now became clear after her rebirth, once she considered Guan Yingying's origins.
A faint trace of derision crept to the corners of her eyes.
Consort Xi spoke with her at length in intimate confidence. When the time grew late, reluctant to part, she asked, "Is there anything you need that your aunt can help with?"
Xie Zhaozhao said, "I would like to ask Auntie for a person—someone of reliable character, quick-witted, and skilled in handling matters."
"What do you need them for?"
"I want to open a general goods shop in the capital."
"Why are you thinking of opening a general store? The household doesn't stint you on food or clothing, does it?"
For a young lady of her standing, food and clothing rivaled those of princes and princesses. The household pampered her as if soaking in honey water—how could she ever lack for anything?
Besides, did she need a general store? Her sister-in-law's dowry included dozens of thriving shops, all in her hands, didn't they?
"It's not for money," she said with a faint smile.
Not for money—then she must be looking to gain leverage over certain people.
Consort Xi patted her head and said, "Then I'll think it over for you when I get back."
As they left the palace, Yuanyuan and Manman asked her, "Miss, shall we return to the mansion?"
Xie Zhaozhao shook her head. "To the South City."
The layout of the capital was such: the east held the wealthy, the west the noble, the north the poor, and the south the lowly.
A noble lady like Xie Zhaozhao would ordinarily never set foot in places like the South City or North City.
Yuanyuan didn't know why Xie Zhaozhao wanted to go to such places, but when the mistress gave an order, one simply carried it out.
She lifted the curtain and said to Yunhe and the guards driving the carriage, "To the South City."
After crossing Xuanhe Bridge, they arrived at the South City.
Everywhere one looked were refugees who had come to the capital for the winter and not yet returned home—some were ragged cripples, others were criminals bearing the marks of tattooed punishment.
All manner of people, all sorts of trades, streets cluttered and filthy—a veritable tumor on the capital.
"Make way! Make way!"
The Xie household guards weren't arrogant, but they didn't hide their necessary authority either.
Passersby scrambled aside as the horses trotted past, kicking up light dust with an imposing air.
Toad-shaped sachets hung from the four corners of the carriage, the curtains were made of Shadowless Gauze worth a thousand gold per foot, and the frame was of precious golden nanmu.
Onlookers gazed in awe and whispered among themselves.
"Which noble is this?"
"What fine horses—even their hooves are snow-white. Who could afford to keep such fine steeds?"
The carriage wove through several main thoroughfares like a patrol, meandering for quite a while before finally stopping beneath a memorial archway outside an alley.
This was an archway marking the entrance to a commercial street, beside which ran an alley. At the alley's mouth stood a stone plaque with clerical script carved upon it: Tianhou Lane.
The alley ran straight, with only three households. One house faced the main street directly—green brick walls, gray-tiled gate tower, no different from the other two.
The black wooden door creaked open, and an elderly maidservant emerged leading a child.
The little boy was three or four years old, hair loose and unbound, chubby and fair-skinned—utterly adorable.
Behind them, a woman wore a light purple cross-collared dress, beneath it a jade-colored misty silk gauze shirt lined with silver thread, set off by a moon-white, faint-pink short-waisted jacket embroidered with sleeping lotuses.
Her hair wasn't coiled into a bun but loosely tied into a single long braid that hung down her chest—utterly unlike the married women of the area. She radiated unbridled boldness from head to toe.
She called out casually to the elderly maidservant, "Aunt Wang, take Yuebai and come back a bit later. It's chaotic out there—keep clear of the carts."
Aunt Wang acknowledged her, watched her close the door, then muttered under her breath, "In broad daylight… who does such things? Every time a man comes, she sends the child home late!"
Not far from the alley's mouth, a carriage sat parked—unremarkable, the most common sort seen on the streets.
On the shaft sat a young servant wearing a bamboo hat.
"Yuanyuan, find someone nearby, give them a bit of money, and have them keep watch on that household's movements," Xie Zhaozhao said calmly.
Yuanyuan was somewhat puzzled and asked, "Miss, do you know this family?"
"Mhm."
How could Xie Zhaozhao not know them? The one sitting on the carriage shaft was Gu Chengyan's personal attendant, Wang Fugui, and the child Aunt Wang was leading—she knew him even better.
Raised for fifteen years!