Shang Yinyu felt a wave of dizziness. His body was burning hot, as if soaked in boiling water, and also as if immersed in a tide of passion, unable to break free.
He thought he was about to suffocate to death, but after waiting half a day, no revolving lantern of memories started in his mind, and his consciousness grew clearer and clearer.
The hand Qiao Beiji had covered his mouth with seemed to have been withdrawn as well. The other was still beside him, but the posture was wrong.
Shang Yinyu frowned slightly. The feeling of his body burning hot and being soaked in water was so real that even the air he breathed in carried hot steam.
The air he breathed in?
I can really still breathe. I’m still alive!
Shang Yinyu suddenly opened his eyes, and with the trance brought by a light wave of dizziness, Shang Yinyu met a pair of dark, restrained eyes.
A hazy, unclear mist floated over those ink-black eyes, and a streak of gorgeous red had risen at the corners of the eyes, the most moving, with the feeling of spring.
Eyes this familiar, even if he were turned to ashes, Shang Yinyu could not forget them.
It was these eyes, once stained with madness, whose owner had pinned him on the dragon couch and covered his mouth so that he could not call for help.
But they were not on the dragon couch.
Shang Yinyu found that the sleeping robe on his body had long since vanished, and only warm pool water wrapped around him. A cry of alarm escaped him before he could stop it:
“Qiao Beiji! What are you doing to me?!”
Shang Yinyu instinctively backed away. The touch of warm, elastic skin under his palm flashed and was gone.
Before he understood what was going on, his foot slipped, and with a “plop” his whole body fell straight into the water.
The last picture Shang Yinyu saw before entering the water was Qiao Beiji, half his body submerged, raising his eyes in astonishment, his gaze meeting his, and Qiao Beiji’s body leaning toward him.
Qiao Beiji was extremely handsome. With half his body soaking in the pool, strands of hair wet with water lying on his body, he did not look the least messy; instead he was like a blade that had been baptized in water, even more keen and tempered.
That blade was coming for him.
The warm, clear water closed over his head. Shang Yinyu heard nothing in his ears but the sound of himself falling into the water, and all that his sight reached was churning pool water.
Shang Yinyu flailed helplessly, and his hand easily touched the bottom of the pool.
The bottom of the pool was not white jade tiles but smooth, warm stones.
Wrong. This was not the Nine Dragon Pool where he bathed in his bedchamber. Where on earth had this treacherous minister Qiao Beiji brought him?!
The thought had only just risen when a pull came at his waist, and Shang Yinyu’s upper body was brought out of the water, and fresh air rushed into his lungs.
“Cough, cough…”
“Your Majesty?” a slightly worried low male voice sounded beside his ear.
Shang Yinyu gripped the arm of the person in front of him and coughed softly. He could swim; it was only that opening his eyes and seeing Qiao Beiji’s eyes full of spring and desire had hit him a little hard, and he had not been able to react for a moment.
Shang Yinyu tried his best to stay calm. Catching his breath, he looked around and inferred the present situation from his surroundings.
The situation was unclear. If it came to blows, Shang Yinyu admitted he could not last a single move against Qiao Beiji, who had been a shadow guard and had been on the battlefield.
Shang Yinyu saw red or pink marks printed on Qiao Beiji’s body… This shouldn’t be my doing, should it? I wasn’t drunk.
His gaze moved. Wisps of mist rose from the clear surface of the hot spring, and on the smooth, damp stones at the bank lay a black and a white training robe, scattered. Farther off, a weeping begonia in full bloom stood with its crimson petals drifting down.
This was…
Huaqing Hall, the Begonia Bath.
The moment the doubt rose in Shang Yinyu, the names of this palace and this bath pool naturally popped into his mind.
When he took the throne, he had changed the names of the halls in the imperial palace at random, every one of them.
This Huaqing Hall had a hot spring pool, but no Consort Yang with skin like congealed fat, and the Begonia Bath was not indoors but in an inner courtyard planted with weeping begonias, where looking up one could see the blue sky and the bright moon.
In childhood, to deal with the endless “accidents” in the palace, he had trained a body of martial skill to protect himself. After taking the throne he had also made a habit of spending some time every day training in Shangwu Hall, and when he had trained until he was hot with sweat he would come to Huaqing Hall to soak.
Sometimes he would drag along Qiao Beiji, the shadow guard commander who served as his sparring partner, and on many afternoons, soaking in the hot spring, he had poured all of his youthful ardor onto Qiao Beiji.
Qiao Beiji at that time was still somewhat quiet and wooden, but extremely obedient. He showed no resistance to any of his commands, and whatever he was told to do, he would dutifully go along.
Shang Yinyu stopped the memory in time and looked at Qiao Beiji, slowing his breathing.
He did not understand why the other had not killed him and had brought him to the bath pool of Huaqing Hall, and then there were those messy marks, which really invited speculation.
“Qiao Beiji, what exactly do you want to do?”
Shang Yinyu stared at the person in front of him through gritted teeth. If their martial strength had not been on different levels, he would certainly have made Qiao Beiji understand why begonias are so red.
While glaring, Shang Yinyu also faintly felt that something was off. Qiao Beiji’s expression and face gave him an odd feeling he could not put into words.
What exactly was off?
After he spoke the question, a moment of blankness surfaced on Qiao Beiji’s face, and he looked at him a little helplessly and said:
“Nineteen does not know whom Your Majesty is asking about.”
Shang Yinyu’s eyes went wide.
Nineteen was Qiao Beiji’s original name. Shadow Nineteen, his shadow guard commander.
Ever since he had granted Qiao Beiji a name, the other had never referred to himself that way again.
How could it be…
Shang Yinyu had a faint sense of it, and his gaze froze on Qiao Beiji’s forehead.
He seemed to know where that odd feeling came from…
Guardian General Qiao Beiji had a scar on his forehead. From far away it could not be seen, but up close one could make out a faint mark.
Qiao Beiji led troops into battle and was always charging at the very front. Who knew how many wounds he had suffered, yet not one enemy soldier had the ability to put a blade across his handsome face.
All the court officials of Great Xia knew that the scar on the General’s forehead had been left when he returned to the capital with his troops and had an audience with the emperor.
The emperor had issued an imperial edict granting the General a title and a marriage. The General refused to accept the edict and entered the palace to see the emperor. When he came out of the palace that night, his forehead was wounded and blood ran down, glaringly red.
Whether because he did not dare to have it removed since it was given by the emperor, or to remember the humiliation, the General did not let a physician treat the wound, and afterward did not use scar-removing ointment either, leaving the faint pink mark, after the wound had healed by itself, printed on his face.
That mark seemed to symbolize the complete break between emperor and Guardian General, with their dispute laid out in the open.
But now the forehead of the person before him was smooth and unblemished. The scar that symbolized their break no longer existed.
Shang Yinyu suspected the hot mist of the spring had blurred his vision. He reached out, brushed aside the strands of hair on Qiao Beiji’s forehead, and rubbed the center of his forehead with his fingertips.
It was indeed smooth there, with no tiny raised scar.
Shang Yinyu’s fingertips moved slowly down along Qiao Beiji’s brow bone, touching the brows and eyes, the bridge of the nose, and the lips of the person in front of him.
Every part seemed different. It was still the same person, but even more… tender.
Shang Yinyu chewed over the word that had popped up abruptly in his mind and felt only shock.
Qiao Beiji seemed to have become younger.
Shang Yinyu was studying the person in front of him. His fingers stopped on Qiao Beiji’s lower lip, on a bitten-open mark on its inner side. Judging by its position, Qiao Beiji must have bitten it himself.
Qiao Beiji looked nervous and at a loss, as if he did not know how to respond to this situation.
Qiao Beiji had followed him for so many years; how could he not know how to respond?
If the other craved his dragon body, he should take his finger into his mouth and serve him as he had once been taught! If he felt humiliated and angry, he should by rights bite down once and bite the finger off directly!
Shang Yinyu’s gaze settled on his own slender, jade-like fingers, and a guess surfaced in his mind.
That guess made every hair on Shang Yinyu’s body stand on end. He pushed the person in front of him away and turned and hurried ashore.
Shang Yinyu roughly wiped the water off his body with a bath cloth, hastily put on his clothes, and headed out.
As he passed the clothes lying at the entrance of the hot spring pool, his gaze froze slightly.
They were two training robes, one plain white, patterned with nine dragons and auspicious clouds, and one black, with the shadow guard’s mark on the cuffs.
—Qiao Beiji had stopped being his shadow guard three years ago!
Shang Yinyu heard the sound of someone coming out of the water behind him. He did not want to stop, and his steps involuntarily quickened again.
Could it really be… rebirth?
Could it be a setup Qiao Beiji had arranged for him, to put on a play?
No one caught up from behind, and this left Shang Yinyu not knowing whether to breathe a sigh of relief or to be even more on edge.
The emperor suddenly came hurrying out of the Begonia Bath, and the palace attendants waiting outside were all startled. The chief eunuch An Dezhong quickly led the attendants after him.
“Your Majesty?” the chief eunuch said in surprise as he chased. “Where are you in such a hurry to go?”
“An Dezhong?” Hearing the voice, Shang Yinyu’s steps stopped and he turned to look at him. His gaze fell on the chief eunuch’s legs, and he was slightly startled in his heart. Watching the chief eunuch’s expression, he asked: “Has your leg chill gotten better?”
An Dezhong was a eunuch who had served at his side since his time in the princely residence, and being an old man, his legs had some problems.
A few days earlier the temperature had dropped sharply and An Dezhong’s old-man leg chill had flared up. It was said he could not walk, so he had asked him for leave, and a newly promoted young eunuch had attended him.
Suddenly receiving His Majesty’s concern, An Dezhong was deeply moved, but his legs were fine.
“This old servant’s legs and feet are still convenient enough to keep up with Your Majesty. Is Your Majesty worried about the memorials in the imperial study? Today is a rest day, and Your Majesty need not toil so…”
The memorials…
Right, there were the memorials.
None of the attendants’ expressions showed anything strange. Even if all of this was acted out, the memorials that had been reviewed and sent down to the provinces could not be faked, and there were also the secret letters of the Military Council, all destroyed after being read.
However great Qiao Beiji’s power, he had no way of restoring the past memorials and secret letters.
Shang Yinyu was extremely anxious and had no time to listen to An Dezhong’s nagging. He did not even have a sedan chair prepared, and turned and headed quickly toward the imperial study.
“Aiyo, Your Majesty! Your Majesty, your hair is still wet!” An Dezhong snatched the cloth held by a young palace maid and chased after him, poor man with his old bones.
By the time An Dezhong, following the emperor’s back, ran panting into the imperial study, the emperor was already leafing through the memorials on the desk.
It was truly “leafing through”; without the imperial vermilion brush, several were turned in the blink of an eye.
“Is Your Majesty looking for something?” An Dezhong came forward with the cloth.
Not only was the emperor’s hair dripping water, but his robe was also worn carelessly. An Dezhong sighed inwardly that martial artists really don’t know how to be waited on, and carefully lifted the emperor’s long hair and wiped it bit by bit with the cloth.
“I’m looking at what day of which month it is today, to find an auspicious day.” Shang Yinyu made up a line offhandedly and casually opened the memorial of the Governor-General of Liangguang, which cheerfully said, “Your servant is sending Your Majesty lychees!”
This governor-general had been transferred to the Liangguang region by him in the tenth year of Tianxi, and of the memorials he submitted that year, seven out of ten were about sending him local specialties, from lychees to pineapples to bananas to mangoes…
But in the twelfth year of Tianxi he had transferred this Governor-General of Liangguang back to the capital, and it had been quite some years since he had seen memorials with such a variety of specialty-sending tricks.
When he had gone through most of the memorials, Shang Yinyu had a clear idea in his heart.
He had already been through transmigration, so another rebirth, as long as it was not in someone else’s setup, was not something he could not accept.
An Dezhong was also startled by the emperor’s remark about an auspicious day, and it took him a good while to calm down.
Seeing that the emperor had not noticed his distraction, An Dezhong gently wiped the emperor’s hair and said softly:
“Yesterday was the Qianqiu Festival, and today is the twentieth of the ninth month. Did Your Majesty… favor Shadow Nineteen?”
“What does it have to do with him?” Whether I slept with him or not, would you, the chief eunuch in charge of the door, not know?
Shang Yinyu thought the other had asked a pointless question and was about to toss the memorial aside, when he suddenly paused and looked again at the year on the memorial.
—The tenth year of Tianxi.
He had taken the throne at nine, and the Qianqiu Festival of the tenth year of Tianxi was his eighteenth birthday.
And the day after that birthday, in the bath pool of Huaqing Hall, he had taken Qiao Beiji, still his shadow guard, for the first time.
Shang Yinyu remembered this date very clearly. The Qianqiu Festival gave three days of rest, and he had taken two of them with Qiao Beiji.
The messy entanglement between them afterward began in the two days after the Qianqiu Festival of the tenth year of Tianxi.
This date… could it be such a coincidence?
Shang Yinyu was stunned and uncertain, and tried hard to recall the scene in the hot spring pool just now.
Had he just slept with Qiao Beiji?
That scene was really hard to say.
Why did it have to bring him back to this day? Even one day earlier would have been fine.
Shang Yinyu had also once thought about why he and Qiao Beiji had come to this point.
It was not because Qiao Beiji’s power shook the court and gave him the capital to oppose him, and even less because he could not tolerate worthy ministers and good generals. Great Xia lacked talented generals, and he could hardly wait to promote Qiao Beiji.
The root cause was still that he had favored Qiao Beiji.
The imperial power on his body had forced Qiao Beiji to submit, and this was the original sin.
It was going to end badly.
Shang Yinyu clutched his forehead with a headache. What meaning did this rebirth have? To let him live his previous life again and in the end be smothered by a palace consort… oh no, by the General, in his own bedchamber?