As the panic threatened to drown Lady Xian, her mind did something desperate to survive the terror.
It fractured backward.
It fled the cold, ruined reality of her sixty-year-old self and ran forty-five years into the past, to a time when her hands were unblemished by ink or blood.
She remembered the great courtyard of the Phoenix Pavilion, bathed in the brilliant gold of a spring afternoon.
She was fifteen years old.
Her name was simply Zhao Meiling, the daughter of the Prime Minister, wearing a simple dress of soft pink, her heart beating with a sweet, frantic hope.
She had grown up running through the formal gardens with Wenzong.
She knew his sharp, brilliant mind; she knew the quiet way he looked at the world, and she had developed a deep, genuine, and innocent affection for him.
When he was named Crown Prince, she hadn’t seen a political throne—she had seen the boy she secretly loved, the scholar who had once patiently shown her how to hold a writing brush.
That afternoon, the Dowager Empress had summoned the daughters of the empire for the formal bride selection.
Meiling had stood in a line of ten beautiful girls, her eyes fixed firmly on the floor, praying to the ancestors that she would be chosen.
When the Dowager Empress—a cold, imposing woman draped in heavy gold embroideries—stepped past the other girls and placed the jade ruyi scepter into Meiling’s hands, signifying her selection as the primary consort, Meiling’s heart had soared with pure, unadulterated joy.
She had looked up at Wenzong, hoping to see a reflection of her happiness.
But Wenzong’s face had been a mask of unreadable ice.
Even then.
It was only later, on the night of their wedding, that the crushing truth had been revealed to her.
The Dowager Empress had not chosen Meiling out of love or respect.
The Dowager Empress was Wenzong’s adoptive mother; his birth mother had died bringing him into the world.
The Dowager was consumed by a bitter, poisonous rage because her own birth son had been bypassed for the throne in favor of Wenzong.
Choosing Meiling was the Dowager’s first, brilliant act of lifelong sabotage against the young Crown Prince.By forcing Wenzong to marry the daughter of the Prime Minister—the most powerful political family in the empire—the Dowager had ensured that Wenzong could never trust his own wife.
A prime minister’s daughter was a permanent political spy in his bedchamber, an extension of her family’s ambition.
Wenzong, recognizing the trap, had immediately closed his heart to Meiling.
He treated her with absolute imperial duty, perfect respect, and chilling, permanent emotional distance.
He could never love her, because to love her was to give the Prime Minister leverage over his crown.
Meiling’s youthful hope had been murdered on her wedding night.
For forty-five years, she had starved for a single spark of affection, eventually hardening her heart into the frozen steel of Consort Xian.
She had made herself satisfied with the cold illusion that he was simply incapable of love.
The youthful Meiling who had loved a prince was completely dead.
In her place stood a cornered, ruined woman who finally understood that her husband had not locked her away to discipline her—he had buried her alive to protect the barbarian.
As Lady Xian sat broken in the dirt of her stripped room, a shadow detached itself from the corner.
Eunuch Qin, her loyal steward, stepped forward.
His face was pale, and he was visibly sweating—he knew how close he just came to the strangling cords in the dungeon.
He dropped to his knees beside her, his voice a frantic, desperate whisper, “Mistress…
look at what Bixia has done to this room.
Look at the guards at the gate.
If you lose your spirit now, the foreign witch wins completely.
She has taken the Emperor’s mind.
Tomorrow, she will take your son’s birthright.”
The mention of her son, Crown Prince Shuren, acted like a shock of lightning to her nervous system.
The despair cleared from her eyes, replaced by a cold, calculating, and entirely murderous clarity.
Her vulnerability hardened into frozen steel.
She arose slowly from the floor, leaning on Qin’s arm.
She looked at her ink-stained fingers and her ruined room.
Wenzong had pushed her into a corner, and a cornered animal has nothing left to lose.
Xian walked to her bare wooden desk.
She didn’t use the fine, gold-flecked paper she usually wrote on; she instead pulled a piece of coarse, cheap scrap paper.
She dipped her brush into the black ink.
Shuren, my son.
If you are reading this, your mother has already been buried alive.
Your father has stripped my palace bare, locked me in chains of silence, and barred me from ever looking upon your face again.
He has done this not for a crime of state, but to appease the barbarian woman from the north.
The Emperor is no longer sane, Shuren.
A foreign witch has poisoned his mind with her dark arts.
Today, he destroys your mother to protect her.
Tomorrow, she will convince him to strip you of your title and replace you as the heir to the Jing Dynasty.
As a son, your filial duty is to protect the mother who birthed you.
As the Crown Prince, your duty is to save this empire from a sovereign who has lost his mind.
Do not come to beg for my release; his heart is ice.
Go to General Meng Kai.
Arm your men.
For the sake of our bloodline, we must cleanse this court from the inside out.”
She sealed it and handed it to her loyal servant, Qin.
“Use the most trusted back channels and make sure the Crown Prince receives this tonight.” She ordered.
“Yes, Majesty.” Qin bowed deeply, taking the letter and slipping into the shadows of the night.
It was the dead of night in the Crown Prince’s private estate.
Shuren was pacing his study, unable to sleep because the rumors from the Inner Court had already begun to leak out—whispers of moving guards, executed kitchen maids, and a sudden, freezing silence enveloping his mother’s palace.
A floorboard clicks.
Shuren spins around, his hand instinctively dropping to the hilt of his ceremonial sword.
Out of the dark corners of the room steps Eunuch Qin.
The old steward is disheveled, his robes torn at the hem, his face pale with a terror so profound he looks aged by ten years.
Without a word, Qin drops to his knees and holds up a crumpled, cheap piece of rough scrap paper.
“Your Highness…
from the Chief Consort.
I slipped through the drainage channels before the heavy iron seals were dropped.
Read it, Your Highness.
Read it quickly.”
Shuren snatched the paper.
He recognized her handwriting instantly—but it wasn’t her usual, flawlessly pristine calligraphy.
The ink was rushed, smudged, and erratic.As his eyes scanned her words, his youthful, royal composure completely disintegrated.
“…your mother has already been buried alive.”
alive…stripped my palace bare, locked me in chains of silence….a foreign witch has poisoned his mind…”
A sharp, suffocating gasp escaped Shuren’s throat.
The paper trembled violently in his grip.
He remembered his entire childhood.
Emperor Wenzong had never held his hand, never praised his academic marks, and never looked at him with anything other than critical evaluation.
But his mother—Consort Xian—had been his sanctuary.
When his father’s coldness had made the young prince weep in his chambers, it was his mother who had secretly brought him sweet pastries, held him against her silk-clad shoulder, and whispered that he was her greatest pride.
She had endured forty-five years of an unloving marriage, pouring every drop of her starved affection entirely into him.
And now, that sanctuary had been violently destroyed.
Tears of pure, agonizing grief hot-wired down Shuren’s cheeks, and splashed onto the rough paper, smudging his mother’s frantic ink.
The mental image of his proud, dignified mother being stripped of her life’s work and locked in a dark, empty room made his blood run boiling hot.
The grief quickly curdled into a blinding, consuming rage.
He clutched the letter tightly against his chest, and crushed it in his fist.
He didn’t see a father who was punishing a traitorous wife; he saw a cold, unfeeling madman who had allowed a barbarian captive to tear their family apart.
In a chocked whisper, Shuren said, “He ruined her life for forty years…
and now he buries her in the dirt for a barbarian?”
He looked down at the kneeling Eunuch Qin, his tear-streaked face hardened into a terrifying expression of absolute defiance.
The soft, benevolent prince was gone.
Filial piety demanded he avenge this slight.
“Tell my mother…
I will not let her die in the dark.
If my father has lost his mind to this foreign witch, then it is my duty as her son to drag him off the throne.”