My fifth spring in the palace arrived like a slow-acting poison. Within the space of three days, two perfectly orchestrated pieces of news detonated across the six palaces: Noble Consort Qi was pregnant. And so was Imperial Concubine Xiang—Ling Huai.
Both announcements ignited something ugly and visceral inside me. A deep, humiliating burn of inadequacy. My own body had betrayed me. I had forced down the scalding, bitter contraceptive brew for years entirely on my own initiative, finally stopping it months ago. The Emperor visited my bed twice as often as any other woman's. And still: nothing. My womb remained as barren as winter stone.
Gong Pingru and Consort Ji saw straight through my brittle composure. They practically moved into Ganquan Palace, bringing endless distractions and gossip to fill the suffocating silence. It was during one of these afternoons that a piece of genuinely massive news broke: my brother was finally being transferred to the capital.
The news brought no joy, only guilt. I thought of Mother and the quiet, iron-willed sacrifices my family had made, dismantling their own neutrality to lay stones under my feet. I thought of my brother, dragged from the open plains of the Northwest into the capital's political mill because his sister had insisted on a man who saw our family as a threat.
He would need a wife now, someone politically bulletproof to anchor him in this snake pit.
That evening, Wei Zhang sat on the edge of my bed, watching me brush my hair. I pressed him—softly, carefully, employing the precise tone he favored—for information about the pregnancies. He let the truth slip with deliberate, terrifying carelessness.
He suspected Noble Consort Qi's pregnancy had been engineered entirely outside his control. He had no desire to create a child with Princess Shengyang's proxy. He only visited Qi's pavilion twice a month to satisfy the political ritual, and he had quietly embedded an operative in her private kitchen to ensure her 'medicinal teas' were heavily laced with abortifacients. He had never once deviated from the dosage. He was visibly frustrated, unable to explain how she had conceived despite a blockade that should have been airtight.
He kept talking, outlining his suspicions about Shengyang smuggling in clean tea. But the roaring in my ears drowned out his voice.
He put an operative in Noble Consort Qi's kitchen to secretly dose her.
My hand stopped mid-stroke, the wooden comb digging into my scalp. Does he have someone in my quarters too? Is that why my body feels dead inside? Has he been secretly sterilizing me every single day?
I was the daughter of the Zhen clan. I didn't know how to play the terrified, silent victim. So I turned and asked him directly, the words tasting like copper.
Wei Zhang froze. For a fraction of a second, he looked genuinely stunned. Then, the shock warped into a profound, suffocating offense. The temperature in the room plummeted. I held his gaze, refusing to blink, while his expression darkened from irritation to absolute, arctic fury.
He didn't say a word. The silence stretched for three long seconds. Then he swept his untouched rice bowl off the rosewood table. Porcelain exploded across the floor. He stood so fast his chair crashed backward and stormed out of the pavilion.
I sat entirely alone in the wreckage. I didn't call the maids to clean up the shattered porcelain. I just stared at the overturned dishes, the cold rice bleeding into the spilled soy sauce—a perfect visual of something fundamentally broken that couldn't be glued back together.
An hour later, the pathetic, bred-in-the-bone subservience I hated in myself won out. He's sulking in Yangxin Hall, I told myself. He won't eat if he's angry, and his stomach will cramp. I went to the small kitchen myself, my hands shaking as I brewed a bowl of rock-sugar bird's nest soup.
I had just stepped onto the stone path, the warm bowl cradled in my hands, when Hong Yu materialized from the shadows. She gripped the lacquer pillar, her face pale, hesitating as if the words physically hurt to say.
The Emperor wasn't in Yangxin Hall.
He had gone straight to Imperial Concubine Xiang's pavilion.
I set the porcelain bowl carefully down on the freezing stone path. The sweet steam vanished instantly into the night air.
He was taking the after-dinner walk with Ling Huai now—the slow, intimate stroll that had been our ritual since we were teenagers. He was holding her hand as they walked the imperial gardens. He was leaning down, pressing his mouth against her ear, and telling her that the moon was less beautiful than her eyes.
I didn't guess this. I knew it, because I knew the exact lines he used to make a girl feel like she was the only living thing in the universe.
* * *
The retaliation came so fast I couldn't even track the political machinery moving it. Within weeks, without any plot I had sanctioned or even known about, Noble Consort Qi began bleeding heavily.
Before the physicians could even diagnose the threat of miscarriage, Imperial Concubine Cao stepped out of the shadows and confessed. She had systematically laced safflower—a potent abortifacient—into the chicken broth she brought Noble Consort Qi every afternoon. Qi, arrogant and isolated, had trusted Cao implicitly because Cao was a remnant of the old regime with no power base of her own. Cao had boiled the broth herself. There were no middlemen to interrogate.
Hours after her public confession, Consort Cao was found dangling from a silk cord in her quarters. She left a single sumi-e brushed letter behind: a plea for the Emperor to find a merciful foster mother for her young daughter, the Second Princess.
I was completely blind to all of this. I was sitting in my pavilion when a palace maid arrived, breathless and frantic.
The senior midwife—the one who owed her life to my mother, the same woman who had dragged Gong Pingru back from the brink of death—needed an immediate, verbal directive from me.
I received her in the hidden side-room. The midwife was chalk-white, her hands trembling so violently she had to clench them into fists. She looked at me, her eyes manic with terror, and asked a single question:
Did I want Noble Consort Qi's child removed permanently?
The question drove straight into my brain like an ice pick, severing all higher thought. The room spun.
"Decide right now, Your Grace," she hissed, glancing frantically at the door. They were calling for her in Qi's delivery room. She could save the child, or she could ensure the safflower finished the job without leaving evidence. It was my call.
My brain was utterly paralyzed. The jealousy, the terror of Shengyang's power, the image of Wei Zhang holding Ling Huai's hand—it all crashed together into a blind, visceral panic. Before any rational thought could intervene, the monster he had built inside me ripped a single syllable out of my throat.
"Yes."
The midwife nodded once, spun around, and vanished into the corridor.
What happened next was a medically engineered slaughter. A pregnancy that the Imperial Physicians later quietly admitted might have been salvaged with aggressive intervention was decisively, irrevocably ended. Noble Consort Qi bled out until she was a ghost. The damage was catastrophic. She would never conceive again.
As Qi lay dying in her blood-soaked bed, Princess Shengyang arrived at the palace gates like an invading army, flanked by the Imperial Guard, demanding the Emperor surrender the truth.
I couldn't breathe. The reality of what I had just authorized crushed my ribcage inward. I sprinted out of Ganquan Palace in the dead of night, not even stopping for a cloak. I ran to Consort Ji's pavilion, my knees giving out the moment I crossed her threshold.
I collapsed on her floor, sobbing so hard the words broke apart in my mouth: "I killed someone. I killed Noble Consort Qi's baby. I did it. I told her to do it."
Consort Ji lunged forward and slammed her hand over my mouth with terrifying force, cutting off the confession mid-scream. She dragged me into the deepest corner of her bedchamber and held me in a suffocating grip while I cried until the world went black and I finally lost consciousness.
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