That autumn marked the ninth year of Wei Zhang's reign. He was twenty-five years old, his authority absolute, and he decreed a second imperial selection.
This time, the great aristocratic houses of the capital did not dare send proxies or collateral cousins. The political terrain had shifted violently since the first selection. The Li family was ash. The court had been purged and rebuilt. More importantly, the Emperor was in his prime and had only one surviving prince. Ambition turns rabid when the throne is ironclad but succession is still fragile. The great houses held their breath, dressed their most beautiful daughters in flawless silk, and sent them into a pit of knives.
Even Princess Shengyang, who had only months earlier demanded blood for Noble Consort Qi's destroyed pregnancy, arranged for two girls from her own network to enter the selection. Grief in the capital dies quickly when a phoenix crown is within reach. One of the girls was Yuan Youlan, daughter of the Minister of Personnel.
Overnight, the dying, silent palace was flooded with young, vibrant women and the ruthless scent of fresh ambition.
With Empress Wang remaining little more than a paralyzed figurehead, I was effectively the highest-ranking woman in the empire. Even Noble Consort Qi, once the untouchable proxy of the Princess, was now irrelevant. Her body had been quietly, systematically failing since the medically induced abortion. As the first winter winds hit the capital, it became obvious to everyone that she would not survive to see spring.
I visited her pavilion almost every day. It was a compulsion born of nauseating guilt. She had absolutely no idea that I had given the single syllable that butchered her child and ruined her body. In her ignorance, she treated me with the warm, exhausted tolerance of someone entirely too close to death to maintain grudges.
We spent the afternoons copying Buddhist sutras at her low table, the room thick with the smell of medicinal herbs and impending death. When her hands grew too weak to hold the brush, I took over, writing the heavy black characters while she spoke in a thin, reedy voice.
She told me about her arrival in the capital. Her father, a brutal, politically savvy border general, had aligned the Qi family with Princess Shengyang. Shengyang had packaged her up and delivered her to Wei Zhang as a secondary consort before he even took the throne. Qi had been furious—she was the arrogant, spoiled daughter of a warlord, too proud to be anyone's lower-ranked wife.
But Wei Zhang, she murmured, staring blankly at the sutras, had been endlessly patient. He had indulged her explosive temper. He had been warm when she was combative, unbothered when she lashed out, calmly and expertly managing the political messes she caused. It took her years to realize that his flawless, gentle tolerance hadn't been love.
"He was just maintaining a weapon," she whispered, a dry, terrible smile cracking her pale lips. "He was tolerating me to ensure my father's cavalry stayed leashed during his ascension. I was a military asset. I only understood that later."
She adjusted her skeletal hand atop the heavy brocade blanket. "Noble Consort Shun. I have one final request of you before I die."
"Name it."
"Protect Wei Qi." The First Princess. "Adopt her. Do not let her fall into Princess Shengyang's hands to be used as another pawn to be used and traded."
I didn't ask for a justification. I felt the phantom blood of her unborn child on my hands. I said yes instantly.
She nodded, her eyes closing. She told me she would draft a formal petition to the Emperor immediately. She also planned to arrange for the Second Princess—Consort Cao's orphaned daughter—to be transferred to a consort who would actually ensure the girl survived adulthood.
I set the brush down, the ink bleeding into the paper. "Qi," I asked quietly. "Why did Imperial Concubine Cao betray you? You trusted her entirely."
Noble Consort Qi let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-cough. She sounded utterly exhausted by the memory of her own cruelty. "Because I treated her like an animal," she rasped. "I slapped her. I humiliated her in front of the servants. I used her as a punching bag for my own frustrations for years because she had no family to protect her. She had every right to feed me poison."
Noble Consort Qi died three weeks before the new year.
The First Princess was formally adopted into my household at Ganquan Palace. The Second Princess was placed under the quiet, ironclad protection of Consort Ji in Jinghe Palace.
* * *
The new intake of concubines—the fresh influx of ambitious, terrified girls—began arriving at Ganquan Palace every morning to pay their formal respects to me.
They knelt on the marble, stealing glances at me, their eyes wide with a mixture of envy and disbelief. I could read their thoughts as clearly as if they were shouting: Noble Consort Shun is barely twenty-one. She really is the Emperor's undisputed favorite.
The Emperor's favorite.
Wei Zhang had not stepped foot inside Ganquan Palace since the afternoon the inkstone shattered.
I looked down at the kneeling girls, with their flawless skin and nervous, hopeful eyes, and I smiled. It was a perfect, gentle, utterly dead smile.
"The Emperor favors women who are gentle, compliant, and obedient," I told them, my voice smooth as silk. "Learn to be exactly what he finds delightful, and you will survive."
Docile. Compliant. Shun.
Even my advice sounded exactly like him now. I was becoming the monster I hated.
Years ago, sitting on a swing in a sunlit courtyard, I had asked Wei Zhang what kind of woman he wanted to marry. He had looked at me with those unimaginably clear eyes and said: "Just like you, Bao Niang. Gentle and compliant."
I had thought it was a love confession.
I hadn't realized it was the blueprint for a cage.
* * *
One evening, I drank with Consort Ji and Gong Pingru until the edges of the room blurred. When it was time to leave, I refused the imperial sedan chair. I wanted to walk—the long, freezing route that ran parallel to the outer palace wall. Auntie Jin Se and Hong Yu knew better than to argue with me when the alcohol had settled into my blood like cold iron. They flanked me in silence.
We turned a corner near the northern meridian gate, and I nearly collided with them.
The Emperor's palanquin.
It was a massive structure of black sandalwood and gold, carried by sixteen eunuchs who moved with terrifying synchronization. The heavy silk curtains were tied back. Wei Zhang sat inside, elevated above the dark path, illuminated from below by the swaying palace lanterns. He looked carved from marble—still, formal, entirely rigid.
And then his gaze caught mine. For a fraction of a second, the sovereign's mask cracked. His hand tightened on the armrest, his posture breaking as he registered the sight of his highest-ranking consort stumbling down a dark stone path like a common drunkard.
The alcohol had stripped away the suffocating layers of 'Shun.' I didn't kneel. I didn't avert my eyes. I pulled my arm violently out of Auntie Jin Se's desperate, terrified grip, walked straight into the path of the imperial procession, and slapped both hands flat against the leading carrying pole.
The sixteen eunuchs jarred to a halt.
"Who dares—oh, Your Grace." Decai, walking point, had started to bark out a treason challenge before his voice collapsed in horror. He whipped his head back toward the palanquin, saw Wei Zhang's face in the lantern light, swallowed hard, and dropped to his knees in the dirt.
I looked up at Wei Zhang. He looked down at me.
The golden light from the lanterns cast deep, unreadable shadows across his cheekbones. He possessed a kind of cold, untouchable beauty sitting up there—the absolute apex of human power. But what was in his eyes wasn't anger. It was something profoundly brittle. A suffocating, exhausted grief. Or worse: it might have been pity.
He didn't order the bearers to lower the palanquin. He slowly relaxed back into the cushions, giving up the rigid posture of the Emperor, and began tapping his index finger against the armrest. A slow, rhythmic, waiting sound. He was looking at me exactly the way a patient adult looks at a misbehaving child, waiting for the tantrum to end.
He waited three full breaths. When I didn't speak, his voice drifted down, calm and devastating:
"Decai. Escort Noble Consort Shun back to her pavilion."
Say something, a frantic voice screamed inside my head. Scream at him. Hit the palanquin. Beg him. Do not let him just walk away.
But my vocal cords were paralyzed. The crushing weight of the title—Shun—pinned me to the stones. He was already turning his head away. The eunuchs hoisted the poles, and the massive palanquin swung in a slow arc, carrying him away into the deep shadows of the imperial corridor.
A blast of freezing autumn wind hit my face, slicing through the alcohol haze. Acid rose violently in the back of my throat. I turned my back to the retreating dots of lantern light and started walking. Unsteady, but fast. Away from Ganquan Palace. Toward the northern gate.
"Where are you going?"
The voice cracked like a whip down the corridor. The palanquin had stopped. Wei Zhang was leaning entirely out of the carriage, staring at my back.
I didn't turn around. I kept walking. "Home," I yelled over my shoulder, my voice raw and echoing off the high brick walls. "Bao Niang is going home."
Bao Niang should have gone back to the Northwest years ago. The woman suffocating inside this palace is Noble Consort Shun.
I heard the sharp intake of breath from the eunuchs. I felt the physical weight of his stare burning into my spine. He said something low and terrible to Decai. And then, impossibly: the palanquin started moving again. Away from me.
I stopped walking. I turned slowly and watched his back recede—sitting so high, so completely untouchable, sacrificing everything and everyone on the altar of his own survival.
This, I thought, the realization settling into my bones like ice. This is exactly what he is. He will never step down into the dirt for you.
Decai scrambled over the flagstones and threw himself on his knees at my feet, literally clawing at the hem of my ruined silk skirt. "Your Grace—my lady, I am begging you on my life. Please do not make this harder than it already is. Do not force me to drag you."
I looked down at the terrified old eunuch. Then I smiled. It was the same dead, flawless smile I gave the new concubines.
"Of course, Decai," I said softly, stepping back from the gate. "Let's return to the cage."
* * *
I had thought the confrontation by the northern gate was our final, irreparable fracture. I had steeled myself for the Cold Palace.
Instead, the very next day, Wei Zhang appeared in the dining hall of Ganquan Palace precisely at noon. He offered no explanation. He simply sat down and ate. And he kept doing it. Every single day, reliably, without fail, the Emperor took his midday meal with me.
For the first two weeks, the silence at the table was suffocating enough to crack porcelain. By the end of the month, we were exchanging a few guarded, polite sentences about the weather or the new tea harvest. To the rest of the squabbling, desperate inner palace, it looked like a miraculous reconciliation.
The Emperor cannot stay angry with Noble Consort Shun. The favor is unshakable.
But the truth was slow and cruel. He came every day. And he called me Noble Consort Shun every single time. Bao Niang never crossed his lips again.
He was spoon-feeding me sugar while systematically rubbing crushed porcelain into the wound. He was demonstrating that he could give me everything the world valued—status, visibility, power—while permanently withholding the only thing I actually wanted. I survived the psychological whiplash only because Consort Ji and Gong Pingru aggressively intercepted me, dragging me to their pavilions to gamble with bone dice, critique theatrical troupes, and drink until I stopped thinking.
* * *
A week before the Mid-Autumn Festival, Consort Ji bullied her kitchen staff into baking dozens of mooncakes and summoned Gong Pingru and me to Jinghe Palace to "test" them.
I took a massive bite of the first one she handed me, and violently choked. I spit it out into a silk handkerchief, hacking and laughing simultaneously. "Five-kernel filling? Ji, are you trying to assassinate me?"
Consort Ji—born and raised in Shandong, with an utterly indefensible, militant attachment to the worst pastry filling in the empire—took a massive, aggressive bite of her own and chewed with exaggerated pleasure. "You lack refinement, Shun."
We both turned like a pair of wolves toward Gong Pingru. She elegantly broke off a crumb-sized corner, placed it on her tongue, swallowed with the grim determination of a soldier taking medicine, and said smoothly, "It is entirely acceptable. Please do not involve me in this regional warfare."
We laughed until we couldn't breathe.
When the tea was poured and the maids retreated, the atmosphere shifted. Consort Ji wiped the sugar from her fingers, her expression hardening. She pulled out a thick ledger—a copy of the imperial physician's attendance records she had spent weeks bribing eunuchs to compile.
"I've been tracking a pattern," Consort Ji began, her voice dropping to a murmur. "Empress Wang is famously useless. When the lower concubines insult her, spread rumors, or entirely bypass her authority, she responds with Buddhist prayers and profound tolerance."
She tapped a heavily annotated page in the ledger. "But whenever a whisper—even a shadow of a threat—touches the First Prince, her reaction is instantaneous, disproportionate, and totally devastating. Her protective perimeter around that boy isn't just maternal. It's venomous. It's lethal."
Consort Ji looked up, her dark eyes locking onto mine. "I've been thinking about the timeline, Bao Niang. Noble Consort Qi and Empress Dowager Li were brutal, yes. But I am beginning to strongly suspect that the systematic eradication of those early pregnancies... wasn't entirely their work."
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