The eleventh year of Wan Feng. I was twenty-three. My brother, Zhen Anyu, was arrested in the dead of night and dragged to the water-dungeon of the Imperial Clan Court.
That was how the year broke: one crisis after another, fast enough to leave no room to breathe.
The charge was a political noose: illicit, intimate contact with an imperial palace woman. The woman in question was Qian Ruixin, the spirited girl from a minor military family who had entered the imperial selection alongside me five years ago.
The Imperial Clan Court handled scandals tied to imperial blood and was shielded by ancestral law. If Wei Zhang interfered publicly, the censorate would erupt.
My brother was not imperial blood, so they could either try him internally or transfer him to the Court of Judicial Review. They transferred him. I could not tell whether it was courtesy to my father's rank or panic about holding the bomb themselves.
What I did know was that this was the second decision of my life I would never stop regretting.
Inside the Court of Judicial Review, the case could be buried as a misunderstanding or expanded into treason and three-generation extermination. That lever belonged to the Emperor.
I was freezing from the inside out. For the past six months, Wei Zhang and I had maintained an agonizing, fragile détente—his daily, silent lunches at Ganquan Palace, a slow, methodical thawing of the ice. Had I completely annihilated that political capital by allowing my family to become a liability? Should I strip to coarse clothes, kneel at the gates of Yangxin Hall, and beg for a physical punishment to offset his anger?
Consort Ji intercepted me before I could lose my nerve. She locked Ganquan Palace and forced a cup of scalding tea into my hands. We split the defense fast: Ji would use her Clan Court network to pull unredacted interrogation logs. Gong Pingru would mobilize her father's influence to keep my brother from being tortured or poisoned in holding. I was the only one who could probe the Emperor's intent.
I arrived at Yangxin Hall carrying a porcelain food-box of soup I had stood over a charcoal stove to brew myself.
Wei Zhang refused me entry. The eunuchs blocked the steps.
I knelt on the freezing stone of the courtyard. I would not leave without looking him in the eye. Two hours passed. Finally, Decai hurried out of the side chamber, practically dragging me into the shadows of the colonnade, his face slick with nervous sweat.
"Your Grace. Do you have any idea what you've triggered?" he hissed. "If this were a standard inner-palace scandal, His Majesty could have smothered the rumors and shipped your brother back to the border. But you—the Zhen family—used your military leverage to force the jurisdiction transfer out of the Clan Court. Do you understand what story that tells?"
My blood froze. I had been blindly focused on moving my brother into the Judicial Review to circumvent the Clan Court's notoriously lethal 'internal discipline' methods. I hadn't looked at the chessboard from the throne's perspective.
The narrative was catastrophic: The Zhen family defying imperial jurisprudence, physically hijacking an imperial inquiry, demonstrating that their military power superseded the Emperor's legal authority.
"The censors are already drafting memorials," Decai whispered frantically. "They are saying the Zhen family's tentacles have strangled the capital. That even imperial family affairs must bow to the Northwest army. My lady, that is precisely the rhetoric they used to annihilate the Li family. Once a sovereign believes that narrative, there is no survival."
Decai gripped his whisk, shaking his head. "Send an emergency courier to the Grand Tutor. Get him to the capital tomorrow. Have your father send an immediate, groveling memorial of self-impeachment from the Northwest. Disarm before the Emperor decides he has to cut the arm off entirely."
* * *
An hour later, Consort Ji breached Ganquan Palace with intelligence that turned the crisis from political to surreal.
My brother was preparing to sign a full confession. He intended to plead guilty to the affair.
"There is a massive structural flaw in this case," Gong Pingru stated, her voice unnervingly calm. Her father had risked his career to review the preliminary deposition. "Your brother admitted to the relationship in broad strokes. But when the interrogators pressed for logistical specifics—how they bypassed the shift patrols, which specific pavilion they used, the dates of the encounters—his answers were contradictory garbage. He couldn't align the facts."
Pingru leaned forward. "Furthermore, the primary witness—a palace maid who supposedly caught them—has suddenly recanted the physical description of the man she saw in the dark. Bao Niang, your brother isn't guilty. He is throwing himself on a sword to cover for someone else."
I launched off the rosewood bench, pacing three tight tracks across the carpet before slamming my hand against a pillar.
My mother and I had spent three days trembling on the edge of a blood purge. The Zhen family had inadvertently triggered a crisis that could end in our collective execution. And my idiot, honorable brother was volunteering to die to protect a friend.
"The objective," Consort Ji said, cutting through my rage, "is identifying the real ghost. Who is actually sleeping with Qian Ruixin? Who does your brother feel loyal enough to die for? Most likely a junior officer in his Imperial Guard unit."
"And what about Qian Ruixin?" I demanded.
"Controlled by Noble Lady Yu—Yi Yan," Ji replied instantaneously. "They entered the palace together. They share a political background. Yi Yan is the only one smart enough to coach Qian Ruixin through an interrogation without breaking. I am going to Yi Yan's pavilion tonight to break her before she can establish a secondary defense."
I stared at the two women sitting in my hall, risking their own necks and their families' survival to pull my brother out of the fire. What did I do in a past life, I thought, to earn this kind of loyalty in a place built on betrayal?
* * *
They deployed immediately. I should have taken a sedative and slept. Instead, I turned around and walked straight back into the lion's den at Yangxin Hall.
Wei Zhang was not there. The imperial records logged him at the pavilion of Noble Consort Yuan—Yuan Youlan, the Minister of Personnel's daughter.
But Decai had not accompanied the imperial procession. The Grand Eunuch was standing alone in the dark anteroom of Yangxin Hall, holding a lantern. Waiting for me.
"I calculated you would return," he said quietly. "I requested to remain behind."
"Did His Majesty leave a directive for me?"
"No, Your Grace. But there is context you lack. Information I have been waiting years to give you, if you will grant me the grace to speak out of turn."
I nodded sharply.
The old eunuch stared into the lantern flame. "In the brutal years immediately following His Majesty's ascension, the pressure was apocalyptic. The late Emperor's faction, the Li dowager, the border generals—he was fighting a war on six fronts. He barely slept for three years. He was turning into something entirely made of ice."
"The shift occurred in the fourth year. During the final review of the imperial selection roster. He sat at that desk, turning the pages of names mechanically, exhausted. And then he stopped. He stared at one specific page for a full minute. Then he looked up at me and asked: 'Decai. These three characters—this reads as Zhen Baolan? Is it truly her?'"
Decai looked me in the eye. "To this day, I can perfectly recall the tonal shift in his voice. It wasn't political calculation. It was absolute, unfiltered shock. And beneath the shock, it was a profound, devastating joy."
"When you entered the inner palace, he aggressively avoided Jinghe Palace. Not because he didn't want you. Because he was terrified of his own preference. Highlighting you early on would have painted a target on your back for the older consorts. But he couldn't entirely stay away."
Decai raised a hand and pointed through the dark hall toward a specific, structurally unusual window cut into the northwest wall. "He realized that from that precise angle, if he stood there, he had a direct line of sight to the primary tower of your Ganquan Palace. He ordered the Ministry of Works to cut that window open specifically for that purpose. For years, Your Grace, whenever the court was finally silent, he would stand at that freezing window just to check if your lanterns were still burning. Just to know you were awake in the same world he was."
The eunuch's voice dropped to a ragged whisper. "That night… when you were drunk. When you blocked the imperial palanquin by the gate. Do you remember?"
I closed my eyes.
"We returned to Yangxin Hall," Decai said. "He didn't read memorials. He didn't summon anyone. He walked straight to that northwest window. He stood in the dark, staring at Ganquan Palace until every single light in your pavilion was extinguished."
"I begged him to rest. The imperial physicians had warned him about the cold. He ignored me. He stood there for hours. My lady, he looked like a man who had watched his own soul leave his body and knew he could never, ever ask it to return."
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