Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I did as I was told.

The Drunken Beauty Red was applied to the inside of my wrist. Its color was lighter than it appeared on the lips, resembling a fresh, thin wound.

Lady Wen used a silver knife to cut her fingertip and let a drop of blood fall into the clear water. The water’s color did not change. She then borrowed a gold hairpin from the Empress and stirred the water gently; it remained clear.

Finally, she placed the porcelain bowl of water next to my wrist.

“Shen Shanggong,” she said, “think of someone you hate.”

I froze.

Someone I hate.

The word was like a small pebble falling into a dry well, producing no echo.

I had been in the palace for ten years. I had seen concubines scheme against each other and palace servants tear into one another. I had seen young girls who had just entered the palace have half their faces beaten to a pulp over a single wrong word. There were those who deserved hatred and those who deserved resentment, yet I could not recall ever hating anyone.

Lady Wen looked at me, seemingly having anticipated this result. She turned to the Empress. “Would Your Majesty care to try?”

The Empress’s brow twitched slightly. “Me?”

The Emperor said with a faint smile, “The Empress is benevolent and kind. There is no harm in trying.”

The Empress rose slowly and walked over to me. She reached out, her finger guards clicking as she tapped the red mark on my wrist.

In that instant, the clear water in the porcelain bowl suddenly turned black.

It wasn’t the black of ink, but the black of rotting blood. The darkness rose from the bottom of the bowl in wisps, like something invisible blooming in the water.

Someone in the hall gasped.

The Empress’s face turned pale. “What kind of sorcery is this?”

Lady Wen dropped into a curtsy. “It is not sorcery, but Thought Poison. Physical poisons harm the body, but Thought Poison harms the soul. If someone infuses a personal object with killing intent, it becomes poisonous the moment it touches the person that intent is directed toward. If the killing intent is deep enough, there is no cure.”

The Emperor stopped turning his prayer beads.

“Are you saying Consort Hua died because someone hated her?”

Lady Wen looked up. “No. Consort Hua died because when she applied the rouge, she intended to kill someone. And that person’s blood had already been drawn into the ‘thought’ of the rouge.”

The entire hall fell into a deathly silence.

I looked down at my wrist. That line of Drunken Beauty Red remained beautiful, as if nothing had happened.

Consort Hua’s body was laid out in a side hall.

I was ordered to re-examine all the cosmetic boxes she had used during her life. Lady Wen was sent by the Emperor to assist me-ostensibly to investigate the case, but in reality, to keep an eye on me.

The black cat in her arms was named Black Tongue. The cat was quieter than the people; as they walked past the white funeral banners, its tail didn’t even twitch.

Consort Hua had not died a dignified death. Her lips were black and her fingers were curled as if she had been clawing at something before she died. The servants said that she had been looking in the mirror while applying rouge. After she finished, she suddenly laughed manically, screamed “Lian, you bitch!” and collapsed from her couch.

Lian was the Empress’s maiden name.

I opened the cosmetic boxes and inspected them one by one. The eyebrow pigment was non-toxic, the pearl powder was non-toxic, the lip glaze was non-toxic, and the osmanthus oil was non-toxic. Everything was excessively clean, as if someone had swept up the tracks ahead of me.

Lady Wen knelt by the corpse, pried open Consort Hua’s fingers, and took a shard of a broken mirror from her palm.

There was red stained on the shard.

She handed the shard to me. “Shen Shanggong, what do you see?”

“Rouge,” I said.

“What else?”

I took a sniff. “Consort Hua’s own blood. She crushed the mirror in her grip before she died.”

Lady Wen shook her head. “There is another layer of ‘thought.’ She wasn’t afraid of death before she died; she was happy.”

I frowned. “Happy before death?”

“She thought the Empress would die too,” Lady Wen said. “Someone made her believe that as long as she applied the Drunken Beauty Red while thinking of the Empress, the Empress would be poisoned to death. But Thought Poison backfires; it first claims the life of the one who initiates the thought.”

I looked at Consort Hua’s blackened lips and suddenly remembered something the Emperor had said when he gifted the rouge.

At the time, he had handed the gold box to Consort Hua and said with a smile, “My beloved consort’s beauty is at its peak when dressed in red. I wish to see who can rival your brilliance.”

Who can rival your brilliance.

In Consort Hua’s ears, those words meant the Empress.

Lady Wen said softly, “There is someone in the palace who understands Thought Poison and the human heart. He didn’t put the poison in the rouge; he put the thought into Consort Hua’s heart.”

I asked, “How do you know so much about this?”

She picked up Black Tongue, her expression calm. “Because my family used to cure poisons and cultivate them. Later, my entire clan was exterminated. I am the only one left.”