Chapter 4

To call Luo Chengxu’s expression ugly no longer did it justice. He fell to his knees in terror and bowed low. “Your Majesty, your subject trembles before you!”

“I see no sign of it.”

I sat down in an armchair and said calmly, “Even before me, you lie without pause and drag my Yongning into your lies. Clearly you are a man of considerable cunning.”

Whether Yongning’s illness was real or not, the mere fact that I had seen him make my daughter kneel and beg was enough to sentence him to death.

And if the illness was real, he had concealed it. Never mind me—even Consort Yang, her own mother, knew nothing. Did he think he could make all of Yongning’s decisions for her?

Ridiculous!

We turned the princess’s residence upside down. Before long, the eunuchs found something in Luo Chengxu’s study.

The head of the Imperial Medical Bureau, who had hurried over, went white at the sight of it. “It is a gu parasite. Unless I am mistaken, the most insidious and vicious kind: a love gu.”

There was no strange disease that turned a person into an animal in heat. There was only the vilest human heart.

“Can it be removed?”

“It can.”

With that clear answer, my heart eased. I let Consort Yang take Yongning away with the physicians to have the parasite removed.

“Speak.”

Luo Chengxu’s face was gray. His lips trembled as he forced down a mouthful of bloody saliva.

“I… I only wanted the princess to belong to me alone.”

“I came from nothing. Only with her help was I able to make something of myself and serve Your Majesty. In the boundless darkness, she was my brightest light, the purest moon in my heart.”

“As Consort Yang said, without the princess, I would never have had the chance to serve you, enter the Bureau of Military Affairs, or fulfill my life’s ambitions.”

“I am grateful to her. I love her. I am willing to serve her for the rest of my life. But she wanted to leave me.”

Agony appeared on Luo Chengxu’s face. “I had no choice. I used this means only to keep her from abandoning me.”

I was in agony too. “That is not what I asked! I asked where you found the courage to harm my daughter!”

I truly could not understand it.

A princess’s husband who had entered government only through her—a common-born, insignificant clerk at the Bureau of Military Affairs in Chang’an.

Everything he had, everything, had come through Yongning.

How could he, how dared he, infect a princess with a gu parasite?

Spare me the claim that he genuinely loved her and resorted to this only because he could not bear to lose her. I was a man too. I knew that if you truly loved a woman, you could never bear to make her suffer.

I had seen it clearly. When Yongning lost her reason and knelt before him, pleading for intimacy, there had been satisfaction in his eyes!

Where was the affection? Where was the love?

This was a contemptible man who had grown arrogant with success and wanted to crush his benefactor beneath his feet!

“Luo Chengxu, both your parents are dead, and you have no uncles or brothers close to you. But you are still alive. You still hold office at court.”

“If Yongning stays away from the palace long enough, sooner or later I will notice. And then you will lose your head.”

By this point I could not tell whether Luo Chengxu deliberately meant to challenge the imperial house or was so monumentally stupid that he thought attaching his life to Yongning’s would make him safe forever.

Or was he truly arrogant enough to think he could deceive us all?

I asked in all sincerity, “What were you thinking?”

“That I am a fool? That Consort Yang is a fool? That every civil and military official at court is a fool? That everyone in the whole world is a fool?”

Luo Chengxu had no answer. He lowered his head in stubborn silence, without a trace of shame.

As I stared at him, I suddenly noticed a green figure trembling violently at the edge of my vision.

On closer inspection, the woman was not dressed like an ordinary maid. Her clothes were even finer than Yongning’s.

Her face was merely pretty. When she saw me looking, she shook harder still, as if she might faint at any moment.

“Who is she?”

The woman trembled like a leaf in the wind. Luo Chengxu abruptly raised his head. “Your Majesty—”

What more was there to understand?

“Answer me! Who is she?!”

Luo Chengxu stammered. “She… she is my childhood friend. She once helped me, but her family’s misfortunes left her in a brothel. With the princess’s permission, I brought her here to stay. In a little while, I intend to choose her a good husband.”

I asked again, “Was she the reason Yongning wanted to leave you?”

Luo Chengxu fell silent.

“Hah.”

I lost patience with him and questioned the maid Yongning had brought with her upon marriage instead.

Luo Chengxu had sent the girl to feed horses in the stables. She had just returned, dirty and disheveled, and looked at him as if she wanted to devour him alive.

“Your Majesty, that is not what happened at all!”

“Those two have been having an affair for ages!”

Luo Chengxu had indeed wanted to find his childhood friend a good husband. Yet not one of the suitable men Yongning carefully chose met his approval.

Not only did he reject them, he accused Yongning of being petty and refusing to let his childhood friend prosper.

And what sort of husband did the young woman want?

As it turned out, the only man who met every one of her requirements was Luo Chengxu himself.

Yongning truly loved Luo Chengxu, or she would not have personally raised him to his present position. But she was a princess, not a fool.

Faced with this, she immediately understood that the two of them were probably far from innocent.

She wanted a divorce. Luo Chengxu refused.

He insisted that he and his childhood friend were blameless. Having finally secured Yongning as his ladder to success, how could he let go?

And so came the love gu, and so came today.