Chapter 9

At last, I reunited with Nanny Ruan, Cui’er, and the others.

Nanny embraced me in agitation. “My lady, you frightened me to death!”

I patted her back soothingly. For everyone close to me, I had arranged a corpse of similar build to be burned beyond recognition in their place.

It would take the Third Prince and his men a great deal of effort to unravel it all.

The Marquis of Cheng’en would certainly tell them that I, Jiang Yue, had killed Pei Yu—not the other Jiang Yue.

But they would surely think it was a trick to protect his daughter.

Still, every deed left traces.

Discovering the truth was only a matter of time.

So I could not rely on luck.

To be truly safe, I had to bring them down completely!

“To the Fifth Prince’s residence!”

I knelt before the Fifth Prince, my head bowed, not daring to look at him. All I could see was a glimpse of a deep-blue robe.

After a long while, a derisive chuckle finally sounded above me.

“Are you shedding your tail to save your life, young lady?”

I lowered my head further. “I only thought these things should go to someone more deserving.”

“You certainly have a way with words!”

It wasn’t really eloquence. I had simply lived through it before.

Next year, the Crown Prince, long confined to his sickbed, would finally die. Grief would overwhelm the emperor, and his health would abruptly fail.

The princes’ struggle for the succession would gradually emerge into the open.

Because I had acted early in this life, none of that had happened yet.

But I knew that, in my previous life, the Third Prince had suffered repeated setbacks at the Fifth Prince’s hands. He had demanded ever greater sums of money, until even I, slow as I was, began to notice. Only then had they resolved to get rid of me altogether.

“I hear your Shen family has an ancestral injunction against involvement in imperial affairs or using its wealth to influence officials. Are you defying your ancestors now?”

A tear slipped from the corner of my eye and struck the floor, spreading like a tiny flower.

“That injunction was meant to keep their descendants alive. If those descendants can no longer survive, we can only set it aside.”

My ancestors had laid down that rule for fear that their descendants would become embroiled in a struggle for the throne and bring ruin upon the entire family.

But that same injunction had taught the Cheng’en household and the household of the Duke Who Guards the Nation that only by killing me and replacing me could they put all the Shen family’s money at the Third Prince’s disposal.

That rule had preserved us, and that rule had ruined us.

In this life, nothing would make me give up my life for it!

“Good. Set it aside, indeed.”

Footsteps sounded closer and closer. I could feel the Fifth Prince approaching.

“I accept your proposal. Now, tell me what you want.”

“When Your Highness ascends the throne, grant the Shen family the status of imperial merchants!”

In this age, merchants stood at the bottom of society. Then I would obtain an official position for us.

“Agreed!”

Epilogue

In the year 626, the emperor fell gravely ill and issued his final edict, leaving the throne to the Fifth Prince, Li Shizhen.

The Third Prince, Li Yuantian, rebelled and attempted to seize the palace. The Fifth Prince killed him beneath the Xuanwu Gate.

The following year, the Great Yuan dynasty established its first official post of imperial merchant. It was awarded to the Shen family of Quanzhou.

By then, I sat aboard a newly built Shen trading ship, smiling faintly at the court gazette in my hands.

From now on, the sky was high and the sea boundless. I was free to go wherever I pleased.

I had heard that across the sea lived strange people with golden hair, blue eyes, and hair all over their bodies, and that there were strange objects in which you could see your own likeness.

Now I would see for myself everything I had only heard of before.

“My lady, if we’d sailed straight out to sea back then, the Third Prince couldn’t have done anything to us!”

Cui’er muttered beside my ear.

I tapped the tip of her nose. “Even if we’d escaped, would Grandfather have had to flee with us at his age? Could the Shen family’s enormous estate, and everyone in it, have fled with us too?”

I looked out over the magnificent sweep of the sea and sighed.

“Besides, even if we escaped, those lifeless possessions would mean nothing to me anymore. Better to exchange them for freedom for all of us.”

Sometimes merely possessing a treasure made you a target. Sometimes you had to give something up to gain what mattered.