Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Lingzhu went deathly pale, her lips trembling. “I-I wasn’t looking at anything…”

“Hold out your hand.”

The discipline ruler cut through the air and came down hard on her palm.

Once. Then again.

The sound was especially terrifying in the silent corridor.

Tears streamed down Lingzhu’s face from the pain, but she bit her lip hard and didn’t dare make a sound.

“Have you fed all the rules you learned to the dogs? Do you think someone like you is allowed to raise your eyes and look upon a noble’s appearance?”

Nanny Zhang’s voice was cold enough to shed ice.

“Tonight, you’ll kneel in the courtyard and think long and hard about what it means to ‘look not at what is improper’!”

It was an early spring night, the kind of cold that seeped into the bones.

Lingzhu knelt alone in the middle of the courtyard’s bluestone paving, her small figure curled in on itself.

From where we lay on the communal sleeping platform, we could faintly hear the muffled sound of her teeth chattering from the cold outside.

In the latter half of the night, that sound stopped.

At daybreak, she was carried back in. Her whole body was burning hot, and she was already delirious, mumbling nonsense under her breath.

No one dared ask a single question.

Nanny Zhang came to take a look, frowned, and ordered someone to move her out.

Two days later, a young eunuch quietly told us that Lingzhu was gone.

The cold had entered her body, and she hadn’t made it through.

Just like that, she was gone.

Like a droplet of water that vanished the moment the sun came out, evaporating without leaving the slightest trace.

Only then did I truly understand that Nanny Zhang’s words hadn’t been meant to frighten us.

Those seven words had been built on lessons written in blood.

In the palace, people really did die-so easily, so insignificantly.

Later, I was assigned to the Palace Supplies Directorate, responsible for the lowest sort of menial work.

Every day, I rose before dawn to scrub floors, dust, and tend the tea stove beneath the corridor, making sure there was always hot water.

The work was dull and exhausting. My knees were always bruised purple from kneeling, and my arms ached unbearably from carrying heavy buckets and scrubbing the floors for hours on end.

But I no longer thought it bitter.

Whenever I knelt on the cold ground, scrubbing hard at the blue bricks that never seemed to come clean, Lingzhu’s eyes would flash before me-empty in the end, staring up at the roof beams.

That look kept me sober.

I learned to lower myself even more, to bow my head even deeper, to keep my gaze forever fixed on that small patch of ground before the tips of my shoes, never letting my eyes wander.

My ears, however, stayed pricked, alert to every movement around me. I learned to distinguish different footsteps, to judge which master or favored palace servant was approaching, and to step aside well in advance.

My hands never stopped working, and my mouth stayed tightly shut.

Listen more. Look less. Speak less.

The managing eunuch of the Palace Supplies Directorate saw that I was silent and hardworking, and gradually began assigning me some of the easier tasks closer to the masters’ quarters.

I carried them out with even greater caution, even lightening my breathing.

The floors I scrubbed were polished enough to reflect a face.

The stoves I tended never once ran out of hot water.

The basins and cups I carried were steady, soundless, and sure.

Like the most unremarkable moss in the corner of a wall, I lived on in silence, with difficulty.