Chapter 7
The duke had secretly trained these private soldiers in the desert.
From birth, they had been dosed with a secret drug. They felt no pain and knew no fear. Each was nothing more than a killing machine.
And now those soldiers belonged to me.
They would be my greatest protection when I returned to the capital.
At first, even after being poisoned mute, Xu Zhaozhao slipped into their ranks under cover of darkness to pass them notes.
“I’m the duke’s real daughter. I’m the one you should be loyal to! Kill that impostor!”
Eventually, she realized that these soldiers recognized only the token, never the person holding it.
She sank into utter despair.
She began to fight back—
By refusing food.
Just what one would expect of a former young general.
She still had some backbone.
But wouldn’t letting her starve to death be letting her off too easily?
Besides, I still had a use for her.
I lifted her chin and smiled at her.
“You want to die?”
“I can grant you that.”
“But once you’re dead, I’ll walk into the ducal residence wearing your identity.”
“I’ll poison your father until blood pours from every opening in his head. I’ll drug your mother and leave her to be assaulted to death by the household servants. Oh, and I’ll tie up your brother and castrate him, so he can neither bear to live nor manage to die…”
Xu Zhaozhao’s eyes widened further and further.
Filled with hatred, she used a brush to write on the ground.
“Who are you?”
“What has our family ever done to you?”
Suddenly, I was interested.
“Why don’t you guess? Perhaps I’ll let you go if you get it right.”
With a trembling hand, she wrote on a piece of paper.
“Are you that northwestern staff officer’s daughter? The one whose entire family was beheaded because my father withheld your father’s military pay?”
I shook my head gently.
She panicked.
“Then are you a relative of that scholarly official who drowned himself after I stole his military credit?”
Again, I shook my head.
“Or are you the daughter of the woman physician who cured my father’s headaches? My mother feared he’d take her as a concubine, so she secretly had her hands cut off.”
“Or a relative of one of the women my brother took?”
I remained silent.
She was almost mad.
“Who are you? Tell me! Who are you?”
Her brush moved faster and faster across the paper.
The ink grew more and more chaotic.
She was losing her mind.
It couldn’t be helped. There were too many.
The ducal household had made too many enemies over the years.
Suddenly, she began to regret it.
If they hadn’t done all those things, perhaps she would never have been poisoned mute, disfigured, or violated…
But it was too late.
She hurled the brush to the ground and burst into tears. Her poisoned throat could not even produce a cry. Only breathy, broken sounds escaped.
I picked up the sheets of paper one by one and folded them carefully.
They could serve as evidence later.
In truth, none of her guesses was right.
My father had never even held official rank.
He was merely an ordinary, very ordinary clerk at a northwestern relay station.
When the duke’s men were escorting provisions for the northwestern army, my father helped move the cargo at the station.
Shouldering a heavy sack of grain, he remarked,
“The wheat in the central plains must have grown well this year. This is really heavy!”
The duke’s men killed him for it.
They drowned my little brother in a water vat.
They strangled my pregnant mother to death.
The men took turns assaulting me, then condemned me to serve as a camp prostitute…
Only after my rebirth, when I searched Xu Zhaozhao’s ledgers, did I learn that the duke slipped things into the provision shipments every year.
What my father had carried at the relay station wasn’t wheat at all. The duke’s men had replaced it with stones!
Afraid of being exposed, they preferred to kill my father by mistake rather than risk letting anyone go…