Chapter 3
But I had no intention of letting her wish come true.
As soon as Shen Changning left, I went to find Father.
In our previous life, he had been the first to be executed.
Father had spent many years fighting on the battlefield and possessed an unyielding pride.
To humiliate him, Lu Heng had slices of flesh cut from his body and fed to dogs.
After his death, even his bones were ground to ash so that his soul would never find peace.
Now Father stood before me alive and vigorous.
My eyes stung with tears, and I threw myself into his arms.
“Father!”
“What has happened?”
He looked at me in surprise. “Did you quarrel with your sister just now?”
I shook my head.
It took me a long while to bring my emotions under control.
Then, slowly, I told him that both my sister and I had been reborn.
For me, the sole purpose of returning to life was to save my family.
And I could not accomplish that alone.
The Shen family’s power had already reached its peak, enough to invite suspicion that our achievements eclipsed the sovereign’s.
No ruler could tolerate that.
Even if Lu Heng never took the throne, whoever replaced him would eventually move against us.
My enemy, therefore, was not Lu Heng.
It was the supremacy of imperial power itself.
Trying to shake it by my strength alone would be all but impossible.
Only if the entire Shen family stood united could we find a path to survival.
At first, Father did not believe I had been reborn.
He thought I had read too many storybooks and was spouting nonsense.
But then I predicted with precision what would happen over the next several days,
and described the horrors of the Shen estate’s destruction in our previous life.
After much persuasion, he finally made his decision.
On an ordinary day bathed in warm spring sunshine,
Shen Changning invited the Crown Prince on a boating excursion.
I, meanwhile, stood before the most powerful and respected members of the entire Shen clan.
I laid bare the clan’s terrible fate in our previous life, along with every part of my plan and ambition for this one.
I needed their unreserved support.
With the puny strength of ants, we would shake this entire decaying dynasty and its imperial order to the ground.
That day, Shen Changning received a poem from the Crown Prince.
She was wondering what pattern to embroider on a handkerchief in return;
I became the hidden leader of the Shen clan and took my first step toward defying fate.
The bond between Shen Changning and the Crown Prince grew warmer by the day.
With shy delight, she secretly told me that the Crown Prince intended to ask the Emperor for her hand soon.
The next day, therefore, Grandmother “died.”
Citing his duty to observe the mourning period, Father immediately resigned his post and requested permission to return home.
At first, the Emperor offered a few insincere words urging him to stay.
But when Father volunteered to surrender his military authority and said he wished only to spend his remaining years as a wealthy man of leisure,
the Emperor nearly failed to hide his grin and accepted at once.
He had long wanted to strip the Shen family of command.
Now that Father had offered his resignation, why would the Emperor refuse?
Needless to say, it was all part of my plan.
Before long, the Emperor would be stricken by a grave illness.
The princes’ struggle for succession would erupt into the open.
In our previous life, the Shen family had been dragged into that struggle and badly weakened.
Nearly all the wealth, power, and connections accumulated over generations had been spent in it.
Otherwise, Lu Heng would never have dared discard us as soon as he ascended the throne.
This time, I chose to stay far from the heart of the maelstrom and watch the tigers tear one another apart from the safety of the mountain.
Once they had fought each other to the brink of death, why should I not claim the prize they left behind?
As for our military authority, we could surrender it.
The army was filled with Father’s former subordinates, and it would not be easy for the Emperor to purge and replace them.
Besides, he would soon fall ill and have more than enough trouble of his own.
These men were brothers who had faced death beside Father and lain drunk together on the battlefield.
Even without the imperial token of military command, they would stand with him without hesitation whenever he needed them.
To give Father a legitimate reason to leave the capital, I had people seek out a drug that could mimic death.
With a century of Shen family resources behind us, such a medicine was not difficult to obtain.
Originally, I had planned for Grandmother to take it much later.
I had not expected the romance between Shen Changning and the Crown Prince to progress so quickly.
If the Crown Prince truly asked the Emperor for her hand, the Shen family would be bound to his cause and dragged back into the succession struggle.
So I had no choice but to move the plan forward.
On the day Grandmother “died,” Shen Changning wept as if her heart had broken.
Fearing she might reveal the secret, I had not told her that Grandmother had merely feigned death.
Seeing her grieve so bitterly, I remembered
that Grandmother had always doted on her most.
My heart softened, and I thought to offer a few words of comfort.
But Shen Changning flung herself into my arms, sobbing.
“Now that Grandmother is gone, I must mourn for three years.
“Lu Zhao will have to wait three whole years for me.
“Why could Grandmother not have waited until after Lu Zhao and I married before she left us?
“Did she not always say she wanted to see me wed?”
My gaze turned cold, inch by inch.
I had thought that, as a daughter of the Shen family, she must possess at least some affection for her kin.
But she merely resented us for obstructing her pursuit of love.
Good. How very good.
Since she was so impatient to be with her beloved, why should I not grant her wish?
Expressionless, I gathered Shen Changning into my arms and coaxed her in my gentlest, most beguiling voice.
“Lu Zhao has already waited one lifetime for you.
“Can you bear to make him wait any longer?
“Tonight, everyone will be keeping vigil for Grandmother in the ancestral hall. No one will be watching the rear courtyard.
“Sister, think very carefully.”
I said no more than necessary.
And that night, just as expected, Shen Changning did not appear in the ancestral hall.
She secretly fled the Shen estate for the Crown Prince’s residence and never returned.
Father announced that excessive grief over Grandmother’s death had left her gravely ill and that she had succumbed to the sickness.
From that day forward, the Shen family no longer had an eldest legitimate daughter named Shen Changning.
Several months later, the Crown Prince acquired a concubine.
She was said to bear some resemblance to the former foremost beauty of the capital, the Shen family’s eldest daughter.
But whenever anyone suggested that the woman might be Shen Changning herself, others laughed the notion to scorn.
A woman properly sought in marriage became a wife; one who ran away with a man became a concubine.
How could the noble daughter of a great house abase herself by eloping to become someone’s concubine?
The Shen family was still in mourning, no less.
To rush off and become a concubine immediately after her own grandmother’s death—
how utterly shameless would she have to be?
They were therefore certain that the woman could not possibly be Shen Changning.
“She merely resembles her a little.
“For all we know, the Crown Prince redeemed her from some brothel!”