Chapter 1

Chapter 1

As the empress’s coronation ceremony drew to a close, the first snow of the year began to fall over the palace.

Inside Jiaofang Palace, red candles burned high. The Hundred Phoenixes Facing Sun Screen, embroidered with gold thread, cast a warm glow over the entire room. Even my face in the mirror-pale and sickly-seemed to have a forced touch of festivity, as if smeared with a layer of rouge.

I sat on the wedding bed, the heavy Phoenix Crown weighing on my head, but my fingers were as cold as ice.

When the palace doors were pushed open, I caught the scent of the winter air.

Lu Yuheng walked in alone, his black Dragon Robe still flecked with unmelted snow. He had been smiling all day: smiling while offering sacrifices at the ancestral temple, smiling while receiving the officials’ congratulations, and smiling while bestowing the Phoenix Seal upon me. But now that we were the only two left in the hall, that trace of a smile vanished completely, like a thin layer of forced ice that had finally cracked to its end.

He personally poured the Nuptial Wine, placing the two jade cups side by side on the table.

I looked at him and suddenly smiled. “Your Majesty has finally gotten his wish.”

He looked up at me, his eyes as deep as well water on a winter night. “Lanyin, drink your medicine first.”

“Medicine?”

“Poisoned Wine,” he said calmly. “The imperial physician says the Red Wither Poison in your body has already reached your bones. If you linger any longer, you will only suffer for three days and nights before dying with blood seeping from your seven orifices.”

I stared at the cup of wine, and for a moment, I wasn’t even surprised.

Over the years, I had long since realized that Lu Yuheng treated everything like a game of chess. Even when granting someone a dignified end, he would calculate the perfect moment to make his move.

I reached out and touched the jade cup, my fingertips instantly trembling from the chill. “So, you first crown me as your empress, and then you decree my death?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He remained silent for a long time before he said hoarsely, “Because when I was seventeen, I promised you that I would marry you.”

The wind and snow outside grew fiercer, making the window paper rustle.

I suddenly remembered the Lantern Festival ten years ago.

Back then, I was still the legitimate daughter of the Censor-in-Chief, Ye Tingshan. I had donned a cloak and snuck out of the manor to see the lanterns. He was the least favored Third Prince in the palace; his mother had died early, and he lived in the remote Chenghui Palace, a place so desolate that even the eunuchs found it too cold. We met for the first time under an old apricot tree at the very end of Vermilion Bird Street.

He was dressed thinly, standing outside the crowd, watching others release river lanterns.

I thought he was some destitute young master from a noble family. Seeing him stare at a lantern painted with twin lotuses for a long time, I bought it for him on a whim.

He asked me, “Why give this to me?”

I was young then, and my words were reckless. “Because you are handsome.”

He was stunned at first, then he chuckled softly. It was the most beautiful laugh I had ever heard, like winter snow falling into spring water-the chill remained, but it had softened by half.

Only later did I learn that he wasn’t a noble son, but a prince.

But what did that matter?

He would wait for me at the most secluded corner gate of the palace walls; he would bring me plum candies newly sent to the palace as tribute; and when I was afraid of thunder, he would climb over the wall into the back garden of the Ye manor to sit with me under the corridor and count the raindrops.

In the year of my sixteenth birthday, he gave me a Red Bean Bracelet.

He said, “Lanyin, once I have the power, I will come to marry you.”

I asked with a smile, “What if you never gain that power?”

He was serious to the point of obsession. “Then I will still come.”

I believed him.

I believed him so much that even on the day the Ye Family met its ruin, I was still waiting for him to come.

That winter, my father stayed at the Censorate for several days in a row. Every time he returned home, his expression was worse than the last. When my mother asked what was wrong, he only said that someone in the court was colluding with the enemy, and the case was so deeply entangled that we should avoid going out.

When I overheard this, I didn’t understand how heavy the words “colluding with the enemy” were.

It wasn’t until three days later, when the Imperial Army stormed into the Ye manor and the sealing strips of the asset seizure were slapped onto the doors one by one, that I realized the person accused of treason was actually my father.

The entire Ye Family was forced to kneel in the courtyard. My mother held my youngest brother, trembling and weeping. My father, however, straightened his back and pointed at the leader of the Imperial Guard, demanding sternly, “Whose decree gives you this authority?”

The man stepped aside.

In the wind and snow, Lu Yuheng stood outside the gates.

He wore the ink-colored python robes of a Prince, his expression as cold as a stranger’s.

At that moment, I lunged toward him like a person grasping at a final straw. My skirt swept across the snow, and icy slush splattered all over my shoes.

“Yuheng,” I grabbed his sleeve, my voice shaking uncontrollably. “My father would never collude with the enemy. You know that better than anyone. He just said a few days ago that someone was framing him… Go see His Majesty! Go tell him!”

He looked down at me, his gaze sweeping across my face inch by inch before finally landing on my hands, which were covered in snowy mud.

I waited for him to help me up, waited for him to say “don’t be afraid” as he always did.

But he only slowly pulled his sleeve away.

He said, “The Ye clan has colluded with the enemy; the evidence is irrefutable. Except for the youngest son, all males are to be executed immediately. The females are to be sent to the Yeting.”

In that instant, it felt as if a bucket of ice water had been poured over me from head to toe, freezing and shattering my very soul.

My mother shrieked behind me, and my father was forced to his knees. My brother, Ye Zhiyuan, still didn’t understand what was happening; he could only cry out for his sister.

I lunged forward to beg him again, but the Imperial Guard held me down firmly.

In the chaos, I only remember that as Lu Yuheng walked past me, his pace did not falter for a second.

He didn’t even look back.

From that day on, I went from being the eldest miss of the Ye Family to a criminal slave in the Yeting.

Winter nights in the Yeting were colder than those outside the palace-so cold that frost seemed to grow in one’s bones. The older palace maids would steal the new arrivals’ quilts, and the Head Matron would prick our fingertips with fine needles, forcing us to wash clothes by the well until our skin cracked from the cold.

At first, I would cry. Later, I stopped.

Crying was useless.
The entire Ye Family died on the execution grounds. If I were any weaker, I wouldn’t even know how I died.

I swallowed my hatred bit by bit. During the day, I learned the palace rules; at night, I secretly memorized pharmacopeias. My father had loved collecting medical books when he was alive, and I had learned to recognize many herbs from him as a child. In the Yeting, people often fell ill, and no one was willing to save them, so I would quietly gather discarded herb dregs to brew decoctions for them. Slowly, I went from a sin-slave doing laundry to a palace maid who tested medicines for others.

Some in the palace praised me for being meticulous and having steady hands.

Only I knew that I simply wanted to survive.

To survive until the day I could personally hand Lu Yuheng a cup of poisoned wine.

Three years later, my opportunity arrived.

That year, the Third Prince was titled the Prince of Qin and entered the imperial court to participate in politics. Everyone in court said he was the most likely candidate to replace the Crown Prince.

When the Prince of Qin’s Mansion came to the Yeting to select a Medicine Attendant, I was squatting under a corridor brewing a cough-suppressing tonic for the Head Matron. When I heard the decree-passing eunuch read my name, I even thought I had misheard.

It wasn’t until I was escorted to the Prince of Qin’s Mansion and saw Lu Yuheng again in his study that I realized he had never forgotten me at all.

Silver-charcoal burned in the study, making the room so warm it was dizzying.

He stood behind his desk reviewing memorials. Without looking up, he asked indifferently, “Do you know how to prepare a formula for pain relief?”

I stared at him, my teeth nearly grinding to dust. “No.”

“Then learn.”

“Your Highness the Prince of Qin has so many people under his command. Why insist on using a sin-slave?”

He finally looked up at me, his gaze calm to the point of being cold. “Because everyone else is too afraid of me. Only you dare to hope for my death.”

My heart constricted violently.

He acted as if he hadn’t seen it and tossed over a thick medicinal manual. “From today on, you will live in Tingxue Courtyard and brew medicine for me. Without my permission, you are not to step a single foot out of the courtyard gates.”

I took the manual, my fingers trembling with hatred.

That night, I poisoned him for the first time.

I used the most common Qianji Herb. The dosage wasn’t heavy, but it was enough to cause agonizing abdominal pain.

I finely ground the powder and sprinkled it into his medicinal soup. When I brought it over, my hands were perfectly steady.

He took the bowl, lowered his eyes to sniff it, and suddenly asked me, “Do you know what a corpse looks like if the dose of Qianji Herb is too heavy?”

My face turned pale.

He actually seemed to smile slightly before tilting his head back and drinking the bowl of medicine clean.

After a brief moment, cold sweat broke out on his forehead. His fingers gripped the corner of the table so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

Standing to the side, I felt a sense of gratification for the first time.

But when the estate physician rushed over, he only said one sentence: “I have eaten something unclean recently. It has nothing to do with the Medicine Attendant.”

After the physician withdrew, he endured the most intense hours of the drug’s effects alone before bracing himself against the table to stand and walk toward me, step by step.

He was covered in cold sweat and his face was terrifyingly pale, yet his voice remained steady.

“Ye Lanyin,” he said, “if you want to kill me, refine your skills a bit more. Next time, don’t use such a clumsy method.”

I glared at him. “Why didn’t you expose me?”

He remained silent for a moment before answering, “Because if you fell into someone else’s hands, you would die.”

That was the first time since the Ye Family’s downfall that he had spoken such a long sentence to me.

But my heart did not soften because of it.

I only found it laughable.

He had personally pushed me into hell, and now he was putting on an act of mercy, as if my life was still his to give or take at will.

I refused to believe it.

For a long time afterward, I stayed in Tingxue Courtyard at the Prince of Qin’s Mansion, brewing medicine by day and studying medicinal properties by night. Lu Yuheng had old injuries that pained him severely whenever it rained. When I prepared his formulas, I would always conveniently add an extra portion of extremely bitter Coptis.

He could taste it, but he never called me out on it.

Sometimes the pain kept him awake at night, and he would have someone summon me to the study to keep watch. I would sit outside the screen grinding medicine for him while he reviewed memorials inside. The lamplight stretched our shadows long, and it was as quiet as if we had returned to that corridor many years ago, seeking shelter from the rain.

Only, no one ever mentioned the past again.

Until one time, Empress Dowager Xie said publicly during a palace banquet, “The Prince of Qin has reached the age to take a consort. I think Mingzhao of the Xie family is quite good.”

The entire hall echoed their agreement.

I stood behind Lu Yuheng, holding a wine flask, my fingers suddenly becoming incredibly stiff.

He only lowered his eyes indifferently. “My marriage shall be as Imperial Mother decides.”

In that moment, I finally realized that when you hate someone to the extreme, your heart can still hurt.

After returning to the mansion that night, he drank the medicine I brewed as usual. Taking advantage of a moment when no one was looking, I poured an entire packet of Hedinghong into the medicinal soup.

When he picked up the bowl, he looked at me for a long time.

“Lanyin,” he suddenly called my name, “if you truly want me dead, don’t blink this time.”

My lips trembled, but I forced myself to look at him.

He drank it mouthful by mouthful until the last drop was gone before placing the empty bowl back on the desk.

Before I could even react, the mansion’s secret guards burst through the door and knelt across the floor.

It turned out he had long known someone wanted to use my hand to harm him. He had prepared the antidote in advance, only waiting to catch the person pulling the strings behind the scenes in one fell swoop.

But the person sent by Empress Dowager Xie was too ruthless. Seeing the plot exposed, they sent dead-soldiers to storm Tingxue Courtyard that very night to silence me.

When I was cornered against a wall, Lu Yuheng arrived with his sword despite his injuries, blocking the crossbow bolt that was meant to pierce my throat.

Blood splashed onto my face, startlingly hot.

He shielded me behind him and whispered, “Don’t look.”

That was the first time I discovered that the blood of the person I had hated for so long was also warm.