Chapter 3

Since this was my first assignment, the department gave me a few concessions and benefits.

I arrived in this world unusually early. Qi Huaixu was seven, and his life had just been torn apart, when I became Yu Zhi: the heroine Yu Huan’s elder, legitimate sister and the legitimate daughter of Prince Xuan.

I didn’t see him often. I was chiefly occupied with adjusting to this era and my identity, though whenever I entered the palace, I inevitably caught glimpses of maids and eunuchs teasing and tormenting him.

He lived in a small courtyard beside the Eastern Palace. Seeing that he had no one to protect him, the wretched servants had given him the most dilapidated room. By day, he put on his only presentable robe to study with the crown prince. When lessons ended, he returned to the courtyard to do the chores the maids and eunuchs assigned him.

The first time we met, I had accompanied my father to the palace. I deliberately wandered into his courtyard to find him. In a thin, worn black coat, he was sweeping snow beneath enormous drifting flakes. His beautiful hands were red with cold.

He glanced up when I arrived, then lowered his eyes and went back to work. A stranger wandering into his courtyard seemed to come as no surprise.

“Are you a little eunuch from the Eastern Palace? Do you know the way to Yonghe Hall?”

“I wandered off and got lost…”

When he didn’t answer, I reached cautiously for his exposed wrist.

Cold. So cold that I shivered.

He deigned to glance at me again, then briskly shoved me to the ground, turned, and left.

I admit I had no designs on Qi Huaixu at first. I only needed him to continue down the villain’s path. So I took advantage of my father’s affection to bring Yu Huan, still a concubine’s daughter then, into the palace with me.

Didn’t the villain love the heroine? Wasn’t he willing to suffer the bitterness of unrequited love for her? Then I would make him love her more deeply, so deeply that he would seize her by force if he had to.

We didn’t visit the palace often. Each time, I found an excuse to send Yu Huan to him with something he needed: exquisite pastries left from a palace feast, perhaps, or a spare padded coat we kept in our winter carriage. That way, I thought, Yu Huan would become a ray of light in Qi Huaixu’s miserable childhood.

The more warmth she gave him, the harder he would find it to let her go. When the hero tried to take her from him, he would be driven to fight back.

But my plan showed little promise.

As the years passed and youthful affections quietly took root, the principal characters came to know one another in that corner of the palace. Yet Qi Huaixu, with his awkward status, was always the one left out.

By then, Yu Huan had become Prince Xuan’s second legitimate daughter.

The original Yu Zhi’s father had loved only her mother, but that beautiful woman had died young. Yu Huan’s birth mother had entered the household among the servants accompanying the bride, though she was also someone the dowager princess had planted there. After losing his wife, Prince Xuan had no wish to marry again, and the household let him have his way. Once he was ordered to lead troops to garrison the western frontier, however, the dowager princess took it upon herself to elevate Yu Huan’s mother to the rank of co-wife.

Accompanying her mother, Yu Huan gained more chances to enter the palace. As the timeline required, she met the hero, Fourth Prince Fu Qi, and the second male lead, Yan Yi, son of a general. Lively and mischievous by nature, she could chatter endlessly with them. Beside them, Qi Huaixu—the quiet, reserved son of a disgraced minister, burdened by his delicate position—seemed hopelessly out of place.

Yu Huan felt a little guilty, but she still deliberately overlooked him. I knew not every plan would unfold as I intended.

So I had to step out from behind the scenes.

My position came with restrictions. The new mistress of Prince Xuan’s household wasn’t pleased when I visited the palace too often. Her ambitions were plain to everyone, especially after she learned that her daughter was close to a prince. She might say that a young lady shouldn’t be seen so much in public, but she never actually restrained Yu Huan. Instead, she kept finding excuses to visit the palace. These petty household intrigues were tiresome and nauseating, but I had no desire to waste my energy on them.

One way or another, I would find opportunities to see Qi Huaixu.