Chapter 2

Yao Shuangxue was beautiful. So beautiful she scarcely seemed mortal.

Her mist-fine brows now relaxed, now drew together. Her face was flawless as frost and snow, her eyes almond-shaped, her cheeks rosy. Every movement had a charm of its own.

The harem abounded in beauties, but beside Yao Shuangxue, every one of them paled.

These noble daughters had truly been spoiled by their families.

They still thought the palace was their own family’s inner courtyard, where they could lord it over everyone.

With Lady Lu at their head, they would scarcely acknowledge Yao Shuangxue.

No matter how she tried to draw them into conversation or please them, they shut her out.

Only I stepped forward to talk to her before humiliation brought her to tears.

In full view of Wan Zhao, I displayed all the gracious manners expected of a noble daughter and rescued Yao Shuangxue from her predicament.

Before long, the girl who had been on the verge of tears was smiling and calling me sweetly, “Sister Noble Consort.”

Wan Zhao was delighted. Before everyone, he praised me for possessing the virtues of an empress, then left contentedly with his beloved Consort Yao.

Lady Lu and the few consorts allied with her no longer bothered to hide their contempt for me.

In their eyes, I was a traitor.

I had betrayed the aristocratic clans’ code and bowed my proud head.

“A young lady raised on the finest delicacies, insisting on waiting upon a servant girl,” Lady Lu sneered.

“Oh, my. From a distance, I thought I saw a phoenix. Up close, it turns out to be a pheasant perched in a parasol tree.”

I laughed inwardly.

Wake up, you fools. Still dreaming that the great clans could hold the court in their hands.

Wan Zhao had delayed appointing an empress precisely because he did not want one from an aristocratic clan.

Those clans had long dominated both court and harem, dividing imperial power among themselves.

As the late emperor’s only son, Wan Zhao naturally resented it.

Ever since ascending the throne, he had been looking for a way to cut out the most troublesome of those cancers.

Any family with a sense of danger had learned to keep its head down.

Lady Lu and the rest of those nobodies, however, still flaunted themselves without restraint.

Wan Zhao had long since marked down the clans that liked to stand out.

He was merely waiting for a chance to tear them out by the roots.

Faced with such fools, I could not be bothered to waste my breath. I simply turned and left.

Of course, I would never tell her.

Pheasants, phoenixes—I did not care.

I had always meant to be the dragon soaring above the highest heavens.

First I won Wan Zhao’s favor, then that of Consort Yao, whom he cherished above all.

A few words from Yao Shuangxue in bed, and I rose from Noble Consort to Imperial Noble Consort, a rank equal to a deputy empress.

The first woman of the harem, in name and in fact.

As for that idiot Lady Lu, even a month or so of confinement had failed to open her eyes.

She actually imagined she could destroy me with a sorcery plot.

Fortunately, my personal maid Xiaoxian spotted a palace maid skulking outside my hall.

Rather than expose her and alert those behind her, Xiaoxian came straight to me.

I studied the curse doll dug from the flower bed.

Slender silver needles pierced it all over. On its forehead was a yellow talisman bearing Yao Shuangxue’s birth date and hour.

On the back, two words had been embroidered:

Drop dead.

Attendants and maids knelt all over the floor, hardly daring to breathe for fear of drawing my anger.

Sorcery was punished as treason, with the extermination of nine degrees of kin.

The maid who had been caught knelt trembling, as though she already knew how close she stood to death.

Supporting me with one hand, Xiaoxian pointed at her with the other. “You treacherous creature! Her Highness is the kindest mistress alive. She never makes life hard for us servants, and this is what she gets—a heartless, ungrateful wretch!”

“How could you do this to Her Highness?”

Xiaoxian was not wrong.

I had always been generous. Everyone in the palace knew that serving in Fuyao Palace was as lucrative a posting as one could hope for.

Gold, jade, emeralds—even rare treasures brought from overseas—I gave them away without hesitation.

The world bustled in pursuit of profit. No one had a quarrel with money.

This was a third-class maid of Fuyao Palace. To some extent, she represented me.

But to my eyes, she was already dead.

One look at Xiaoxian was enough. She knew what to do.

Beneath the palace’s red roofs and green tiles, human lives were the one thing never in short supply.

Making a little maid vanish from this palace without a sound—

For a senior consort like me, it was as easy as eating a meal.