Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The third time was on the day of his coronation.

The Late Emperor had passed away, and the court was in turmoil. Every eye was fixed on that grand ceremony. Clad in his ceremonial robes, Bai Xiuzhu had just stepped onto the vermilion stairs when a poison needle as fine as a cow’s hair shattered the wine cup offered by an attendant. The toxic liquid splashed across the back of his hand along with the shards of porcelain. Within moments, he collapsed before the assembled civil and military officials.

It was the Southern Borderlands’ most sinister poison, “Heart-Devouring Sand,” which kills the moment it touches blood.

As I rushed forward, Rong Yingxue threw herself beside him, weeping like a pear blossom in the rain, while the imperial physicians didn’t even dare to approach.

I didn’t hesitate. I bit the tip of my tongue to pass him the medicine and then slit my wrist in front of everyone to feed him my blood.

Bai Xiuzhu trembled in my arms, his fingers clutching my sleeve with a death grip, as if driven by the last vestiges of survival instinct.

His eyes were half-open, his breath as thin as silk, as he asked me, “Wentang… which time is this?”

My tears fell uncontrollably.

“The third time.”

He was stunned for a moment, as if suddenly understanding something. With the last of his strength, he pressed a key into my palm.

“Taiye Pond… stone beast…”

“Go.”

That was the last word he spoke.

Then, he fell unconscious.

Kneeling on the vermilion stairs, my hands covered in both his blood and mine, I suddenly realized that he knew everything.

He knew that if I saved him again, he would forget me entirely.

That was why he had prepared a way out for me long ago.

But I didn’t leave.

Because before he collapsed, I saw where the poison needle had come from.

It was someone from the Rong Family.

At that moment, I finally connected all the dots: the injustice against the Jiang Family, the repeated assassination attempts on Bai Xiuzhu over the years, and the network the Rong Family had planted in the Southern Borderlands.

If I left, even if Bai Xiuzhu survived, he would only become a puppet emperor held captive by the Rong Family.

So that night, instead of retrieving the wooden box, I ordered Eunuch Chang to hide the items at Taiye Pond and waited for the Rong Family to reveal their fangs.

I had originally thought that even if Bai Xiuzhu forgot me, he would at least retain a shred of instinctive trust.

But I had underestimated the Forgetfulness Gu.

When he woke, his eyes held nothing for me but coldness and suspicion.

Rong Yingxue kept watch by his bedside, her voice hoarse from crying. She claimed she had stayed awake all night tending to His Majesty. She claimed I had taken advantage of the chaos to hide the poison needle. She claimed that a secret letter from the Southern Borderlands and a rubbing of the military tally had been found in my room.

After listening to her, Bai Xiuzhu looked at me quietly.

“Is what she says true?”

I looked back at him.

That face was still the face I had loved for seven years; even the arch of his brows hadn’t changed. But the expression with which he spoke was that of a stranger who had absolutely nothing to do with me.

I was suddenly very tired.

“Do you believe it?”

He remained silent for a moment before saying, “I only believe in evidence.”

In that moment, I knew I had lost.

I didn’t lose to Rong Yingxue.

I lost to that Gu, and I lost to fate.

Everything that followed happened as a matter of course.

The Rong Family directed the censors to submit memorials, dredging up the old case of the Jiang Family. Rong Yingxue wept in the inner palace, putting on a perfect act of being gentle and virtuous. Meanwhile, I was thrown into the Imperial Prison, to be executed in three days.

The night before the execution, Bai Xiuzhu visited once.

The Imperial Prison was lit by only a single dim lamp. I sat on a straw mat, already feverish. Taking my blood for the third time had damaged my very foundation; even without that imperial decree, I wouldn’t have lived much longer.

He stood outside the iron bars and asked in a heavy voice, “Where is the rubbing of the military tally hidden?”

I looked up and couldn’t help but laugh.

“Your Majesty came to see a death row prisoner in the middle of the night just for this?”

He frowned, seemingly unable to understand why I could still laugh.

I slowly stood up, walked to him, and untied the white jade peace charm I always wore at my waist, handing it to him through the bars.

He had given that to me with his own hands years ago at the border.

As soon as Bai Xiuzhu took it, his fingertips trembled violently.

He stared at the jade, his face turning pale inch by inch, as if thousands of needles had suddenly pierced his brain at once.

“This thing…”

“You gave it to me,” I said, watching him. “In a ruined temple beyond the pass.”

His breath hitched, and cold sweat broke out on his forehead.

I knew the Gu was blocking him.

So, I took a step back and said no more.

He looked up at me, and for the first time, a look of almost bewildered pain surfaced in his eyes.

“What exactly… was our relationship in the past?”

I remained quiet for a long time before saying, “It was a relationship that you would rather forget than allow me to speak of.”

The pain in his eyes deepened.

After a long while, as if struggling against himself, he said hoarsely, “If you truly have been wronged, present your case again tomorrow. I…”

Before he could finish, Rong Yingxue’s fragile voice called out from outside. “Your Majesty, the night is cold, and you have not yet recovered from the old poison. How can you come to a place like this?”

Bai Xiuzhu seemed to be snapped back to reality, and his gaze quickly turned cold again.

He tucked away the white jade peace charm and turned to leave.

As he reached the door, I suddenly called out to him.

“Bai Xiuzhu.”

This was the first time I had called him by his name since his coronation.

His footsteps paused, but he did not look back.

I asked softly, “If one day you remember everything, will you regret it?”

He was silent for a long time before coldly dropping two words.

“I won’t.”

I watched his back disappear at the end of the long corridor, and suddenly, I wasn’t sad anymore.

‘I won’t’ is fine too.

At least when I die, he won’t feel the pain.

At noon the next day, I was to be executed outside the Meridian Gate.

Before the execution, the sky was heavily overcast, as if it were about to snow.

Kneeling on the execution platform, I heard the presiding official loudly reading out my crimes. I heard the commoners cursing me as a poisonous woman and the descendant of a traitor. The moment the blade was placed against the back of my neck, I suddenly remembered many years ago at the border, when the sky had looked just like this-on the verge of snowing, but not quite yet.

Bai Xiuzhu had tucked my hands into his sleeves and whispered, “Wentang, your hands are so cold. Don’t ever stray too far from me in the future.”

I closed my eyes and softly answered in my heart.

“Okay.”

When the blade fell, it didn’t hurt that much.

What truly hurt was that even until death, I never saw the moment he remembered me.

Three days after my death, the Rong Family finally let down their guard.
Following the arrangements I had left behind, Eunuch Chang retrieved the wooden box from the mouth of the stone beast at Taiye Pond and delivered it to the Imperial Study overnight.

Inside that wooden box were three things.

The first was a copy of the case files regarding the Jiang Family’s old scandal. It stated clearly that the person who had conspired with the Southern Borderlands years ago was not my father, but Grand Tutor Rong. The Jiang Family had merely been made the scapegoat for the Rong Family.

The second was a ledger of the Rong Family’s dealings with the Southern Borderlands over the years, as well as the full arrangements for the assassination of Bai Xiuzhu at the coronation ceremony.

The third was a set of three letters.

Three letters, all written to me by Bai Xiuzhu.

The first was written after he woke up from his first bout with the Gu.

He said he had forgotten what his mother looked like at the end, and his heart felt terribly hollow. He was afraid that one day he wouldn’t even recognize himself, so he wrote down the person he trusted most.

The letter contained only one sentence:

“Jiang Wentang can be trusted with my life.”

The second was written after he suffered that arrow wound at the border.

At that time, he had already forgotten me, yet he wrote in the letter:

“I do not know why my heart feels like it is being carved out with a knife whenever I see her shed tears. If I truly loved someone in the past, it must have been her. If there comes a day when I still cannot remember, then I ask my future self to love her once more.”

The third was written the night before the coronation ceremony.

There were hurried ink stains on the paper, as if the writer had paused many times.

He wrote:

“Wentang, if you are reading this letter, it means I have ultimately reached the third time.”

“Hidden within the stone beast at Taiye Pond are travel permits for you, a letter of divorce, the documents exonerating the Jiang Family, and the evidence of the Rong Family’s crimes. If I do not recognize you after I wake, leave immediately. Do not stay trapped with me in this palace city any longer.”

“I know you surely won’t be able to bear it. But this time, I am begging you.”

“If you can live on, then act as if you never met me.”

“If you refuse to live-”

The sentence that followed had been written and crossed out, then written again.

What he finally left was:

“Then consider it my betrayal of you. For all my lives to come, I do not ask for your forgiveness.”

When Eunuch Chang presented the three letters, Bai Xiuzhu was in the middle of reviewing the report on my execution.

He said that the moment the Emperor saw the third letter, he looked as if his soul had been ripped out; for a long time, he couldn’t say a single word.

Later, he suddenly coughed up blood. Clutching his chest, he collapsed over the imperial desk, as if something was violently tearing through his flesh, growing outward from his deepest depths.

The memories swallowed by the Forgetfulness Gu had no one left to consume after my death.

And so, it finally returned them all to him.

He remembered the apricot blossoms at the border; he remembered the crumbling statues in the Matchmaker Temple; he remembered the scar on my wrist; he remembered how he had held me tight during every night the poison flared up, begging me not to leave.

He also remembered that in the Hall of Golden Chimes, it was his own hand that had marked my death warrant in vermilion ink.

Half the room’s porcelain was smashed in the Imperial Study that day.

When Bai Xiuzhu stormed into the Rong household with a sword in hand, Rong Yingxue was still wearing the snow-white palace attire she had worn on the day of my death. Seeing his bloodshot eyes, she finally realized the plot had failed. She collapsed to her knees, weeping so hard she could barely breathe.

“Your Majesty, I only did it because I loved you too much!”

Bai Xiuzhu stood on the steps, his voice colder than midwinter.

“You think you’re worthy of speaking of love?”

The entire Rong Family was imprisoned and executed at the West Market seven days later. The Jiang Family’s old case was overturned, and all the old files from the Late Emperor’s final years were reinvestigated. My father was posthumously titled Chief of the Imperial Medical Bureau, clearing the stain of “colluding with the enemy.”

As for me, I was reburied at North Mountain with the rites of an Empress by the new Emperor.

The entire court said His Majesty was deeply affectionate and had returned to the right path after losing his way.

But only Eunuch Chang knew that on the day of my burial, Bai Xiuzhu sat alone before my spirit tablet for the entire night.

He read those three letters over and over, stroking that white jade peace charm again and again, asking like a madman:

“When she went to the execution grounds, did she cry?”

Eunuch Chang said she did not.

He asked again: “In the end, did she resent me?”

Eunuch Chang still said she did not.

After hearing this, Bai Xiuzhu lowered his head and did not speak for a long time.

Later, Eunuch Chang heard him muttering to himself in a raspy voice:

“It’s not that she didn’t resent me.”

“It’s that she wouldn’t even let me hear her resentment.”

Three years after my death, a heavy snow fell upon the capital.

Bai Xiuzhu never appointed another Empress. The inner palace remained empty, and even the palace where Rong Yingxue had lived was burned to the ground by him. He moved my grave to the side of the Imperial Mausoleum and personally carved a headstone, but he did not use any posthumous titles, nor did he write the word “Empress.”

There were only three words on the stone.

Jiang Wentang.

He said this was the name I liked best, and the one that deserved to be remembered most.

Every rainy night, his old poison would still flare up. It was just that while someone used to stay by his side until dawn, there was no one now.

So he would wrap himself in a cloak and go to North Mountain alone, sitting before my headstone all night long.

Some said the new Emperor had grown fond of talking to a gravestone over the years.

Sometimes he spoke of frustrating matters in court, sometimes he said it was snowing again at the border, and sometimes he said nothing at all, merely tracing the name on the stone over and over.

He said he was afraid.

Afraid that one day he would grow old, fall ill, and his memory would fail.

Afraid that even if the Gu were dead, he would still forget.

So every time he came, he buried a letter beside the headstone.

The first one wrote: “Wentang, I dreamed of the border apricot blossoms again today.”

The second wrote: “Wentang, I have cleared the Jiang Family’s case. Your father’s name has been carved back onto the commemorative stele of the Imperial Medical Bureau.”

The third wrote: “Wentang, I finally understand. A person’s true retribution isn’t loss-it’s having to go on living after you remember.”

Later, the letters at North Mountain grew in number, buried there for over a decade.

But I would never open them to read again.

On the day before Bai Xiuzhu died, the weather was just as it is when snow is about to fall but hasn’t yet.

He had himself carried to my grave. His withered hand brushed the snow from the headstone bit by bit as he spoke to me in a low voice, just as he had many years ago.

He said:

“Wentang, this time, I didn’t forget.”

But the mountain wind was too cold, the headstone was too cold, and the world was too cold.

There was no longer a girl like the one who waited for him to return to camp at the border, reaching out her hand to brush the snow from his shoulders.