Chapter 3

Chapter 3

When I returned home, I immediately issued several orders.

First, I had people keep watch on Lu Yu at all times.

Gu Feiyan could not bear to see Lu Yu suffer. She would definitely go back for him. I wanted to make sure that if she did, she would never return. I wanted Lu Yu to spend the rest of his life with that hideous face.

Second, I sent someone to the Imperial Fragrance Pavilion in the capital. It was the largest assassin organization in the city, and I wanted to put out a bounty on Gu Feiyan’s life.

In my previous life, I had tried every possible way to find Gu Feiyan.

With my perfect memory, I drew her portrait and exhausted every avenue to seek out people from the martial world, hoping to find her and get the antidote from her.

But Lu Yu had angrily accused me of colluding with people from the martial world, claiming I was trying to ruin his official career.

At the time, I asked him how he had found out.

I had handled the matter in absolute secrecy, and the Imperial Fragrance Pavilion was even more discreet. They would never reveal a client’s private information.

In an icy voice, he said his political enemies had discovered it and told me to stop at once, to quit causing trouble for him.

Only before I died did I finally understand. It was clearly because Gu Feiyan had been injured while being hunted and had gone crying to him. That was why he came to me, using the excuse that it would affect his career to force me to withdraw the kill order.

In this life, I would make Gu Feiyan live every single day in terror.

Since she hated being bound by the rules of the Marquis’s Mansion, then she could spend the rest of her life wandering in exile.

Third, I summoned the manor physician, handed him a prescription, and told him to refine Frostless Ink.

In my previous life, I had never managed to find the antidote. All I could do was earn money desperately, buy several apothecaries, and hire a few famous physicians to start from the formula itself.

I thought that as long as we could decipher the prescription, we would naturally be able to find the antidote.

Those famous physicians were indeed capable. They developed a formula similar to Frostless Ink and even attempted to create an antidote.

When that antidote was used on my face, it only faded the ink by a few shades. It did not completely erase the ink marks on my face.

The physicians said it was likely missing one or two of the most crucial medicinal ingredients. Those ingredients were probably not from our lands, but very possibly from a foreign realm.

Gu Feiyan had once traveled far and wide, roaming all over the world. Who knew where she had obtained such strange and bizarre things?

I felt regret, but I was not discouraged.

I had them alter the formula instead, changing it into a version of Frostless Ink that had no antidote at all.

At the time, I had actually harbored one thought: if I found Gu Feiyan one day, I would smear ink all over her face. I would make her regret what she had done for the rest of her life.

In my previous life, I used that formula. I drugged her with Soft Tendon Powder and blackened her face, but she died too quickly. No one saw her darkened face. I felt none of the satisfaction of avenging a great wrong, only an absurd sense of waking from a dream.

Everything had been too absurd.

Because of the love, hatred, and entanglements between him and her, I had become the sacrifice that sustained their happy life.

Yet no one had ever asked whether I was willing.

In this life, she could forget about living in this world with a clean, unblemished face.