chapter 1

chapter 1

I was a little confused.

What else could it be?

Could it possibly be fake?

I suppressed the question in my heart and said calmly, “To put it plainly, Your Highness and I were never truly husband and wife to begin with.”

“Three years ago, we made a deal. If we divorced in the future, so be it. If I died quietly, that would work too. In the end, we only needed to get rid of this identity.”

“Now I think the time has come. What do you think, Your Highness?”

Three years ago, the imperial consort’s decree bound me and the Fifth Prince, Zhao Ye, together.

At that time, I was a palace maid whose face had been ruined by tasting medicine.

He was a prince stripped of his rank and reduced to commoner status.

Under the watchful eyes of the eunuchs, we bowed to heaven and earth and were sent into the bridal chamber.

The eunuch left in high spirits to report back to the consort.

He and I sat there in silence, neither of us speaking.

Later, when I was too tired to keep holding it in, I finally said softly what I had in mind:

“Your Highness is far too great a man to have a wife like me, but I really cannot change this.”

“You have read more books than I have, and you understand more reasoning too.”

“So why don’t we sit down and figure out what to do about this properly?”

“I am not someone who refuses to be sensible. If Your Highness has a plan, please tell me.”

He kept silent. His sword-like brows were tightly furrowed, and his eyes held anger and humiliation deep inside.

We both understood the truth: I was his punishment.

They had stripped him of his princely status and given him an ugly woman, making it plain as day that a lowly man like him deserved only a wife just as ugly.

He understood.

So did I.

But I had no choice. This was simply what I had become.

The Li Shuyao of today was an ugly woman whose face was covered in purple scars.

Others saw me as a disgrace, the same as rotten mud or stinking filth that everyone wanted to spit on.

But I could not think of myself that way.

I had no way to peel open my own heart and show it to others, to tell them that beneath the ugliness, I was actually not a bad person.

All I could do was think of the bright side: I had finally left the palace. I no longer had to get up before dawn. I could eat a hot meal. A good life had only just begun, and I should be thinking about how to live well.

So I told Zhao Ye, “If Your Highness has nothing else in mind for now, why don’t you hear my plan first?”

That day, I told him what I wanted.

Life had to go on, but I did not want us to owe each other anything.

We could be strangers under the same roof and stay out of each other’s affairs.

If one day in the future the Fifth Prince rose again, I could fake my death, or we could divorce. Whatever was convenient for the Fifth Prince, I would cooperate.

“A debt of conscience is the hardest to repay. If Your Highness regains your footing in the future, you probably won’t want people accusing you of abandoning your first wife.”

“I’m a vulgar person. Once I’ve given my all, I always want something in return. If I devote myself to Your Highness, I can’t help overthinking.”

“So I won’t interfere with Your Highness, and Your Highness needn’t interfere with me.”

“We will each mind our own lives. That way, when the time comes, things will be clear.”

After I finished, he finally looked up at me, his gaze carrying a trace of scrutiny.

“Don’t you resent it?”

I paused.

He was probably asking whether I resented the imperial consort.

But I could not answer.

If he did not trust me, then I did not trust him either.

Anyone who had survived the palace would always be a little more cautious than other people.

I smiled faintly. “Your Highness, I was able to leave the palace at the age of twenty. That is five years earlier than I expected. Isn’t that a good thing?”

That was the first time Zhao Ye and I met.

There was no dazzling romance, only a clean break.

Later on, he relied on his own efforts to return to the ranks of the princes, and I followed him back to the prince’s estate. Life stayed much the same as before.

We stayed out of each other’s way, owed each other nothing, and so when it came time to leave, I could do so without shame.

The only thing I could not face with complete calm was my parents and younger sister.

They came to seek us out without my knowing.

By the time they knocked on the door of the prince’s estate, I learned that a flood had struck our hometown. Hearing that I had become a prince’s wife, they had traveled all the way here through mountains and rivers, thinking they could live a good life by following me.

Unfortunately, the moment we saw each other, we all fell silent.

My parents hesitated for a long time before asking why I had become like this.

I could not tell them about the intrigue behind the bowl of medicine the imperial consort had given me, so I could only mutter that I had fallen ill.

They looked disappointed.

That night they stayed in the guest room, and the next day they finally said to me in a roundabout way, “Aqiao, you need to compete for His Highness’s favor.”

“You can’t do it on your own anymore. Why not look at your sister?”

“She’s only sixteen, younger than the prince. He’ll like her.”

They pushed my sister in front of me.

My sister was sixteen, in the flower of her youth, and even plain clothes could not hide her brightness.

Girls that age always look beautiful.

Not like me. I was twenty-three and three years older than the Fifth Prince.

They were hinting that I was already old and ugly, and that I could not hold on to the Fifth Prince’s heart, so I should rely on my sister instead.

They were saying the most practical things, but my heart still throbbed with pain.

When I was in the palace, my hometown was the moon in the sky. All the resentment, anger, and affection I had once felt became separated by the long river of time, leaving only a thick, lingering homesickness.

But now that my hometown stood before me, it had robbed me of speech and left me wanting to cry.

There are so many moments in life that leave you unable to say anything.

At that moment, I also could not tell them that I and the Fifth Prince had never shared any husband-and-wife affection. This whole union had only been a toy for the powerful to play with on a whim.

It was a humiliation to the Fifth Prince.

It was also contempt for me.

So I could only calmly refuse my parents, personally pack their luggage, and give them the silver I had saved. I told them to go rent a room in the brokers’ quarter first and find some way to make a living, and that we could talk slowly after they were settled.

My parents were unwilling. They kept calling me Aqiao, Aqiao.

“Aqiao, you have to be sensible. Why are you still so stubborn even now?”

“Aqiao, would we ever mean you harm? If someone else is going to have her, why not make it one of our own?”

“It’s better for the meat to go bad in the pot than to give it to someone else. Don’t you understand that, Aqiao?”

Aqiao was my childhood name. While I was in the palace, I most longed for someone to call me that, as if my parents had once called me so. It was the remembrance that kept me going in the palace.

But when I finally heard it again, it only sounded sharp and grating.

I stopped and said coldly, “Shuyao. Call me Li Shuyao.”

This was the name once given to me by the Third Prince, the imperial consort’s son.

When I was chosen to serve in the consort’s Yongxiu Palace, the consort summoned the new maids and summoned each of us to be inspected and named.

The Third Prince happened to be there, and the consort, wanting to test him, had him name us.

When he came to stand before me, he paused slightly and smiled. “The moon rises bright and clear; the lovely lady is charming. Elegant and graceful, she troubles my heart. Then let’s call you Shuyao.”

Only later did I learn that it was a line from the Book of Songs, praising a beauty as lovely as moonlight and unforgettable to the heart.

At the time, I was thirteen, and so was the Third Prince.

That compliment was no more than a joke, and no one paid it any mind.

But when I was eighteen, those words nearly cost me my life.

The Third Prince thought no one was in the room, so he leaned close and whispered in my ear, “Shuyao is bright and lovely, and my heart is full of longing. Shuyao, one day I will ask Mother Consort for you.”

He smiled with earnestness and a bit of teasing.

But I dropped to my knees at once.

The imperial consort walked out from inside. She looked down at me from above. She said nothing, only bent slowly forward and dragged her long fingernails across my face.

It hurt, but I did not change expression as I thanked her for her grace.

The Third Prince turned pale and looked as if he wanted to speak but could not.

The imperial consort slapped him hard.

“Useless fool. If you really wanted to ask for her, why didn’t you ask me directly?”

That day was truly an uneasy one.

The Third Prince was beaten.

I was punished.

When the punishment was over, I wanted to curry favor with the consort, so I planned to pick some osmanthus flowers to make food. I endured the pain in my knees and stood on tiptoe to reach the blossoms.

At that very moment, the emperor came by and watched me in silence for quite a while.

Only after the imperial consort emerged did he come back to himself and smile. “This girl has a little of the bearing of a refined lady.”

A woman of eighteen is a ripened fruit. Everyone wants to pick it, without asking whether the fruit itself is willing.

Later, the consort fell ill, and I tasted the medicine for her. It was so bitter that it went straight to my heart.

I clutched my chest and collapsed.

When I woke up again, purple scars had spread across my face.

The imperial doctors said I was useless now, and that I could not be cured.

The consort used the matter to thoroughly clean up Yongxiu Palace, and then used it to drag her enemies into the matter and win herself a brilliant victory.

Only I was discarded in a corner of the palace. I went from a second-rank maid in Yongxiu Palace to a laundry maid in the laundry bureau.

After that came the day the Fifth Prince was deposed and reduced to a commoner. The imperial consort remembered me and bestowed me on him as a wife.

It was only in my twentieth year that I finally walked out of the palace.

I had barely made it out, and I understood the blades and shadows inside it.

But my relatives wanted nothing more than to throw themselves straight back in.

Naive, reckless, filled with greed and resentment, and I could not even put any of it into words.

That endless stream of “Aqiao” was not longing. It was a shackle, a hope that I would return to the obedient, compliant Li Aqiao I had been at thirteen.

I had already seen through all of it.