The bright yellow silk was clenched in Xie Jing’s hand, its words unmistakably clear and devoid of any ambiguity, striking directly into the eyes of both him and Lu Lingcong.
Xie Jing understood in an instant why Lu Lingcong had hesitated: he understood the late emperor’s final disposition better than anyone. He had likely guessed that the so-called “delicacy” of the edict was far more sensitive than the matter of the successor or the crown prince.
He asked with an almost eerie calmness, “Have you thought about the circumstances under which this edict would have appeared, had things gone according to plan?”
Lu Lingcong spoke each word deliberately: “According to Emperor Father’s scheme, the Xie family would have already been imprisoned with their crimes confirmed. The Wang family would never have passed up such an easy opportunity; thus, once Emperor Father faked his death and the Wang clan lost their final shred of concern, they would have immediately moved to finish the slaughter of the Xie clan. Then, the edict would be made public, and Zhang Yan would announce the Prime Minister’s treasonous act of administering the Bone-stripping String to the world. Using that as a pretext, the rhinoceros horn archer’s ring could be used to command the Yulin Guards to purge the Wang family with full legitimacy.”
“Thus, Emperor Father intended to use the Wang clan’s hands to eradicate the Xie clan. Then, once the Wang clan grew unscrupulous and revealed their treacherous hearts, he would use Zhang Yan and the Yulin Guards to settle accounts with them. Finally, he would ‘return from the dead.’ Whether he kept me as the heir or appointed Lingzhang, there would no longer be any hidden threat from maternal relatives. His reason for choosing me was not due to any expectation of my character, but merely to ensure that Qing’er could one day ascend the throne smoothly and without dispute.”
“The betrayal of Zhang Yan and Zhong Zhao disrupted Emperor Father’s plan. Those two anonymously leaked the location of the true edict to the Wang clan; consequently, the forged edict was created, the heir was changed, and a choice was turned into a definitive answer—all of which were the Wang clan’s embellishments to justify their own legitimacy. And Emperor Father truly died, never gaining the chance to pull in the net and deal with the Wang clan himself.”
His gaze drifted toward the rear of Shenlong Hall, the place that had served as the late emperor’s living quarters. “On the very night of the raid on Wuyi Lane, Emperor Father summoned me to his presence. He told me he would not punish you. He said that while he did not particularly like you as a daughter-in-law, you still held the merit of giving birth to Qing’er. He said he knew I doted on you to excess, so he would allow me to leave a path of survival for you…”
“…What he wrote in the imperial edict was a multiple-choice question, but in truth, he had already provided the answer for me long ago.”
Silence reigned in the hall for a long time. Xie Jing stared at the sentence: “The Xie clan possessed talents fit to assist a sovereign, and that Madam Xie possessed the bearing of a virtuous empress.” He thought blankly: when the late emperor chose him to be Lu Lingcong’s consort; and eventually the empress, what exactly had he seen in him?
Had he seen his youth and beauty, capable of securing the monarch’s lasting favor? Had he seen the birth of a legitimate son whom he would raise and educate with all his heart? Or had he seen his talent, which could be used to scheme for the emperor in all matters by acting as an unpaid prime minister of the inner court?
How many roles was he filling for one person? The favored concubine who flattered the Son of Heaven; the palace mistress who bore the imperial lineage; the capable minister who shared the sovereign’s burdens; he had been nothing more than a tool in the hands of the Prime Minister’s Mansion, and no different a tool in the hands of the late emperor. The late emperor held him by his weakness; he knew too well that Xie Jing would exert every ounce of his strength to assist Lu Shuqing. So, what necessity was there to kill such an obedient puppet?
And what chilled Xie Jing to the bone the most was that it wasn’t the late emperor who had carved the puppet into this shape. The late emperor had simply seen through him too clearly—
This was who he had been all along.
“I originally thought my family’s disaster was the result of the Wang clan rooting out dissidents. Only yesterday did I learn we were the sacrificial victims of my teacher’s private vendetta. I had even harbored a sliver of hope, thinking that if none of this had happened; if things had followed the late Emperor’s original decision to let you succeed the throne, then perhaps the Xie family wouldn’t have had to suffer such total destruction, and could have lived out this life in peace.”
“But now that the imperial edict is laid out before our eyes, I finally understand why the Empress Dowager said I have never truly seen through it. Even without the Wang clan, even without Zhang Yan; even if the late Emperor had simply passed away and all the factionalism and old grudges ceased to exist, the fate of the Xie family was still placed beneath the executioner’s blade. The Xie family did not perish from partisan strife, or from being the target of displaced anger, or from hatred; it perished because of the supreme, absolute imperial power that has hung over our heads for a thousand years.”
“Even in the best-case scenario, where we were unhindered by others, we wouldn’t have even known of this edict’s existence, let alone deliberately pried into it. Had the late Emperor truly died then, we would only have learned the contents of the edict at the same time as the civil and military officials and the rest of the world! At that moment, with ten thousand pairs of eyes watching, you would have had no choice but to obey, to comply, and to choose!”
“I am so tired, Zifeng,” Xie Jing murmured. “This is all so utterly meaningless.”
“I imagined this moment a thousand times, thinking I would feel a sense of relief, a surge of triumph, or the thrill of vengeance. In truth, there is nothing.” He pressed his hand against his chest. “There is only a void in my heart, heavy and sinking.”
“I finally understand what my elder brother said in prison: ‘Remember that you have no hate and no grudge waiting for you to avenge.’ A person cannot survive on hatred alone. After all this hating back and forth, I realize I no longer know whom I should hate. Grand Tutor Zhang, Zhong Zhao, Cui Shushi, He Gao, the late Emperor, the Empress Dowager… how are we any different from them? Not one of us is not a pitiable soul, yet not one of us is without a hateful side.”
“And what have we done? To give ourselves a legitimate reason to act, we used the murder of the Eldest Princess as a pretext to strike back at the Prime Minister’s Mansion. Zhenzhen died in battle; she isn’t coming back. We will never see her again. She already sacrificed her path to survival for the sake of avenging the Xie family and seizing power for Prince Zhao’s Mansion, yet we still did not let her go. We still used her death as a front to incite public indignation and win over the hearts of the people!”
Lu Lingcong remained silent for a long while before finally speaking, “They couldn’t find her… Yongzhou is so far away, and the banks of the Wuding River are so cold, crowded with countless lost souls. I was the one who lost her; how is she supposed to come back alone? How could she ever possibly return?”
He struggled to control the violent trembling in his voice, “Winning this battle by using Zhenzhen’s name makes me feel… disgusted with myself. But the more disgusted I feel, the more I cannot afford not to fight or resist. If I simply continue to hesitate and wait for death, then your parents, your brother and sisters-in-law, the over one hundred servants of the Xie family, the soldiers lost during those three years in the Tiger Division; and Zhenzhen, will all have died for nothing.”
Lu Lingcong almost ruthlessly stripped away the last layer of pretense, bringing the matter up in the most piercing and direct manner possible, forcing both of them to confront the traumatic wound left by Lu Lingzhen’s death.
“I must seize this opportunity to personally send every person who caused her death to the Yellow Springs and then spend the rest of my life remembering today’s impotence and regret.”
Lu Lingcong threw the imperial edict back into the brocade box. He took two steps forward and firmly grabbed Xie Jing’s shoulders, forcing him to look him straight in the eye.
“Xie Jing,” he called his name. “It is time for you to grow up.”
Xie Jing was stunned by those words. He suddenly realized what a monumental change “death” could bring to those left behind. In the past, Lu Lingcong might have told him, “You don’t have to grow up; I am here for everything,” protecting and sheltering Xie Jing just as he had done to Lu Lingzhen and Lu Lingzhang. But after losing his younger sister and brother in succession and realizing that their deaths had paved the way for Prince Zhao’s struggle, Lu Lingcong seemed to have lost a certain capacity for being the “elder brother.”
He said to Xie Jing, “It is time for you to grow up.”
Or perhaps Lu Lingcong had long ago prepared himself to face fate, and the only one who had consistently refused to see reality clearly was Xie Jing himself.
“Zifeng, do you remember?” A faint trace of sorrowful lament appeared on Xie Jing’s face. “On the boat back to Chen Commandery, you told me that if the price was losing me, you would rather not have the throne at all and would give it to Lingzhang. Today, must I treat those words as a mere jest?”
Lu Lingcong paused for a moment, then spoke in a calm, deep voice, “I was too naive then; I thought of things too simply. Back then, giving up the throne would not only have failed to save the Xie family but would have also sacrificed the lives of our children, my mother, Zhenzhen, and many more innocent people! There is no such thing as a path of retreat for the Imperial House. Your opponent only fears that you will fight with your life on the line; if you instead rush to withdraw and yield, what then? If you do not retreat or yield, you may struggle for a sliver of life; if you retreat or yield, it is certain death!”
“And now, Lingzhang is gone. The only one left to whom I could shirk my responsibility and hand over this burden is Qing’er. But I can never allow my son’s hard-won stable life to end prematurely by forcing him to abandon his freedom and his right to choose his friends and lovers and become a lonely man at the freezing heights of power at the age of fourteen, all while his selfish, cowardly father hides behind his back!”
“Regarding the choice Emperor Father left behind what I should do is not helplessly push everything onto you, making you choose between yourself and your maternal clan; forcing you to either endure the pain of being separated from your kin by death or choose to die yourself! What I must do is stand at the highest point so that everyone who threatens me, interferes with me, or questions me for protecting both you and the Xie family will never dare utter another word. I must make it so this ‘choice’ is no longer a choice at all!”
“I’m sorry. From this day on, you and I should indeed treat that as nothing more than a passing jest,” Lu Lingcong said, looking deeply at Xie Jing, an endless sorrow in the depths of his eyes. “But in those days, it was never that. If you do not believe me, then I have nothing left to say.”
Xie Jing stood dazed for a long while, then shook his head and said wretchedly, “Zifeng, no matter what happens, it is impossible for me not to believe you. How could I not believe you?”
“You want me to grow up, so I will no longer; out of my own selfishness or my fear of repeating the mistakes of the late Emperor and the Empress Dowager, beg you not to step into that position.”
“You want me to raise Qing’er into an outstanding Crown Prince; you want me to enter court as the Prime Minister and share the burden of governance; you want me to move among the noble clans, the impoverished scholars, and the rising new elites to balance the factions; and you even wish to summon me to Shenlong Hall for your bedchamber—I can do all of it. I am willing to do all of it for you.”
Xie Jing raised his hand to trace the bridge of Lu Lingcong’s nose with his fingertips. “Only the position of Empress… after more than ten years, it seems I am still unable to take on that role.”
Lu Lingcong’s hand could completely encircle his wrist. “Tell me, if I let go of this hand now, will you ever come back to my side?”
Xie Jing’s gaze slowly turned vacant. Dawn was approaching quickly; the long night, steeped in blood and tears, was about to come to an end, yet his path ahead did not grow any clearer because of it.
“I do not know,” was all he could say.
Lu Lingcong raised his voice slightly, speaking with solemnity, “You once told me that my wedded wife never regretted marrying me. You said you knew you would have regrets, so if there ever came a day where you became muddled or went down a dead end, even if I had to shut you away or lock you up, you wanted me to pull you back!”
Lu Lingcong raised his voice slightly, speaking with solemn gravity. “You once told me that my wife; my bound spouse, had never regretted marrying me. You said you knew you would regret it one day, so if there came a time when you lost my sense or became stubborn and fixated, even if I had to confine you or bind you, you would still insist that I pull you back from the brink!”
He lowered his head; his gaze entirely focused on Xie Jing’s eyes. “Xie Zhiwu, I could never bring myself to shut you away or lock you up in this lifetime. But today, I reach out my hand to pull you and to hold you, and I have one question for you—if your endurance and humiliation over the past four years, the slander and hardships you suffered, and the partings of life and death are all to become nothing more than footnotes to a separation, then what was the meaning of all that pain and suffering? What is it that you truly seek in your heart?!”
What was the meaning of pain and suffering? What was the meaning of joy and pleasure? If death was ultimately unavoidable, then what was the meaning of a life lived in this world?
Xie Jing suddenly gave a chilling laugh, one full of self-deprecation and irony, brimming with an unspeakable desolation. He asked in return, “What do I seek?”
“Do you think I exhausted the Xie family’s reputation and labored like a dog or horse just to seek wealth and luxury? Do you think I walked on thin ice to reach this point just to seek a position above all others? Sages and gentlemen concern themselves with the realm and seek peace within the seas; I am not one of them. I do not care for peace that is merely painted on!”
“I seek only for my kin in the springs below to know and forgive my youthful absurdities; I seek for my children to follow their hearts and stay with those they love in this life; and I seek for you—I seek for you, Lu Zifeng, to gallop across the battlefields and guard the rivers and mountains, never again having to worry about what you leave behind!”
As his voice fell, the air remained frozen for a long time.
After a while, Lu Lingcong moved his hands from Xie Jing’s shoulders to his back. Applying a bit of force, he pulled him into his embrace. Xie Jing did not resist either, allowing the other party to hold him, yet he was stunned to find that even this embrace felt somewhat foreign. The three years in Yongzhou were long and the distance far, but none of that compared to the barrier the truth and this sudden realization had built within the heart.
Xie Jing seemed chilled by this estrangement, shuddering involuntarily. Leaning against Lu Lingcong’s chest, he murmured vacantly to himself:
“May you be as bright as the sun; let me ride a fish and skim away upon the waves…”
After a long while, Lu Lingcong loosened his grip and, as Xie Jing wished, let go of his hand. “If what you seek is to be unbound, then go. Leave and fly far away to a place where the sky has no horizon.”
The heavy doors of Shenlong Hall were pushed open. Xie Jing walked unsteadily across the threshold before lifting his face. The piercing morning light flooded the cinnabar steps; he kept his eyes open, meeting the glare head-on.
In his sixteenth year, he had stepped through these doors as the top scholar of the triple examinations basking in glory and pride with not a single worry to bind him. In this, his thirty-first year, he stepped out of these doors; looking up and down, the vault of heaven was filled with ten thousand rays of dawn, and the world of men stretched out vast and boundless.
Behind him, inside Shenlong Hall, Lu Lingcong stood alone with their backs turned to one another. The late emperor’s true edict was already a piece of wastepaper; with the grudges settled, it had lost all its efficacy. Yet the invisible power and schemes woven between those lines would linger like ghosts, hovering over this great hall for thousands of years, infinite and unending.
Xie Jing thought to himself that perhaps, compared to Lu Lingcong, he was indeed cowardly and selfish. Between them, there was no right or wrong, nor was it a matter of who had changed and who had not. There was only the struggle between being forced to grow up and being unwilling to do so—and even though Lu Lingcong wanted him to grow up, in the end, he still indulged him, protected him, and followed his heart’s desire. Ultimately, Lu Lingcong did not wish to have Xie Jing remain by his side at the cost of him spending his days in melancholy.
The purple-green scars on his right arm throbbed with a long-forgotten sting. Xie Jing’s eyes began to water from the blinding light, his vision gradually blurring until only a wave of dizziness remained. After two stumbling steps, he collapsed headlong from the top of the stairs.
