In the middle of winter, frost blanketed the sky, and the entire city of Chang’an was immersed in a vast sea of cold mist.
Yet Yong’en Marquis Estate in Chongren Ward remained like a secluded paradise, still as warm as spring.
On a sunny afternoon, under the warm corridor canopy, eight maids dressed in identical thin green gauze gowns stood quietly at the door, each holding delicate white porcelain cups and jade washbasins in their palms.
After waiting a moment, a hand adorned with a jade bracelet reached out, lifting the door curtain: “Is everything I instructed you to prepare?”
“Rest assured, Jing Zhe, everything has been prepared according to the Princess’s preferences,” the lead maid answered crisply, pointing to each item. “The teacup contains freshly collected plum blossom snow water, just warmed over the brazier. The food box has cherry custard and frozen pastry cakes—eight different pastries without repetition. The incense box contains the newly tribute ‘Saffron’ fragrance from the western regions this winter. The handkerchief is made from the lightest, softest water silk…”
“You have a good memory,” Jing Zhe appraised her with an appreciative glance. “What’s your name?”
“This servant is called A-Chun.”
“From now on, you’ll be called Gu Yu. I’m going out for a while. Stay alert and lead them in to serve.”
Gu Yu happily acknowledged, leading the line of maids across the threshold toward the bedchamber.
The noble person they were about to serve was the daughter of the late Duke of Ning, a cousin who had been living in the Marquis Estate since childhood—Princess Yongying.
Though not the Marquis’s daughter, she received more love and protection than his daughters. Since childhood, she had been raised in luxury and pampered to adulthood—drinking snow lotus stewed milk as if it were plain water and bathing in pearl powder broth—she was the most exquisitely particular noble lady not just in this estate but throughout the entire capital.
Something had happened recently that caused all the maids in Yaoguang Pavilion to be dismissed, leaving only Jing Zhe who they had just met.
These newcomers were being thrown in at the deep end, simultaneously delighted at their good fortune yet anxious about making mistakes and following in the footsteps of their predecessors.
Thinking about this, Gu Yu couldn’t help feeling nervous and recalled Jing Zhe’s instructions—
“The Princess dislikes noise, especially when just waking up. When entering the room, you must move silently, always circle behind the Princess when coming and going, and never move in ways that might dizzy her eyes.”
“The Princess loves cleanliness. From fingernails to the spaces between them, there must not be a trace of dirt before approaching her. If you’re smudged with dust or mud, not only can you not touch the Princess, you cannot even enter her sight.”
“The Princess has delicate skin. If the floor heating becomes too dry, it can damage her face. Remember, the water wheel in the pavilion must never stop turning, ensuring the room remains constantly humid…”
Reciting these points to herself, Gu Yu grew increasingly curious—what kind of noble jade branch could have so many particular requirements?
She looked up and caught sight of “the actual person.”
On the bed in the inner chamber lay a young lady wearing only a cream-colored undergarment with a semi-transparent yellow gauze robe over it. Beneath the mist-like gauze, her shoulders gleamed moistly, and her bosom appeared full, revealing flawless curves of well-proportioned beauty.
Above, her lustrous black hair shone like satin. Her oval face was as pure and translucent as white jade. With charcoal eyebrows and vermilion lips, every feature was picturesque, making her as beautiful as a heavenly immortal.
Gu Yu stared in amazement, her footsteps becoming completely disordered. Hurriedly approaching the bed, she somewhat clumsily offered the teacup: “Princess, please have some tea.”
With a delicate chime of arm bracelets, a hand both slender and plump lazily raised to accept the teacup.
Gu Yu secretly lifted her eyes, gazing up from that snow-bright wrist.
She saw the woman on the bed with her apricot eyes lowered, her face full of weariness. After rinsing her mouth, she propped her hand back against her forehead, allowing a maid behind her to comb her hair with a listless expression, appearing discontented.
Do celestial maidens also have troubles?
While returning the tea saucer and wondering this, Gu Yu’s attention wandered, and with a clang, the teacup tipped over toward the edge of the bed.
Gu Yu drew in a sharp breath, but before she could apologize, she heard another sound: “Ouch—”
Turning her head, she saw the maid combing the hair, who had already knelt, clutching the comb: “Th-this slave is clumsy, I pulled the Princess’s hair… Please forgive me, Princess!”
All the maids in the room froze in place, not daring to breathe as they looked at each other, then one after another they knelt down like dumplings dropping into water: “Princess, please forgive us…!”
Jiang Zhiyi frowned and hissed softly, pressing the edge of her palm against the painful spot on her head. Her raven-black, long eyelashes slowly swept downward as she noticed the water stains on her skirt. She closed her eyes and sighed.
She didn’t know how she had fallen to such a state that she didn’t even have a capable maid to serve her.
When all was said and done, she had to blame that accursed novel.
The winter days were cold and dry, and Jiang Zhiyi was unaccustomed to going out in the wind. Bored some time ago, she noticed among the popular novels gifted by the Three Surplus Bookshop that one called “The Tale of Yiyi” had a main character whose name was homophonous with her own. Finding this connection appealing, she casually flipped through it.
The novel wasn’t particularly novel; it told of a romance formed by a cousin girl living as a dependent in the capital.
The beginning was nothing special—the girl, orphaned and helpless, sought refuge with her relatives. At their estate, she encountered a handsome young man and fell in love at first sight…
Jiang Zhiyi normally despised such cousin romance stories.
Because she was a cousin girl who had lost both parents at seven and been taken in by her uncle at the Yong’en Marquis Estate.
Unfortunately, none of the cousin brothers in the household were capable men, and each had his unsightly appearance. Whenever she read stories about affectionate cousins, one look at her actual cousins would completely ruin her interest.
Remarkably, in “The Tale of Yiyi,” the cousin girl’s affection was not for her cousin brother but for his schoolmate from the academy. This seemed somewhat precious, so Jiang Zhiyi picked up this novel to pass the time.
Who would have thought that as she read, the novel would come to “life.”
In the novel, Yiyi and the young man quickly fell in love with each other, but it seemed as if their fortunes were incompatible. From then on, Yiyi faced a series of misfortunes.
When she tried to send a carrier pigeon to her lover, the pigeon died.
When she entrusted a servant boy to deliver a token to her lover, the servant absconded with the token and the silver.
When she took a carriage to meet her lover secretly, just as she left the estate and stepped onto the carriage footboard, it collapsed, and her foot was sprained.
As Jiang Zhiyi read this part, she was thinking how fortunate that the footboard collapsed at the estate gate rather than in the middle of the street. Otherwise, in the capital, a noble lady from a prestigious family might be able to afford a sprained foot, but she couldn’t afford to lose face—
The next day, when she went out, as her boot toe touched down while alighting from the carriage, with a crash, the footboard fell apart right in the street.
“…”
Everyone on the street turned to look at once.
Jiang Zhiyi, never having been the subject of such a spectacle, pulled down her veiled hat with an expressionless face and immediately returned to her carriage. After returning to the estate, she sat silently before her dressing mirror for the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, then without a word dismissed the cook from her courtyard.
However, those dull-witted people below only understood her meaning after a full day. The carriage attendants and miscellaneous servants came crowding in to kowtow, saying it wasn’t because she had grown fat from eating too much, begging her to cherish her precious health, and asking her to punish them instead.
But would punishing them retrieve the face she had lost on the street?
Jiang Zhiyi impatiently waved her hand, telling these people to go back and make ten sturdy, bronze-wall-iron-fortress-like footboards, and considered the matter settled.
That time, she dismissed it as a mere coincidence.
Until two days later when her mood improved and she picked up the novel again, she read that Yiyi, to please her beloved, had a new outfit tailored at a clothing shop, but the new clothes vanished without a trace.
This time, Jiang Zhiyi didn’t even have time to reflect before a maid came to report that when she went to collect her newly tailored turmeric skirt from the clothing shop, she received only an empty box.
“…”
Jiang Zhiyi opened the novel and glanced at it, then asked the maid: “Did the shopkeeper bristle his beard and glare, saying that he had placed the skirt in the box himself, so how could it disappear without a trace, and perhaps the shop had been robbed?”
“How did the Princess know?”
Because that’s exactly how it was written in the novel.
Jiang Zhiyi looked at the novel in her hand with newfound curiosity.
Could it be that this book, mere black ink on white paper, possessed supernatural powers that could make whatever she read come true?
If so, she wanted to see what other abilities this novel had.
Jiang Zhiyi looked at Yiyi’s next calamity in the novel—finding half a dead rat in a gift box sent by her lover—and pondered for a moment.
Though she had no lover, many wished to be. Coincidentally, her birthday was in three days, and those gentlemen and princes were surely worried about what precious treasures they should offer to curry favor.
She would give them an opportunity by announcing: Any who came to deliver gifts within three days, regardless of what was given, would receive a cup of tea from Princess Yongying as a return gift.
As a result, young men from noble families nearly broke down the Marquis’s door coming for tea, and even noble young ladies whom she hadn’t seen for a long time came to join the excitement.
But when she had Jing Zhe open the gift boxes one by one for three consecutive days, she didn’t see even a single rat, let alone half of one.
“It seems even ghosts and spirits fear the nobility, daring only to target commoners’ clothing shops and not to frame children of noble families,” Jing Zhe joked with her.
She thought this must be the case—the novel’s power was only this much after all. She coldly snorted and continued reading.
When she opened the novel again, the page was about Yiyi’s aunt.
It turned out the aunt had not taken Yiyi in out of pity, but because she had a sickly son who needed Yiyi’s auspicious birth chart to suppress the illness.
Seeing that after Yiyi entered the household, her son indeed improved significantly, how could the aunt let the water fertilize someone else’s field? Naturally, she tried every means to obstruct Yiyi and her lover.
Yiyi’s so-called string of bad luck was actually all “man-made disasters” created by her aunt.
However, the aunt never expected that no matter how she schemed behind the scenes, she could not separate the couple.
With no other options, the aunt obtained a special prescription from a Taoist priest to bring good fortune through marriage—
It was said that if a strand of hair from both the man and woman was cut, braided together, and placed in a specially formulated sachet for the man to wear for a full month, the woman would gradually become entranced by the man as if under a spell. After they “united,” the man could successfully “harvest yin to supplement yang.”
Jiang Zhiyi frowned in disgust as she read this and was about to throw away the filthy novel when she suddenly paused.
She suddenly remembered that last month, one morning after waking up, her hair-combing maid had discovered that a strand of her hair had been cut.
The cut was indeed strangely neat, but at the time, no one considered other possibilities. Everyone thought it had been pulled out by her pet fox.
Could it be that her hair had been taken to cast a spell?
Looking at the severed strand that hadn’t grown back yet, Jiang Zhiyi felt a chill run up her spine and slammed the novel shut.
From that day on, Jiang Zhiyi hadn’t slept a full night. As soon as she fell asleep, she would dream of someone sneaking into her room at night with scissors to cut her hair.
The scenes in her dreams were vivid, and each time, it was one of her servants doing the cutting. After waking, she naturally couldn’t trust her servants anymore.
So she temporarily sent her original personal maids to the outer courtyard, instructing Jing Zhe to investigate thoroughly whether her hair had indeed fallen into the hands of a male member of the household.
Just as she was thinking about this, there was a knock at the door, and Jing Zhe returned: “Princess, the items you requested have arrived.”
Jiang Zhiyi straightened up and waved her sleeve toward the side.
The kneeling maids withdrew, eyes lowered respectfully.
Jing Zhe closed the door, not even having time to ask what had happened, and quickly presented a gold-plated silver incense ball with a bird and flower pattern: “The eldest young master’s sachet.”
Jiang Zhiyi glanced at the object, took out a brocade handkerchief to cushion her palm, and only then accepted it.
If it weren’t necessary to verify, she would not touch her cousin’s personal belongings.
Her eldest cousin was the Marquis’s only legitimate son. Because he had been sickly in childhood, he was completely spoiled and indulged by his mother. He had barely studied properly for a few days and spent his days either in gambling dens or frequenting brothels and taverns. Before even coming of age, he had already earned a reputation for “the five poisons.”
Some years ago, a brothel girl had even come to the door, crying and shouting that she was pregnant with the eldest cousin’s child, causing a great commotion as she sought recognition.
That girl, of course, could not enter the household in the end. Her aunt, shrewd in weighing advantages and disadvantages, knew well that if this child remained, it would be difficult for her eldest son to marry a noble lady. So she forced the girl to terminate the pregnancy and sent her away from the capital, handling the aftermath with practiced efficiency.
The eldest cousin didn’t take this farce seriously at all and returned to the brothels after just a few days of restraint.
Later, when Jiang Zhiyi happened to encounter her eldest cousin, she overheard him enthusiastically discussing with his unsavory friends about some sort of aphrodisiac wine and the taste of consuming souls and bones…
Seeing her eldest cousin’s sunken eye sockets and the dark circles under his eyes, from then on, Jiang Zhiyi found even looking at him distasteful.
Yesterday, Jing Zhe had told her that the eldest young master had indeed been wearing a sachet recently, which she found strange.
Unless this cousin of hers had gone completely insane and didn’t know his worth, how dare he use such methods on her?
With so many respectable young men throughout the capital for her to choose from, none of whom caught her eye, if she were to become enamored with someone so beneath notice, wouldn’t anyone be able to tell she was under a spell?
Wouldn’t that prescription then fail on its own?
Her eldest cousin was already ugly and without virtue; surely he couldn’t be so stupid as to fall short in every aspect, including his intellect.
Thinking this, Jiang Zhiyi opened the sachet clasp and looked inside, then, with a jolt, quickly dropped it, throwing it away.
Jing Zhe was also startled, staring wide-eyed at what had fallen from the small container: “This is…!”
Jiang Zhiyi frantically wiped her hands with a handkerchief, her crimson lips opening and closing several times before she could speak: “This… this fool has truly lost his mind!”