◎The Imperial Mausoleum◎

After Emperor Yinshi founded the dynasty, he passed the throne to his eldest son, a man of mediocre talent, who took the era name Emperor Gao.

During Emperor Gao’s reign, he ruled with a light hand, and fortunately there was little to trouble the court, so his years passed in relative calm. His greatest contribution to history was the grand, magnificent mausoleum he built for the imperial house of Northern Yin, known to history as the Yue Mausoleum.

The Yue Mausoleum was built on Qi Mountain outside the capital, consuming vast amounts of manpower and resources at the time, spanning the reigns of three emperors in its construction. By the time of Emperor Xuan’s reign, the Yue Mausoleum had fallen out of use, and the emperor instead built the Chang Mausoleum a few miles behind Jinghua Mountain, on Fenghua Mountain.

Compared to the Yue Mausoleum, the Chang Mausoleum was built with extreme discretion and modesty. Emperor Xuan was a man of simple tastes, and Emperor De had left a final decree before his death forbidding extravagance, so even the state funeral was conducted simply. As a result, only a small contingent of imperial guards had ever been assigned to the area around the Chang Mausoleum, with a fence set up at the foot of the mountain.

The soldiers guarding the mausoleum were half-asleep with drowsiness.

The previous evening, a fellow guard had suddenly claimed to have seen someone sneak into the woods on Fenghua Mountain, sending the entire unit up the mountain in a search that lasted half the night and turned up nothing.

Everyone had come to assume the soldier had simply been imagining things.

After a busy half-night, as dawn approached, the surroundings had grown quiet again. Even though it was this soldier’s turn on watch tonight, he thought he might steal a bit of rest — after all, the mausoleum had been peaceful for years now, and guarding the dead was always a more relaxed job than guarding the living.

He’d been dozing for a while, his eyelids growing heavier and heavier, sleep pulling him under more deeply, when a rustling sound of footsteps suddenly reached his ears. He tried to open his eyes but found, for a long moment, that he couldn’t move.

A faint scent drifted to his nose, mixed in with the wind, gone the instant it blew past.

Someone was there!

Before he could react any further, he felt a coldness at his throat.

Even the pain had grown hazy by the time the soldier collapsed into a pool of his own blood, and in his final moment, he finally managed, with great effort, to open his eyes.

A figure wrapped in an enormous black cloak, hood raised, was leading roughly six or seven ordinary armored soldiers, stepping through the pool of blood as they hurried toward the imperial mausoleum behind Fenghua Mountain.

The light was dim, and the last thing he saw was a pair of pink-and-white embroidered women’s shoes peeking out from beneath that cloak.

Seeing the figure take a step closer, Qu You instinctively took a step back.

Bo Ying froze for a moment, then stood still where he was, saying gently, “If I wanted to kill you, I’ve had countless chances to do it already. As things stand, you and I are here together, and you pose no threat to me whatsoever — I won’t do anything to you.”

As he said this, he seemed to find something amusing about it, and added self-mockingly, “Even someone as bold as you is afraid of me now.”

Qu You reached up and pulled a rose-gold hairpin from her hair — the one Zhou Tan himself had placed there for her that very morning. “Right now, I can’t guess at all what’s going on in your mind. Doesn’t that make you worth fearing?”

Bo Ying stopped advancing, and simply stood where he was. “You asked me just now…”

He paused. “When I was young, I lived next door to the Eleventh Young Master.”

By saying this, he was tacitly confirming everything Qu You had guessed.

The empress’s own son had not died. He was standing right in front of her!

Qu You could never have imagined that Bo Ying, once she had bluffed him, would confess so readily and completely. Cold sweat trickled down her forehead — that morning, before she’d left, she and Zhou Tan had guessed she might be taken as leverage against him, but neither of them had ever imagined the mastermind would be someone this close to them, someone they knew so well.

Because of that closeness, she was now trapped here with him, with no way of knowing when Zhou Tan’s rescue might arrive, and everything around her chaotic and uncertain. If Bo Ying truly meant to harm her, she would have no way to resist at all.

But at the same time, there was, strangely, a thread of quiet reassurance in her heart.

Now that she knew it was him, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he wouldn’t hurt her.

Perhaps it was only an illusion, but she didn’t think so.

Bo Ying pulled out a fire-striker from somewhere on his person — he’d apparently had it on him all along, and had only pretended to search for one earlier. Now he no longer bothered hiding it from her.

The candle was relit. Bo Ying sat down in the room’s crude table and chair, keeping his distance from her.

“When Aguli smuggled me out of the crown prince’s household, she didn’t actually mean to kill me.”

Bo Ying spoke evenly, the candlelight casting shadows beneath his lashes. Qu You studied him — unmistakably the same person, and yet the vivid, sly liveliness that usually lit up his face had vanished, replaced by a cold, blank indifference.

She stared at him blankly for a moment before it belatedly dawned on her that the “Aguli” he spoke of must be the woman from Xishao whom Emperor De had taken in when he was still crown prince.

“Perhaps what she wanted was to keep me alive, raise me into someone who hated the imperial family with his whole heart — or a good-for-nothing failure — and once the dust had settled, let Song Chang, the man who’d wronged her, ache with regret at the sight of me. Wouldn’t that have been satisfying.” Bo Ying spoke slowly, with a note of mockery. “She didn’t kill me — she simply hated me. From the moment I could first remember anything, all I ever knew from her was beating and cursing. I didn’t understand why back then… most people’s mothers dote on their children, but mine was different. Even as an ignorant child, I could tell that the way she looked at me was frightening.”

Not long after Song Shiyan was born, Emperor De had entered the palace and ascended the throne, granting his deceased first wife the posthumous title of Empress, and never taking another empress after that. Song Shiyan was the rightful, undisputed crown prince, doted on and coddled from childhood — the only hardship he’d ever known was the strictness of his studies.

A tangle of emotions churned within Qu You, but she found no words, and could only let out a heavy sigh.

“When I was six or seven, she brought me back to the capital — before that, we’d been drifting through the towns around the capital, scraping by however we could. Maybe she finally couldn’t bear it anymore, and wanted to come back and see her real son. We lived on North Street, in a place even lower than the Fangxin Pavilion. Whenever she couldn’t see him, she’d take it out on me by beating me… a foreign woman, with no sense of restraint in how hard she struck. One day, she nearly beat me to death — and she felt satisfied by it, humming a tune as she walked out the door.”

Bo Ying propped his chin on his hand, seeming to remember it all with careful attention — his words were harrowing, yet the corner of his mouth carried the faintest smile. “I dragged myself out the front door, leaving a trail of blood behind me, crawling to get help. Lucky for me — my master happened to be traveling the world at the time, and had come to the capital, staying on North Street. He saved me, felt sorry for me, and went to Aguli again and again, telling her that if she didn’t want to raise a child, she could hand me over to him instead.”

“She wouldn’t have agreed to that,” Qu You said quietly.

“Of course not — she refused, and cursed him out in Xishao besides. My master hadn’t expected that, and was startled to realize he understood Xishao — he found his chance and slipped her a dose of a rather good drug,” Bo Ying said, the corner of his mouth curling in a playful expression. “A good drug, mixed with some good wine — she’d had no one to confide in for years, and had been bottled up nearly to the point of madness… That day, my master and I learned the truth of my birth. I finally understood — all these years, I hadn’t been her child at all. That was why she treated me the way she did.”

“As for whether I was the emperor’s son or not — at the time, I couldn’t even bring myself to believe it. I just told my master I didn’t want to stay with Aguli anymore. But after so many years together, I couldn’t bring myself to kill her either, so I played along, kept up appearances of respect, and simply drugged her mad instead — that took care of it. If Song Shiyan had gone on taking the drug a while longer, he’d probably have ended up just as mad as she was.”

Qu You shivered.

“But I hadn’t actually expected her to survive as long as she did — even going mad didn’t kill her. I’d hoped she’d fend for herself and die on her own, but instead she got herself carried off by people from the pleasure quarters… though I suppose that worked out well enough too — a few more years of suffering just counted as her paying me back,” Bo Ying said, his tone shifting, growing flat. “I was still young at the time — I just told my master, kowtowing, that I didn’t want to remember any of my past life anymore, and he took me away from the capital to travel the world. By the time we came back, it happened that we were neighbors with the Eleventh Young Master.”

He had finally arrived at the topic of Bai Shating’s long-cherished elder brother.

“The Eleventh Young Master couldn’t stand the humiliation his mother suffered within the main family, and came here on his own. He had an open, easygoing nature, and we got along well… but sadly, sadly, he wasn’t granted a long life — he came down with a terrible illness, and even with my treatment, he didn’t survive even a single winter.”

Qu You said, stunned, “He died so long ago? Then when Master Shisan first met you…”

“I studied medicine with my master, and what I mastered best was the use of poison and disguise,” Bo Ying cut her off. “The first time I ever tried disguise, I used myself as the test subject. Look at me — seamless, wouldn’t you say? This face — I doubt I could ever change it back now, even if I wanted to.”

Qu You murmured, unable to believe it. “You’ve gone mad. Why did you have to—”

“Because I have my own hatred too,” Bo Ying said gently, looking at her, speaking unhurriedly. “What did I ever do wrong, growing up the way I did? My birth parents abandoned me — I never even got to see their faces once. Aguli hated me down to the bone, wouldn’t even give me a name, treated me as nothing more than the shadow of her real son. Even mad as she was, she still clung to the idea of finding Song Shiyan, telling him I hadn’t actually died, warning him to be careful — but too bad, I’d already anticipated that.”

“I needed a clean, respectable identity, one you’d all trust. San Jing — ‘Three Views’ — as a shadow, it suited me perfectly, didn’t it? I begged my master to take me to meet my uncle and Yuanjun, went through no small trouble, and worked out a way for Yuanjun to get close to Song Shiyan and administer a slow-acting poison… Aguli treated me this way — how could I stand by and watch her real son enjoy everything that should have been mine, while I spent my whole life rolling in the gutter?”

By this point, his composure finally began to crack. Even the candle flame flickered, startled by his clenched fist. Qu You saw a flush of blood-red creep into his eyes, though he was still laughing. “I wanted, more than anything, to make Aguli see Song Shiyan face to face one last time, to let her own son kill her with his own hands. I wanted Song Shiyan to go mad and die a miserable death, only understanding at the very end just how thoroughly I’d schemed against him all those years… ha ha ha ha, shouldn’t I have been allowed to do this? They owed me. Heaven itself owed me!”

Once he’d finished laughing, he raised his head and looked at Qu You coldly. “Why did you just tell me everything Zhou Tan had planned? Haven’t you already guessed I’m not a good person? Laying his whole scheme bare — were you hoping a saint like him could move me to repentance, to turn back from all this?”

Qu You didn’t answer. She gripped the rose-gold hairpin in her hand so tightly that its sharp edge cut into her fingers, drawing blood, an aching pain welling in her chest. “I know I can’t talk you out of this. But I still had to try…”

Bo Ying seemed not to hear her, only muttering to himself, lost in thought. “Ha, a saint. If I too could have… if I, if only…”

Qu You knew what he meant to say — if none of what had happened back then had ever happened, he, as the empress’s true son, would have grown up bathed in favor, receiving proper education and wise counsel, and might have become the most outstanding sovereign this dynasty had ever seen. He might have formed an open, honorable friendship with men like Zhou Tan and Su Chaoci. He might even… have lived out his life in harmony with Song Shixuan as true brothers, content and unhindered.

“But I don’t even have an identity, Youyou,” Bo Ying said, standing and walking closer to her, his tone mournful. “Zhou Tan was once vilified across the streets of the capital, and still you knelt and struck the petition drum for him at the imperial avenue, not once but twice. But who would ever clear my name? Who would ever right the wrong done to me?”

He smiled faintly. “I started with nothing at all.”

Qu You’s voice trembled violently. “Then what is it you want now?”

The candle behind him went out, and at that very moment, footsteps suddenly sounded beyond the pitch-black door, accompanied by a woman’s voice calling out, as though someone were hurrying toward the place where the two of them were sheltering.

“Brother…”

Bo Ying turned his head, his expression unreadable, glancing back over his shoulder.