◎ Zhenru ◎

When Zhou Tan had been demoted and sent from the capital at thirty-one, he had also passed by the Qingxi River.

There, beside the river, he had written a vague elegy for the dead.

Qu You remembered — this was the poem he had written for his late wife, of the Qu clan.

The reason she called the poem “vague” was that, when she’d first read it, she hadn’t realized at all it was a mourning poem — only the title, “Venting My Grief,” hinted at the author’s true feelings.

“By the clear stream, washed by fresh rain” — passing the Qingxi River outside the city, a fine spring rain had just fallen.

“Adrift, I offer up old garments” — alone, he had left the capital, like a boat cast adrift, able only to offer old clothes by the riverbank in mourning for the departed.

So it turned out these two lines had been written for Gu Zhiyan.

For the first time since arriving in this world, Qu You felt a bone-deep confusion and fear rising within her.

She had never before thought much about what lay ahead, never wondered what her own future might hold. But today, when Zhou Tan spoke of his late teacher, she suddenly remembered — in the historical record, Zhou Tan’s wife — perhaps herself — had already died of illness before he left the capital.

The history books wouldn’t record the feelings between them — only that one vague, ambiguous elegy. Now Qu You realized that the first two lines of that poem mourned his teacher, but she still didn’t understand what the last two lines meant.

His parents had died young, his relatives and friends had grown distant, his younger brother treated him coldly, his teacher had abandoned the world in death… and afterward, his wife had left him too. Zhou Tan was a man of such deep feeling — to die quietly beneath the apricot blossoms, he must not have wanted to go on living, either.

But this body of hers held no illness. Where, then, had it failed her?

She refused to believe that any woman who had stayed by Zhou Tan’s side for a time could remain unmoved by him. And if she had loved him, how could she have borne to leave him?

Could it be, like Gu Zhiyan, that she had been swept up in the storm of politics and forced to her death?

But I don’t want to die.

Qu You heard the voice inside her heart, clear as day.

She wanted to stay beside this man — at the very least, to spare him from facing the apricot blossoms alone at the end, fragile and unsupported.

But could she… change history?

No — that wasn’t right. Without her, the case of the woman who fell from the tower would never have concluded this way. If she hadn’t intervened, Zhou Tan could never have gotten hold of the letters Liu Lianxi had left behind, nor would he have uncovered what lay before them now.

In these unrecorded gaps of history — had she already changed it?

As these thoughts ran through her mind, her fingers traced idly over the back of his hand. Zhou Tan, lost in his own grief, was not as sharp as usual, and didn’t notice her distraction.

He picked the letters back up with her hand still in his, feeling his mind now terrifyingly clear — and the clearer it became, the more it made him tremble.

He thought back to the day Gu Zhiyan had come to visit him in the imperial prison. His teacher — always so refined, ethereal, and full of vitality — had shown him, that day, a side of himself he had never seen before.

That was right after he had suffered the “nailing punishment.”

The so-called nailing punishment involved driving long iron nails, thick as a finger, into the gaps of a person’s joints — never touching bone, causing little blood loss, never enough to kill outright. It was a cruel punishment left over from the previous dynasty.

The pain was excruciating — so agonizing his consciousness had grown hazy.

Four iron nails had been driven through his body. He’d been tossed onto a pile of straw like some lifeless thing, his posture humiliating. He’d wanted to crawl up, but couldn’t even move.

It hurts, it hurts so much — better to let me die like my fellow students did.

That was what Zhou Tan had thought, and he didn’t know how much time had passed before he suddenly felt the pain begin to ease. It seemed someone had gently lifted him up. Two of the nails in his arm had been removed, and medicine applied to the wounds.

Through the haze, he’d opened his eyes and seen Gu Zhiyan’s face before him, streaked with tears.

“Xiaobai… you’ve suffered.”

“Teacher…”

The prison around them had been eerily silent, everyone else sent elsewhere. Gu Zhiyan had come alone to see him, his expression weary and lost, as though he had aged ten years overnight.

Zhou Tan had known full well — the renovation of the Candlelight Tower was never the real issue. The Emperor, ever fickle, had simply decided that the tutor who had helped raise him to the throne now held too much power, and needed to be purged. The fresh blood of the scholar-officials was simply meant to be a demonstration of imperial might to the entire court, civil and military alike.

Everyone had known this, and still, none of them had been willing to bow.

This was called “dying for principle.”

“You are my finest student. You shouldn’t have to die so young… but sometimes, living is harder than dying.”

There, in that prison cell, Gu Zhiyan had told him a secret that could overturn the entire realm.

The secret of Zhenru Palace.

Emperor Xuan had had few children throughout his life. His consorts had not been too many nor too few — the three palaces and six courts fully staffed — and yet it wasn’t until twelve years after his ascension that he had his first child, the current Emperor, Song Chang.

Noble Consort Zhao’s father, Zhao Yin, had held the Emperor’s trust, and Noble Consort Zhao herself had been much favored, residing in Zhenru Palace — Zhenru, Gongshu Wuyuan’s most prized work, a name suggested by a master of Xiuqing Temple upon entering the palace, deeply imbued with Chan meaning. Zhenru Palace occupied the most auspicious position in all the harem, its grounds spacious and its decoration lavish — proof enough of how deeply Noble Consort Zhao was favored.

The year before Song Chang was born, a fire had suddenly broken out in the south wing of Zhenru Palace. Gongshu Wuyuan had been placed in charge of the renovation — but once the work was completed, he had suddenly vanished. A year later, Emperor Xuan’s first child was born, and Noble Consort Zhao, using the excuse of moving out, left Zhenru Palace, never to have anyone dwell there again.

By this point in Zhou Tan’s account, Qu You suddenly understood. She could hardly believe it, and yet what he was describing was exactly the sort of secret that history books could never have recorded.

“Is Chancellor Gu implying… that His Majesty is not truly the late Emperor’s own son?”

This was truly shocking to hear.

And yet, Emperor Xuan had had only that one child in his entire life. Near death, he’d had no choice but to consider naming his younger brother’s line as heir — he had likely been unable to father children at all. Noble Consort Zhao, using the renovation of Zhenru Palace as her excuse, had probably had some hidden chamber built within the hall in order to borrow another woman’s womb, then had everyone involved silenced — Gongshu Wuyuan included — sealing the secret away entirely within the grounds of Zhenru Palace.

“At the time… Zhao Yin’s sworn enemy, Chancellor Liu, repeatedly petitioned the throne, questioning the bloodline of the Noble Consort’s child. Before the matter could be resolved, the late Emperor died suddenly. Before his death, he summoned my teacher into the inner palace and left behind a posthumous edict — that is how my teacher came to know of this.”

Qu You’s teeth chattered — so this was what it felt like, to come into contact with a buried secret of history. “If something this hidden was known only to Master Wuyuan, and he’s already dead — how could anyone else have learned of it?”

“Exactly — my teacher, too, could never work out how His Majesty came to learn of it!”

Zhou Tan stared at the melted wax pooling at the base of the candle, his voice bitter. “The Noble Consort would never have let that man leave the palace alive, and moving the body out would have been even harder. It’s very likely he was buried beneath the very floor of the Zhenru Palace he’d renovated. The late Emperor instructed my teacher to guard Zhenru Palace’s secret forever, to never let His Majesty learn of it. And yet, in the end, His Majesty found out anyway…”

Upon learning that he might not actually be Emperor Xuan’s blood son, Song Chang’s first reaction had likely been sheer disbelief. He must have wanted desperately to dig up every inch of Zhenru Palace’s grounds in search of a body, and yet he couldn’t move rashly — and so, the construction of the Candlelight Tower had come from exactly this.

Gu Zhiyan had done everything in his power to stop him from tearing down Zhenru Palace to build the Candlelight Tower, only for Song Chang to suspect that Gu Zhiyan already knew the secret — or worse, that he might know even more, having perhaps been told additional details by Emperor Xuan on his deathbed.

Gu Zhiyan was the foremost scholar in the realm; the Emperor didn’t dare torture him directly, and so instead purged those under his tutelage as a means of coercion — though it’s just as likely Song Chang, already suspicious of Gu Zhiyan’s dominance at court, used this as an excuse to vent his own resentment.

No matter what Gu Zhiyan said, Song Chang, blind with fury, believed none of it. Facing one young scholar after another who stood stiff-necked, refusing to beg for mercy, the Emperor’s patience ran out entirely, and blood stained red the Jinliu River before the gates of the imperial prison.

Overcome by grief and rage, Gu Zhiyan fell ill, coughed blood before the court, surrendered all his authority, and retired to his hometown. In the end, the only person he managed to save was Zhou Tan alone.

Zhou Tan alone — his reputation ruined, forced to write, in utter humiliation, the “Ode to the Candlelight Tower” that would shame him for the rest of his life, made to swallow, without hesitation, the poison the Emperor gave him, planted within a Ministry of Justice overrun with cruel officials. When he was later attacked, he was forbidden even a physician’s care, told to survive or die on his own — and still expected to remain loyal.

“My teacher told me, there in that cell, that living is harder than dying. But the late Emperor’s edict still exists. We… still have unfinished business.”

Qu You could no longer hold back. She raised a hand to wipe away tears that had fallen without her noticing, and when she turned her head, she found herself already pulled into his arms. He was the one who needed comforting, and yet it was still he who stroked the crown of her head.

“Don’t cry. If you cry, I won’t be able to keep talking.”

Zhou Tan murmured softly, coaxing her — and yet she felt something warm and wet fall onto the side of her neck, mingling with the salt of her own tears.

Emperor Xuan had left the edict with Gu Zhiyan. Now that he had relinquished his power, the court still needed someone to carry it forward.

Even in a moment like this, Gu Zhiyan had still been teaching him to be an upright official.

Before the Candlelight Tower affair, Song Chang had, on the whole, been a diligent and fair ruler, capable of listening to a word or two from the remonstrance bureau. If he could go on being a moderate, unremarkable emperor, stability was still better than chaos and upheaval — and any turmoil within the palace would mean bloodshed.

If things could remain calm, this edict would probably have rotted away, forgotten, within Zhou Tan’s residence, and no one would ever have known of it, even after his death.

“No wonder…”

“No wonder what?”

“After the tower-fall case concluded, you were struck with the court rod by order of His Majesty. I went to meet you at the East Gate, and you turned back to look at the lit Candlelight Tower, and said to me…”

Qu You recalled the scene at the time, repeating it word for word. “You said — it was I who had held unrealistic hopes for him.”

Zhou Tan had spent all that time working numbly as the Emperor’s lapdog within the Ministry of Justice, never once thinking, even after being attacked, of taking out the edict. What had truly turned his heart against the throne was, most likely, the tower-fall case — the deaths of so many wrongfully killed women, horrifying to witness — and yet Song Chang had still allowed Fu Qingnian to suppress the punishment again and again. It wasn’t that he was incapable of stopping it. It was that he simply didn’t care.

“A matter of bloodline was beyond his control, but venting his anger on others, purging his court, tacitly allowing his ministers to fight amongst themselves while he stood by and watched — that is all the art of kingship.” Zhou Tan closed his eyes tightly, then opened them again. The candle had burned down to its very end. “But a ruler, above all else, must never turn a blind eye to the blood of his people. I studied since I was young, and was fortunate enough to have my teacher’s guidance, so that I might stand as an official with integrity…”

“For the people — not for the sovereign. Tan will never be a fool’s loyal servant.”

Author’s Note:

Successfully managed a double update on the first day √ I’m so proud of myself, patting myself on the back (shameless.jpg)

Writing period pieces is really tough going, TwT—

Thanks to the little angels who watered with nutrient solution: One Chubby Da x, Shuiyan 20 bottles; Le Wei 2 bottles; Little Cloud, Chengcheng, 243094691 bottle;

Thank you all so much for your support — I’ll keep working hard, www