“Sister, why are you and Yang Chonggu standing here motionless?”
Someone called from behind them. It was Wang Yun, who had been waiting at the foot of the mountain and came up to look for them when they hadn’t returned for a long time.
Seeing the empty birdcage on the ground, he asked, “Why would someone leave something like this here?”
Huang Zixia looked at Wang Ruo, and he finally sensed something was wrong, quickly asking, “Sister, what’s the matter?”
“Bro… brother.” Wang Ruo’s voice trembled as she looked up at him, tears of fear in her eyes.
Wang Yun frowned slightly and asked, “What happened?”
“Just now… there was a strange man, he, he said…” Wang Ruo’s voice shook chaotically, becoming incoherent.
Huang Zixia took over, saying, “Just before you came up, a man appeared here with a birdcage. He performed some trick making the bird vanish, and said the Princess Consort might also vanish like the caged bird.”
“A man?” Wang Yun looked around in bewilderment. “We cleared the temple earlier, and since you entered, I’ve been below with the soldiers from the prince’s mansion. There shouldn’t have been anyone here – how could a man have gotten in?”
“That person must still be in Xianyou Temple. Brother, if you search, you’ll find him,” Wang Ruo said tremulously.
Wang Yun nodded, seeing how frightened she was, and consoled her: “It was just some mysterious person speaking nonsense – why are you taking it so seriously? Don’t worry, how could a daughter of the Langya Wang family, the future Princess Consort of Prince Kui, simply vanish? Don’t believe such absurd talk.”
“Mm.” She nodded tearfully, then timidly said, “Perhaps… perhaps I’m overthinking things. As the wedding approaches, I feel constantly uneasy, I…”
Wang Yun nodded understandingly, smiling: “I know, I’ve heard that women often have such thoughts before marriage. Though I don’t quite understand it, perhaps it’s anxiety about how life will change afterward.”
Wang Ruo nodded slightly, gently biting her lower lip.
“Silly sister, with someone as good as Prince Kui, are you worried you won’t be happy in the future?” Wang Yun said, patting her shoulder. “Come on, don’t believe such baseless talk.”
Wang Ruo followed Wang Yun down the steps toward the Great Buddha Hall on the mountainside. Huang Zixia followed a step behind, hearing her soft voice: “Chonggu.”
“Yes,” she responded.
“Do you also think that… lately I seem… very anxious and nervous?” she asked uneasily.
Huang Zixia thought for a moment and said, “The Princess Consort cares too much about His Highness, that’s why you’re increasingly nervous. If you didn’t care, why would you be like this?”
Wang Ruo pursed her lips, looking at her with teary eyes, and said softly, “Perhaps.”
The monks’ evening chanting continued, the evening bells and Sanskrit sutras surrounding them. Hearing the Buddhist verses, Huang Zixia suddenly remembered what her grandmother used to recite –
“All meetings of love must end, impermanence makes nothing last. From love comes worry, from love comes fear.”
She recited it silently in her heart, turning to look at Wang Ruo’s downcast face, wondering if she was really like this because of her love for Li Shubai.
Wang Yun was a very meticulous person. After consulting with the mansion guard Xu Zhiwei, he immediately divided the soldiers into two groups – one to search all the halls, meditation rooms, and corners of the temple, the other to investigate the temple monks. However, at the time of the incident, everyone had been in evening prayers – all the monks were present, gathered in the main hall, with no one possibly able to appear in the Burning Lamp Buddha Hall behind.
By nightfall, the search parties had all reported back. They had divided the temple into fifty sections, with teams of ten conducting thorough searches – even if a louse had been hiding in the temple, it would have been found in such a thorough combing – but nothing. No trace of anyone was found. Besides Huang Zixia and Su Qi who had accompanied Wang Ruo, there were only the Wang family’s maids and servants, no one else.
The only discovery worth mentioning was a rusty arrowhead found placed before the Buddha in the Burning Lamp Hall.
On the arrowhead were four faintly discernible characters: “Prince Kui of Tang.”
When Huang Zixia returned to Prince Kui’s mansion, Li Shubai was dining alone in the flower hall. Seeing her arrive, he gestured for the maids to leave and pointed to a chair beside him.
Huang Zixia understood his meaning and pulled up the chair to sit down. Li Shubai handed her a pair of ivory chopsticks and pushed a small bowl toward her.
She looked around, seeing only flower shadows moving beyond the wall and no one else, before picking up a golden milk pastry and adding some spiced raw fish to her bowl.
Li Shubai asked casually, “I heard someone performed quite an impressive magic trick in front of you during the incense offering today?”
Everyone said Prince Kui Li Shubai was the best-informed, and since his guards had escorted them, he naturally knew everything.
So Huang Zixia wasn’t surprised and simply said, “Yes, it was impressive, but I found the Princess Consort’s reaction more interesting.”
“Future Princess Consort.” Li Shubai corrected the title of Princess Consort, adding two words in front.
Huang Zixia said nonchalantly: “With the Emperor himself arranging the marriage, and her being the Empress’s cousin, could there be any variables?”
“Whatever the reason, presenting false birth charts is deceiving the Emperor – there can only be eternal damnation for such an act,” Li Shubai said, then changed the subject: “Was she worried about her identity being exposed?”
“It seems more than that. She seems to be hiding some unspeakable secret from her past. That suddenly appearing man hinted at it, and she was too frightened to hide her reaction.”
“Did you notice how that man appeared and disappeared?”
“I couldn’t tell at all. And how he got past the prince’s mansion guards to enter, then vanished – I couldn’t find any clues,” Huang Zixia bit her ivory chopsticks, frowning. “After he disappeared, Wang Yun led a group searching the temple for a long time but found no trace. It was as if he turned into a bird and flew away.”
Li Shubai asked languidly: “Have you read the Huangfu Records?”
Huang Zixia shook her head: “What’s that?”
“It’s a book that records an extraordinary skill called the ‘Jiaxing Rope Technique.’ During Emperor Xuanzong’s Kaiyuan era, there was a decree for a great feast, and Jiaxing County competed with the supervisory office in acrobatics. The supervisory office looked among prisoners for someone with extraordinary skills, and one prisoner said he knew rope techniques. So the jailer took him to an open space and gave him a hundred-foot coil of rope. He took it, threw the end toward the sky, and the rope shot straight up as if someone was pulling it from above. As he let it out, the rope kept climbing until its end couldn’t be seen. Then he climbed up the rope and disappeared into the sky, escaping just like that.”
“No matter how you look at it, no matter how you imagine it…” Huang Zixia pondered for a while, then said, “It’s impossible.”
“Why impossible? Aren’t there countless inexplicable things in this world?” Li Shubai’s lips curved slightly. “For instance, they say my future Princess Consort will vanish before everyone’s eyes.”
“It seems you’re also concerned about what that person said?”
“I believe there’s no smoke without fire.” Li Shubai leaned back in his chair, watching the slowly swaying flower shadows on the window screen, and suddenly asked, “Huang Zixia, when you were young in Chang’an, what was your favorite place?”
“Huh?” Huang Zixia was caught off guard, with a mouthful of golden milk pastry. She stared at Li Shubai, then mumbled: “Probably… the Western Market.”
“Mm, the Western Market. I liked it best there when I was young too,” he said slowly, thoughtfully. “Who wouldn’t like it there? The busiest place in the capital, perhaps in all the world.”
Chang’an’s Western Market.
Persian jewels, Indian spices, Fergana horses, tea from Jiangnan, brocades from Shu, furs from the northern frontier…
All kinds of shops bustled with business – fish shops, brush shops, wine houses, teahouses, and the like, all noisy with activity. Merchants and passersby shoulder to shoulder, street food vendors wandering about, flower-selling girls in colorful dresses, slender foreign dancing girls in the wine houses – it all formed an incredibly lively scene.
This was Chang’an’s Western Market, where even the night curfew couldn’t stop the bustle. Since the Kaiyuan and Tianbao eras, it had grown increasingly prosperous, bringing the surrounding Chongren Ward along with it – filled with music and revelry night after night, never quiet.
Late spring sunlight fell on the sophora and elm trees lining the streets, their newly sprouted leaves as green as jade. Li Shubai and Huang Zixia walked one after another in the shade. Since Li Shubai was in plain clothes, Huang Zixia had also changed out of her eunuch’s attire into men’s clothing, looking like an underdeveloped youth.
They wandered freely through the Western Market, browsing the shops’ wares. Unfortunately, Li Shubai, raised in luxury since childhood, looked down on the crude craftsmanship of market goods, while Huang Zixia had no money at all – Li Shubai hadn’t yet given her any salary – so she could only look but not buy anything.
Only at a shop selling koi did Li Shubai buy a small bag of fish food and look at their uniquely styled porcelain fish tanks, seeming to ponder something.
Unable to buy anything herself, Huang Zixia naturally encouraged others: “They’re quite pretty, and the small fish would have more room to move in a porcelain tank.”
He picked up a fish tank, looked at it, then put it back, saying: “Having grown used to swimming freely in the large one, they wouldn’t adapt to a small one.”
Huang Zixia mumbled: “Can’t it be comfortable for just one day?”
“It’s easy to go from frugal to luxurious, but hard to go from luxurious to frugal. Since they’ll end up in that state anyway, why let them be too happy in the first place?”
“…” Huang Zixia was truly speechless before this man who applied such grand principles to small fish.
It was still early, and the acrobats hadn’t come out yet. Huang Zixia asked passersby and learned that the performers usually came out after noon when the streets were busiest.
Seeing it was nearly noon, Li Shubai finally took pity on Huang Zixia and led her into a roadside restaurant. They sat in a private room and ordered some local dishes they hadn’t seen in the prince’s mansion.
The restaurant was quite elegant, though somewhat noisy with many diners. Just as Li Shubai was starting to frown, a wooden clapper sounded, and the restaurant grew quiet.
A storyteller was in the shop. He had a drum, playing, and singing, first performing a local tune, then setting aside his drumsticks, clearing his throat, and saying: “Everyone, this old fellow will tell you today about strange tales from the nine provinces and eight directions.”
As soon as he spoke, Huang Zixia recognized him – he was the storyteller from the roadside pavilion outside Chang’an, where a group had sheltered from rain together, and he had told the story of her family’s case. Telling local tales should be perfect for him.
Sure enough, he began: “In Chang’an city, in the Great Bright Palace, the Emperor sits at the center. Outside the palace are various princes, among them Prince Kui, named Li Zi, Li Shubai.”
Someone in the audience called out: “I love stories about Prince Kui! Tell us about when Prince Kui led six military governors to battle Pang Xun!”
“Don’t rush, honored guest. Let me first tell you about current events – this matter is closely related to when Prince Kui shot and killed Pang Xun among ten thousand troops!”
The outer room was bustling with noise. Li Shubai sat in the screened private room, seemingly deaf to it all, eating slowly, his gaze on the passersby outside, his expression calm.
Huang Zixia rested her chin in her hand, listening to the sounds outside – “Ah, do you all know that Prince Kui has been very busy lately? I hear he has a new trouble.”
“Prince Kui just solved the Four Directions case and is about to welcome his Princess Consort – he’s riding high on success. What trouble could he have?” It was the same guest as before, playing along.
“Do you know about yesterday afternoon, when Prince Kui’s future Princess Consort, that young lady from the Langya Wang family, went to offer incense at Xianyou Temple?”