Chapter 756: Forbidden City Journal (2)

There were six palaces each to the east and west of the Emperor’s quarters: the Eastern Six Palaces and the Western Six Palaces.

These were where the women of the imperial house resided.

But the women of the imperial house were not only concubines.

Dowager empresses, crown princesses, and princesses all lived within those twelve palaces and their environs as well.

Once someone secured a place in one of those palaces, it was rare for them ever to be moved out.

So they weren’t arranged in neat rows in strict rank order, and it wasn’t even possible to do that.

Which meant that where someone lived was not, in itself, a clear yardstick of their rank in the palace’s factional warfare.

Still, there were rough tiers.

For instance, in the Western Six Palaces, Seunggeon Palace was regarded as the foremost of the western palaces.

Seunggeon Palace had traditionally been the residence of the most favored consort, but in the current reign, it was being used as a princess’s quarters.

And attached to Seunggeon Palace was the Left Rear Attendant Room.

The chambers to the left and right behind the main hall were called the rear attendant rooms, and they were usually used by the maids who waited upon the mistress of the palace.

The one on the left was the Left Rear Attendant Room, and inside it, thick, uncanny smoke coiled.

A maid opened the door and carefully stepped inside—

“Ugh, my lady, what... what is all this smoke?”

The maid flinched and waved her hands in front of her face.

In spite of the dense smoke, there was a woman sitting in the room, legs folded in a full lotus.

She had dusky skin and sharply defined features, with a clear brow and straight nose, and the outer corners of her eyes slanted down just enough to give her a languid air.

They were typical features of a woman from India.

The woman sitting in lotus smiled with a somehow innocent expression and answered.

“Oh dear, I suppose the incense sticks weren’t fully dried. What can we do? We can’t air it out. We’ll just have to drink it. You’re just in time. Let’s clear the smoke together.”

If you couldn’t ventilate a room, you could simply drink the smoke.

It was a truly radical method of ventilation.

But the maid seemed used to it.

After double-checking that the door was tightly sealed and no air was leaking anywhere, she sat right down beside her mistress and took her hand.

Then—SSSIP, haa. SSSSIP, haa. SSSSSIP, haa.

All that could be heard was the sound of them diligently drawing in the smoke.

It was the sort of scene that would make you think, How are they ever going to clear a roomful of smoke like that?

But in short order, the smoke in the room began to stir, gathering into thin threads and slipping into the two women’s nostrils.

It was like watching the smoke from burning incense in reverse, time running backwards as the wisps rolled back down instead of dispersing.

Bit by bit, the murk drained from the air in the room.

Its air purification performance was impressive.

The mistress, who had been steadily drinking in smoke, quietly opened her eyes.

“[So, what sort of person is this new lady?]”

Fluent Sanskrit—Indian tongue.

“[Oh, don’t even start. Her energy—her prana—is so strong that the colors leaking from her eyes can only mean all seven chakras are open.]”

“[They call her a transcendent master of the martial world, don’t they? I believe their term was ‘great circulation’? But the vital energy of the Central Plains is nothing more than an imitation of our yoga. It can’t compare to the spiritual refinement of the chakras.]”

Incidentally, yoga was also “yoga” in the tongue of the Central Plains, written with characters that simply sounded out the foreign word.

“[So, did the new lady show interest in the Classic of Love?]”

“[Yes, her eyes were sparkling.]”

At that, the mistress’s lips curled slowly upward.

“[Well, of course. A lady’s power comes directly from favor. Why would she turn down a means to seize a man? In that case, you must explain it to her very... kindly. In de-tail.]”

“[Yes, my lady.]”

The maid answered with a broad, foolish grin—then suddenly slapped her own thigh.

“[Ah, that’s right! No wonder I kept thinking the new lady looked familiar—it’s Princess Yeonsul’s portrait! She’s the spitting image of that painting!]”

A keen eye.

The mistress tilted her head.

“[Is that so? I have heard the rumors that the lady is a peerless beauty. If she resembles the portrait to that degree, then, well. No wonder the Crown Prince gave her his heart.]”

But that was as far as it went.

When a woman had her portrait painted, naturally the artist made her even lovelier than in real life.

And the more that happened, the more all those paintings tended to end up resembling one another: a standard beauty-picture imbued with the ideals of the Central Plains.

Thinking of it that way, if the new lady was the spitting image of Princess Yeonsul’s portrait, then the rumors calling her Number One Beauty Under Heaven were hardly empty talk.

*****

In front of Dan’gyeong Hall of the Southern Three Halls.

On the broad courtyard to the north, officials in court robes had taken up positions here and there.

Even though each man, standing in line beside and behind the next, claimed a fair stretch of space, the forecourt of the Southern Three Halls was wide enough to swallow them.

There they all knelt in unison and, on the count of one-two-three, shouted in time.

“““Your Highness, this must not be!!!”””

“““How can you give the bridal chamber to a woman whose character you do not know!!!”””

“““We beg Your Highness to reconsider!!!”””

In other words: why in the world had he brought Heavenly Flower Sword into Hilbang Hall?

They were blood-boiling memorials demanding he retract that order at once and throw her out.

Why were they kneeling under the blazing sun after a muggy summer rain, the air so humid it choked the breath, telling other people what they could and could not do with their love lives?

Of course, as elders, they did have grounds for grave concern.

If you cut out the Crown Prince’s circumstances and the Son of Heaven’s pressure, the picture was an alarming one.

He had seen Heavenly Flower Sword for the first time—a peerless beauty hailed as the most likely candidate of their era for Number One Beauty Under Heaven—and at the mere sight of her face, he had effectively handed her the bridal chamber.

To anyone looking on, it would appear that the Crown Prince had been bewitched by a pretty face and was throwing a tantrum.

So as the petitions drifted in from outside the door, the Crown Prince’s expression curdled.

It truly, thoroughly, curdled.

For a Crown Prince generally known to be mild and without sharp edges, his face right now was so dark that it would make you shout, So you’ve been hiding your true colors all this time!

If Qing had seen him like this, she might have felt a little baffled.

But isn’t the very idea of future power that the Crown Prince can’t even bring in his own partner and put her in his own main room?

If he wanted, couldn’t he gather the beauties of the entire world into one place and—what was the term—Eastern-style, he could turn his palace into a pleasure-palace of meat and wine and romp himself senseless.

Of course he could not.

(There had been emperors who did exactly that, but in most of those cases, the country collapsed.)

This was not unique to the Central Plains.

To the ministers of every dynasty under the heavens, the king’s marriage was a major matter not to be taken lightly.

Because the king’s women were themselves power.

They became part of the king’s base of support, the so-called royalist faction that propped up the throne.

In other words, the more women the Son of Heaven had, and the more women the Crown Prince had, the greater that power grew.

Naturally, every minister’s greatest dream was to join their family with the imperial house.

Just as modern people muttered, “I wish I’d win the lottery,” ministers of the Central Plains harbored the quiet wish, “I wish my daughter could enter the imperial palace.”

The Son of Heaven, at his age, was no longer particularly interested in feminine charms, and he already had the proper complement of First Wives and Lesser Wives. There was no room to add more.

But the Crown Prince?

It would be best if his partner were my daughter.

But if not, then she absolutely must not be the daughter of a house with too great a power base.

If she had to be from such a powerful clan, then it had to be their faction, not the rival’s.

Such was the massive battle that had long been brewing over the question of who would become the Crown Prince’s consort.

Into that tinderbox had suddenly rolled a stranger—a woman from the martial world, no less—who had, out of nowhere, caught the Crown Prince’s eye and immediately seized the bridal chamber, Hilbang Hall.

Of course the entire spectrum of factions had no choice but to pour out together, regardless of their alignments, and cry out their total, united opposition.

“Sss.”

The Crown Prince’s insides were burning.

He didn’t want this, either.

What brother in this world would want to take a wife who looked exactly like his little sister?

He was only doing it because he’d been told to.

Seriously.

The Crown Prince had worries of his own.

Those eyes that looked like you could smack her in the back of the head and they’d roll right out—

That overall disagreeable, stubborn look, like she was pure pigheadedness, born to be contrary and never listen.

The way her activity level was like a wild boar’s, and yet her complexion was so bloodless that she looked sickly pale, on the verge of collapse.

It was all so painfully familiar.

Of course, he did not believe the outlandish claim that Heavenly Flower Sword was truly Yeonsul, as his mother had said.

He remembered his sister when she’d been at her sickest.

The state so wretched he could hardly bear to look: not a single patch of skin without some festering sore, everything split and cracked and rotting.

Even where there weren’t ulcers, tumors bulged in countless lumps like toadskin, weeping pus.

Even if she had recovered in the best possible way, how could her face possibly have become that flawless?

Even now, the Yeonsul in the palace carried such grotesque scars that she kept her face hidden.

Surviving that monstrous disease—the one even the gods had shaken their heads at and fled—was itself a miracle.

Cruel as it was to say, escaping with “merely” a ravaged face, while preserving her life, was a stroke of heavenly fortune.

And as for the insistence that the Yeonsul in the palace was fake because her behavior was not like “Yeonsul’s behavior”—

Then what, was Yeonsul meant to spend her whole life performing “Yeonsul behavior”?

In childhood, she had simply been thoughtless.

Yeonsul was just very, very thoughtless—so thoughtless that the word itself wasn’t enough and she’d been called a total menace, and that was all.

It just attracted more frowns because she’d been a child whose body was as big as an ox’s.

If she’d been small and slight like an ordinary girl, no one would have coined the phrase “acting like Yeonsul.”

Well, all right, she probably still would have been bouncing off the walls.

The Yeonsul of today had simply grown up.

All the more so for having almost died.

He sometimes missed the old days—not in the sense of missing her, but in the sense that those days had been fun in their own chaotic way.

But Yeonsul had long since passed the age for marriage.

She could not remain a child forever.

The things Heavenly Flower Sword did now were similar to “Yeonsul behavior.”

But the Son of Heaven had always said that the princess acted no differently from some lowly wild woman.

Which meant that lowly wild women behaved like Yeonsul, and if Heavenly Flower Sword acted like a lowly wild woman, of course her manner would resemble Yeonsul’s thoughtless days...

The part that troubled the Crown Prince was not his mother’s mad assertion that Heavenly Flower Sword was the real Yeonsul and the Yeonsul in the palace was fake.

He worried about when, and where, his mother had seen Heavenly Flower Sword and mistaken her for her daughter.

It takes two hands to clap.

His mother would not have looked at Heavenly Flower Sword and instantly decided she was Yeonsul.

Heavenly Flower Sword must have done something to suit that misconception.

She must have played into it in some way.

Without question, there had to be some sly scheme here, in which Heavenly Flower Sword had taken advantage of his mother’s delusion to pursue some great gain...

His mother was the mother of the nation.

Of course Heavenly Flower Sword would seek the favor of the mother of the realm and—ah.

A thought flashed across the Crown Prince’s mind.

Hadn’t his mother spent about a month at the priestess order’s temple, offering rites?

And afterward, hadn’t she granted all the land in that area?

It had been said that since the priestess order had overseen the rites for her, it was only natural to gift them the surrounding lands, but that she had given them far too much.

BANG!

The Crown Prince slammed his hand down on the low table.

Of course.

That wicked woman had surely deceived his mother, whose mind had not yet fully recovered, and tricked her.

There was no way his mother could have fallen into madness.

She was still perfectly lucid, even now.

The Crown Prince’s eyes took on a ferocious cast.

He would tear off this woman’s mask and expose her true nature.

And he would see to it that she paid in full for daring to toy with the imperial house.