Chapter 764: Forbidden City Journal (10)

The palace maids of Hilbang Hall were in no way pleased that yet another new personal maid was being assigned in.

After all, Her Ladyship who would one day become Crown Princess would, in the end, be putting down roots here in Hilbang Hall, and when that happened it was only natural that the number of personal maids would increase.

And by the strict laws of the palace, the rank of a personal maid sat far, far above that of a maid assigned to the upkeep of an empty building.

And if that personal maid belonged to the Crown Princess... what do you think her future would look like?

Therefore, it was only right and proper that such glory go to a maid who had belonged to Hilbang Hall from the start.

Because the maids of Hilbang Hall were not the sort who got lucky with a draw and were randomly assigned and “wow, what good fortune,” but women who had clawed their way into Hilbang Hall through Jaehwa or through high-level politicking.

All while nurturing the grand dream of serving the Crown Princess.

Gabiya might sulk, but there was nothing to be done.

Hadn’t she fluttered her eyelashes at Her Ladyship and won her place through fair, open competition?

Lady Deokseong was never a real opponent in this.

They weren’t even in the same weight class.

To begin with, she was the living legend of the palace-maid world who had risen from maid to the mistress of an entire palace.

But this time was different.

Who? Haeryu? The girl who was the same age as Princess Yeonsul and had spent long years as her childhood companion, but who had lately been treated like cold rice? And all anyone said was that she was a bit scary?

Hmph, how scary can she really be.

Besides, even if a princess’s personal maid had been beloved for a long time, in reality, in the not-so-distant future she’d just be sold off to some faraway land along with her mistress, so in the hierarchy she wasn’t rated that highly.

And so, as one of the original maids who had taken care of Hilbang Hall from the very beginning, they resolved to teach this new girl some proper manners.

You might say, come on, this is the Crown Princess’s personal maid we’re talking about—are you really going in with some half-baked, no-backup plan like that?

But if personal maids wanted to compete for favor, then of course there were a lot of situations where they in turn needed things from the building’s assigned maids.

Naturally factions formed, and they pushed and pulled each other forward, helping one another get their faces in front of Her Ladyship, and if luck was good, you might even ride that into becoming a personal maid yourself...

You could call it childish little palace politics, but these were women who had to live out their entire lives in the palace—and alone, at that.

Without this sort of upward-ambition goal, life became literally too hard to bear.

And so: new personal maid, Haeryu, makes her entrance!

“Big sisters! I’ll be in your care!”

“Ah? Y-yes, yes.”

The maids of Hilbang Hall glanced sideways at one another.

Hey, what the hell, weren’t you going to give her a sharp lesson about hierarchy?

Weren’t you the one saying you’d get her under your thumb from the start?

No, see, if we try to get her under our thumb we’re going to get beaten to death instead, that’s what.

Hey, Chohwa, Chohwa’s stepping forward! You can do it, Chohwa! Give her a real stinger of a—

“Please speak comfortably. You’re the building maids. Oh, do you perhaps need someone to show you around?”

Wrong. Fucking wrong. Look at that woman’s eyes, they’re pure demon-peach red.

They said she was a maid, so why does she look like some tiger in a skirt!

The fist was always closer than the law.

Highly developed muscle mass by nature gave off a pressure so intense that it was hard to even meet her eyes.

So what could they do? Time for a change of plans.

Now that things had come to this, they needed to stick close behind this reassuring Haeryu, who was so much more solid than that hag Gabiya, and at least secure some chances to get their faces seen by Her Ladyship...!

However.

The sight of Haeryu when she came back from “going to pay respects to Her Ladyship” was shocking.

She’d cried so much the skin around her eyes was puffed up and bulging, and the color was flushed a deep apple-red.

“Y-you, you okay? Did Her Ladyship scold you or something?”

“N-no, no. That’s not... it’s not like that.”

On top of that, her voice was completely hoarse and dry and caught in her throat. Anyone could tell this wasn’t just a little teary episode.

This was the state of someone who had wept and wept and wept again until every last bit of strength had drained out of her.

The maids of Hilbang Hall exchanged looks.

Maybe it’d be better to give up on being a personal maid?

If even someone built like a general like Haeryu came back with tears streaming down like that, just how strict and terrifying is this person?

What if she’s some villainess straight out of the Chronicles?

It was the moment when the infamy of Heavenly Flower Sword began to bloom.

*****

Qing was in shock.

Putting together Haeryu’s story, it meant that the palace maids from Heavenly-Maiden Temple had been using some kind of drug like an aphrodisiac to soothe the loneliness of the women of the palace.

And once she heard that, it suddenly didn’t feel like someone else’s story.

No wonder she hadn’t felt properly rested even after sleeping, and had been unsettled, like she’d had a wet dream all night.

Even awake all she could think about was boobs.

Even when she ran Cold-Heart Art, there had been a warm, rising heat under her skin that made it impossible to sit still—an antsy, fidgety morning.

Gabiya used a horny drug on me?

I trusted you!

Yes, you’re a suspicious woman from India!

But I’d been thinking of you as a way to get in contact with those Indian demon-women the Empress had cursed out so thoroughly, so I kept you around, but still!

I thought your karmic score was ordinary, so you weren’t an actual villain!

Hmm. On second thought...

Even if her karmic score hadn’t reached a full hundred and gotten to “beast pass score,” there was still plenty of room for her to do weird shit.

Thinking back, she’d been suspicious from the start.

Just scratching lightly at the surface—what kind of massage was that supposed to be?

And why, during a massage, was she constantly asking why Qing’s body felt so hot, whether this spot felt good, or maybe that spot, and telling her it was nothing to be ashamed of to let her voice out, so she should moan all she liked.

How could you do this to me! I trusted you!

All that time we spent together, those many long days—three days, three whole days of memories, what are you going to do about those!

...Okay, we did only not see each other for a few days, huh.

Right, sure, whatever.

So Gabiya’s betrayal wasn’t exactly a earth-shattering shock.

What was more shocking was—

This stuff actually works on me?

Wasn’t the Corpse-Blood Poison Immortal a god and wasn’t I invincible?

But thinking about it, it had been the same back when she’d gotten a taste for poppy.

Once she’d sucked on poppy, she’d gone all hazy like she was drunk, her body felt light, weightless, like she was floating, and she’d felt good, her mood lifting.

Mm, just thinking about it makes me crave poppy again...

The mechanism of the Corpse-Blood Poison Immortal was the side-effect of poison.

Poison might enter her body, but it did not act.

And “poison” here included every substance bad for the body: even if a shard of metal embedded itself in her flesh, there would be no infection, not even swelling.

Because the physical nature of the Corpse-Blood Poison Immortal’s body belonged not to the hard sciences but the liberal arts.

There was no equation that sorted poison from non-poison by some rigid definition.

By liberal-arts sensibility, if it’s harmful, it’s poison. That was all.

Now Qing could finally put it into clear order.

She had talked magic with Perfected Danryun, Kunlun Sect’s ritual-lover, and come to understand the nature of spells.

Then why did this kind of drug work on her—why, to put it bluntly, was she in heat, fuck, like this?

Because that would mean it wasn’t harmful.

Thinking of it that way put her in a gray area.

First of all, this aphrodisiac—mm, calling it an aphrodisiac made it sound weird—this drug might simply be something that was not harmful to the human body at all.

Or it might in fact be a harmful drug, but because the Corpse-Blood Poison Immortal constitution nullified poison anyway, the harmful effects had been stripped out, leaving only the effects that weren’t bad for the body.

This was a fairly important issue.

If they had used a harmful drug, leaving things as they were was not an option.

Not only had they dared to use poison on her, but from the sound of it, the Eastern Six Palaces were already a complete mess, so this was no small problem.

But if it wasn’t that?

Then they might have done it out of pure goodwill, right?

According to the teachings of the Classic of Love, the second chakra grew through sexual pleasure, and through that the seven chakras all reached maturity.

Even if one did not, through the completion of the Thousand-Petaled Crown Chakra, reach Nirvana, the growth of the chakras clarified the mind and granted the robust health of a long, disease-free life.

Hmm. Should I just ask her straight out, bluntly.

But these kinds of plots—these “any sorts of schemes? like this, of that genre”—were always the same: the answer you got when you asked was already decided.

I’m innocent. I did nothing wrong.

Whether she truly had done nothing wrong or not, she’d plead innocence, and if she had done wrong she’d deny it and plead innocence.

Then what to do...

—Heehee, My Lady. It’s heavenly maiden Gabiya. There was a long ceremony at Heavenly-Maiden Temple today, so I only just got back. May I come in?

“Mm. Come in for now.”

Gabiya slinked in, doing her best to look lethal, her hips swaying.

Qing’s brows creased slightly.

Above Gabiya’s head, the number: forty-four points.

Last night, when she’d come in to “light some incense,” Qing was sure it had been forty—mm, somewhere in the high forties.

It went down? Where’d she go rack up good karma.

So suddenly, and so dutifully?

“My Lady? Is there another bug?”

Gabiya tipped her head back to peer into empty air.

This was why Qing described Gabiya’s movements as acting lethal.

She tried so hard to act like a deadly seductress, but then these dopey little gestures would pop out, making it obvious she was forcing herself to act lethal any which way she could.

Qing’s heart softened a little at the sight.

Hmm. There’s the part where she goes off and builds good karma, and then there’s this clumsy way she acts lethal...

“Was there some kind of event at Heavenly-Maiden Temple? What kind of event was it?”

“Ah, well. Right! Are you perhaps interested? If My Lady would be so inclined—ah, right now you’re not in a state where you can leave the palace. After you’ve paid your respects to His Majesty, would you like to go there together?”

“Sure. Let’s go once. I am curious.”

“Oh my, how delightful. Our Heavenly-Maiden Temple is a shrine that serves Aditi, who is the highest heaven and the primal earth, who is the world itself, and also the mother of all the heavenly gods.”

When people got onto a topic they loved, their words sped up and their eyes sparkled and their face lit up with joy.

“And so... in the oldest scriptures, the Vedas... the priests of India may deny this, but we are the ones who truly inherit the orthodoxy...”

And thanks to that, Qing abruptly found herself forced to listen to religious doctrine from India that she had zero interest in.

So she went, haaam, and her mouth opened in an unplanned yawn. Qing hurriedly shut it.

Yawning straight into the face of someone speaking with such passion wasn’t polite.

But because of the aftermath of the yawn, her eyes watered a little.

“Ah! I got too excited as a heavenly maiden. I’m so sorry. Oh dear, and I haven’t even lit the incense for you yet. Heehee, don’t worry—this heavenly maiden will be watching over the incense so bugs never dare come near you. And if you’d care to lie down on the bed? It’s a little late, but I’ll be administering today’s perfumed-oil massage now.”

“Ah.”

Qing started to stop her, then hesitated.

On second thought, there was no guarantee that this incense was the same “aphrodisiac incense” Haeryu had mentioned.

And was my state this morning really at the level of, like, full-on heat?

It might just be that once a pair of boobs imprinted on a person’s brain, being unable to control oneself was perfectly normal.

She needed a clear certainty first that Gabiya had actually used a drug on her; whether it was harmful or not was something to worry about after that.

Her karmic score was annoyingly low—if it were up around eighty or ninety, Qing could be confident in her suspicions, but it wasn’t high to begin with, and then it had gone down on top of that.

In that case, the method of finding out was simple.

She just had to undergo it one more time today.

And so: this round of Indian massage.

Gabiya rubbed the perfumed oil between her palms, warming her hands thoroughly, then ran those hands all over Qing’s body.

At first she spread it gently, and it felt vaguely like something you might call a massage, pressing here and there.

Then, sure enough, she switched to those upright fingertips, skimming lightly across Qing’s skin.

Mm. Mmm.

Something. Something something.

“Haa...”

“Heehee, My Lady. It feels good, doesn’t it? Now, just let all your strength go.”

This, um, it did feel, a bit...

What to call it.

A ticklish, tingling feeling.

Something that made her breath start to come short on its own...

“Heehee, My Lady. It’s all right. Just naturally... ah, so this is where you’re weak?”

“UAAGH!”

“Kyaaa!”

Qing jolted upright.

Wow, fuck. This is horny drug shit, all right!

“This is not okay!”

“M-My Lady? What is the matter...”

“Haeryu! Now!”

—My Laaady!! I’m coming!!

With a force close to a full-on CRASH, a muscular woman came pouring into the room.

Wearing only a single thin skirt pulled up as high as her chest and, since it was already late, a sleep-robe for a top, her sculpted, chiseled shoulders and forearms were bare.

“M-My Lady? What—”

“Haeryu, grab her!”

“Yes, My Lady!”

Gabiya, arrested on the spot.

Charge: unlicensed treatment using illegal drugs.

She had directly experienced the drug’s effects.

Horny drug confirmed.

The next step was to figure out whether this was a harmful drug or not, wasn’t it?

How? Simple.

Qing picked up the jade bottle holding the perfumed oil.

“Now that I think about it, it’d be wrong for me to be the only one who enjoys something this good. I’m thinking I should learn this six-thousand-year-old massage that leads to skin care, body conditioning, and long, disease-free life.”

“T-that, that’s something this heavenly maiden could teach you...”

“The best way to learn is hands-on practice, you know? And I’d been thinking Gabiya was working way too hard, too. So, want to lie down?”

“M-My Lady...”

“What, you don’t want to? Is it that you don’t want this touching your body because it’s some weird drug?”

“Ghk.”

Gabiya sucked in a huge breath.

“H-h-h-how can you call it a w-weird drug! That’s perfumed oil, simply perfumed oil crafted with true Indian secret arts!”

“So then it’s not a weird drug, right?”

“Of course! Absolutely!”

“Then there’s no problem, is there? Go on. Lie down. Haeryu, would you help Gabiya lie down nice and comfortably?”

“Kyaaak, I can lie down myse—”

Haeryu pinned Gabiya’s arms and pressed her firmly down on the bed.

Qing swung one leg over and sat astride Gabiya’s thighs, loosened the knots, yanked open her jacket, and, hehehe, with a vicious little grin, lifted the jade bottle.

“Okay, I’m really going to put this on you. It’s okay if I do, right?”

“W-wait just a moment.”

“Why? Is it not okay? Because it’s a weird drug?”

“It’s too precious a medicine to be wasted on someone like me...”

“Oh, come on, between us? Don’t be shy.”

Qing slowly tilted the jade bottle.

In response, Gabiya looked up at her with eyes on the verge of tears.

And Qing poured, GLOOP GLOOP, filling her cupped palm with the stuff like she was pouring wine.

At that, Gabiya cried out in panic.

“My Lady! Not that much—!”

“Why? What happens if I use a lot?”

“That, that is...”

“Okay, I’m putting it on now.”

Qing lifted her hand slowly, as if to flip her palm over and smear it.

Even so, all Gabiya did was squeeze her eyes shut.

Was that her way of saying, go ahead and put it on if you’re going to?

Qing’s smile was truly cruel and grim.

Well then. Did she think Qing wouldn’t go through with it?