Chapter 11: The Pact of Plenty and Peril
"Should such harvests bless our realms," the Emperor breathed, the weight of dynasties trembling in his cadence, "how many wasteland ghosts might we resurrect into farmers?"
"They *shall*." Ye Ling's vow resonated like bronze temple chimes. In his former life, yams and potatoes had yielded tenfold—but here, three thousand *jin* would rewrite history's arithmetic.
"Delirium!" Ye Changfeng's accusation hissed like a venomous serpent. "No soil under heaven births such obscene abundance! Let peasant tongues wag of this madness, Father, and they'll brand the Vermilion Throne itself a jester's stage!"
"Time arbitrates truth." Ye Ling motioned to Lu Yuan, now swathed in astral sigils. "Master Lu—your observatory becomes tomorrow's forge." From silk sleeves emerged vellum scrolls—diagrams of millstones gnashing grain, screw presses wringing oil, and looms weaving air into brocade. Machinery to transmute sweat into empire.
With Lu Yuan commanding the observatory's coffers and craftsmen, miracles would bloom faster than weeds.
"Crown-funded manufactories near the new croplands", Ye Ling proclaimed, "shall employ rootless souls. Coins clinking in hollow bellies forge stronger than swords."
The court crackled—whispers of "heresy" entwined with "genius".
"Indentured thralldom!" Chen Huai roared, veins bulging like enraged serpents. "Another ploy to milk the wretched masses!"
"Prefer they lick dust from famine's palm?" Ye Ling's riposte hung like a headsman's blade.
The Emperor's sceptre struck jade with finality. "Ling'er claims the trade seal. Three moons to fill Lingnan's emptied coffers. Let the observatory midwife these crop-demons."
Three million taels—a sum to cripple kings. Without the Chen clan's shadowed vaults, it reeked of suicide.
"Sixth Brother stumbles through merchantcraft's labyrinth!" Ye Changfeng's concern dripped poisoned honey. "Let wiser hands steer before all drown in mockery!"
"Let failure taste the whip!" The Minister of Justice bared yellowed fangs. "Lash law's purity upon his princely hide!"
"You'd condemn seeds unborn?" Ye Ling's smile frosted the marble floors. "Since when does justice haunt dreams?"
"None here swallow your phantoms!" the minister sneered.
"Then bind me to fate's ledger." Ye Ling's voice cleaved the silence. "Imperial Father—I stake my crown, name, and skin. Three moons. Three million. Fall short, strip me to beggar's rags."
He stood—a sun disc eclipsing doubt. Emperor Shang felt ancient shackles crumble. Perhaps this whelp truly carried the Mandate's scent.
For beneath Ye Ling's sleeves lay maps of salt veins whispering through Tianqu's wastes and wine-silver flowing like clandestine canals beneath the Chen clan's rotting foundations.
The Germination of Shadows
The covenant with the Chen clan hung like a poisoned pendant around Ye Ling's neck—a millstone disguised as merit. Yet among princes vying for the Vermilion Throne, what currency outweighed the privilege of governance? To bear the Emperor's burdens was to carve one's name upon the pillars of legacy.
In the marble hall, Chen loyalists wore the grins of jackals scenting bloodied prey, their certainty a miasma thickening the air. Emperor Shang's options had withered to a single thread of faith. To relinquish trade rights to the Chens would be to surrender his dynasty's arteries to leeches.
Chen Huai and Ye Changfeng stewed in rancid triumph. Their labyrinthine scheme had crumbled—the river-monster gambit now burnished Ye Ling's legend while costing them the Celestial Archivist. Yet their adversary had finally erred: pledging threefold harvests in ninety dawns? Heresy demanding a pyre.
"Let the madman till his funeral plot," Chen Huai hissed, adjusting his jade belt of office. "When autumn's third moon waxes, we'll banquet on his ashes."
"Honoured patriarch," Ye Changfeng bowed to the Minister of Justice, filial piety dripping like an asp's venom, "adorn the nuptial chambers. Soon your daughter shall reign as my consort, and this theatre concludes." The ghost of Fu Yuanyuan—stolen by Ye Ling's defiance—twisted his smile. *That theft shall be repaid in screams etched upon his bones.
***
Within Prince Qian's walled sanctuary, Ye Ling became a spectre haunting rows of earthen mounds.
"My lord", Lü Wu murmured, placing chrysanthemum tea beside sprout charts smudged with soil, "even jade cracks under unrelenting hands." Her loveliness, now a disregarded moon eclipsed by his obsession.
Beneath waxed tarps, emerald tendrils curled like sleeping dragons—potato and sweet potato slips smuggled from Tianqu's salt-scarred badlands. Ye Ling crouched, fingertips grazing leaves as reverently as a scribe tracing sacred texts. These fragile greens held more might than legions: agriculture as insurrection, hunger as dynasty's fulcrum.
Above, crows wheeled like vassal lords eyeing carrion. Below, roots whispered conspiracies to the patient earth.
The Alchemy of Soil and Sovereignty
To cultivate bounteous potatoes and sweet potatoes demanded more than selecting robust sprouts—it required dominion over the soil's hidden rhythms. Ye Ling laboured as both agronomist and revolutionary, compressing seasons through sleepless vigils.
"Three million taels could be wrung from trade routes," Ye Ling confessed, dabbing sweat with Lü Wu's silk handkerchief, "but this wager transcends silver. It's about hollow bellies and the alchemy of abundance." In truth, the outrageous yield pledge served as masterful theatre—a luminous distraction to keep Chen's hyenas fixated on farmland while his true commercial armada sailed unchallenged.
Lü Wu embraced her mercantile coronation with lethal poise. The once-trembling concubine now orchestrated spice caravans and naval fleets, her phoenix hairpin—plundered from Zhao Linger's humiliated coiffure—glinting like a conqueror's standard.
"My lord's trust anchors me," she declared to the Chu delegation, jade bangles chiming with each gesture. Beneath her vermilion lips pulsed dread: one miscalculation could unravel their dynasty.
In the Golden Crab Tavern's gilded chamber, Zhao Miao'er dissected her rival through sl*t-pupiled scrutiny. The dancer-turned-spy had demanded an audience, her curiosity a stiletto probing Lü Wu's armour.
"A bedchamber flower masquerading as a merchant prince?" Miao'er's laugh tinkled like broken porcelain. "How quaint."
"This flower", Lü Wu countered, "commands seven spice roads and four naval treaties. Shall we negotiate saffron quotas or continue this pantomime?"
***
Ye Ling's walled Eden reverberated with curses:
"Defiant sprouts! Were you born to torment me?"
Clods of earth flew as he uprooted another runt tuber. His ancestral farming wisdom clashed violently with this world's soil scripture—pH levels and mycorrhizal networks as alien as astral charts.
A memory surfaced—his survival mentor's rasp: *"Modern crops are spoiled nobles. Ancient strains? Battle-hardened legionnaires. Let the soil sing its ballads, boy."
Ye Ling stilled. Palming the earth, he deciphered its coded whispers—salt-poisoned from Tianqu's mines, starved of nitrates, drunk on alkaline excess...
His barked laughter startled nesting crows.
"Rebellion demands revolution!"
Madness followed: crushed oyster shells for calcium, rotted fish entrails for nitrogen, lunar-charged limestone dust. The sprouts responded with Dionysian fervour, leaves unfurling like emerald war banners.
***
In gilded chambers reeking of sandalwood excess, Ye Changfeng's bridal theatrics unfolded. Each pearl sewn into Fu Xianxian's gown represented a peasant family's ruin—a jest the groom cherished.
"Post-nuptials", the Minister of Justice whispered, "my hounds will dismantle Prince Qian's trade web. Irrevocably."
Ye Changfeng's smile mirrored the poison ring on his finger. "Let the fool grub in dirt. When his crops wither and mines collapse…"
The snare was primed.
Yet in a walled garden far from perfumed conspiracies, green tendrils coiled like sleeping dragons—a harvest destined to shatter thrones.
Gilded Deals and Silent Blades
The preordained terms unfurled with the inexorable precision of a master craftsman's mechanism—fifty thousand jars of spiced crabs, thirty thousand amphorae of mellowed wine, and ten thousand measures of glimmering salt—a torrential deluge of goods transmuting into a sum surpassing a million silver taels. Lü Wu preserved her regal composure, yet the celestial figures set her pulse fluttering like a hare bolting from shadowed hunters. Commerce, she reflected, was warfare waged not with blades but with the whispered arithmetic of abacus beads.
Zhao Miao'er's gaze clung to her like a shroud. "Is His Highness unwell?" The inquiry slipped forth, a treasonous murmur laden with implication.
"The affairs of governance tolerate no vacancy," Lü Wu deflected, though the dancer's tension coiled about her throat like a spectral noose, stifling her breath.
***
Triumph curdled at the moonlit threshold of the estate.
"Consort Xu!" Rong Mama emerged from the gloom like an apparition, her hands quivering like wind-tossed mourning silk. "Lady Fu has sought deliverance by the silken noose!"
The courtyard tableau crystallized: Fu Yuanyuan's alabaster neck bore the lurid kiss of hemp, while Ye Ling's voice sliced the air with glacial precision.
"Should death's allure beckon," he declared, "let the executioner's rope oblige."
Lü Wu faltered. This obsidian-eyed spectre bore no kinship to the lord who once teased her with mirthful glances.
"She draws breath anew, Your Grace—" Rong Mama faltered, her words unravelling at the edges.
"You." Ye Ling's stare transfixed the prostrate maid, Hongluan, as a pinned moth. "Confess your betrayal, lest I carve verity from your sinews."
Beneath skeletal peony boughs, guards disinterred a sandalwood coffer. Within lay a phoenix hairpin, its surface shimmering with the venom dubbed "widow's tears", and a scroll of sonnets sealed by Ye Changfeng's dragon crest.
"A nuptial tribute from your paramour," Ye Ling spat at Fu Yuanyuan's pallid form, "to seal your silence beyond the bridal chamber."
Lü Wu felt her phoenix pin weigh like molten lead upon her brow. In this gilded theatre of deceit, even love's epistles flowed with gallows ink.
Royal Wrath and Scarlet Stratagems
"I… I…"
Hongluan's gaze darted between Fu Yuanyuan's pallid form and Ye Ling's thunderous visage, her frame quivering like an aspen in a tempest.
"His Highness extends the mercy you scarcely deserve," Rong Mama hissed, silver needles glinting like viper fangs. "Do you think the web of your machinations lies unseen?"
The maid scrambled toward Fu Yuanyuan's lacquered vanity, fingers clawing at its hidden compartment. A cascade of parchment spilt forth—illicit epistles from Ye Changfeng, chronicling whispered conspiracies from the concubine's first day in Ye Ling's household.
Beneath veneers of courtly concern festered darker designs: directives to pilfer jade seals, sabotage ledgers, and ultimately destroy the tender rice shoots in Ye Ling's experimental fields. The failed agricultural sabotage had precipitated Fu Yuanyuan's desperate gambit with the silken cord after her confinement.
"Audacious vermin," Ye Ling murmured, tracing characters pledging imperial consort status. His glare burned into Fu Yuanyuan's waxen features. "Compassion becomes a monarch's fatal flaw."
"Your Grace", Lü Wu interposed, melody woven through her plea, "despair bends even noble minds. Let Prince Xu's venom dissipate in the wind, unworthy to taint your august spirit."
To her, the celestial axis itself revolved around Ye Ling's well-being.
"This insult demands repayment in scarlet ink!" Ye Ling's thumb brushed the vermilion seal on the letters, inspiration kindling in his obsidian eyes.
"Caution tempers vengeance—" Lü Wu's fingers brushed his embroidered sleeve.
"Caution?" He whirled, silk whipping like battle standards. "This day calls for dragon's fire, not scholar's ink!"
Within heartbeats, Liu Ren's carriage charged toward the crimson gates. The celestial calendar marked Ye Changfeng's ritual purification before wedding rites—sacred hours when princes knelt alone in the Hall of Ancestral Wisdom, receiving imperial edicts beyond even consorts' hearing.
"Prince Qian! The sanctity—"
"By decree of heaven's mandate—"
Eunuchs' protests died mid-air as Ye Ling's palm strikes dropped them like felled saplings.
The imperial study's sandalwood doors exploded inward. Ye Ling's knuckles collided with royal bone in a crack echoing through ancestral tablets.
"Madman! You dare—?"
Ye Changfeng's counterblows dissolved into flailing as constellations bloomed behind his eyes. The crown prince became a crumpled tapestry of silk and bruises, his guards conspicuously absent from this most private of rituals.
"Shield the Son of Heaven!"
Trembling eunuchs formed human ramparts before Emperor Shang, yet froze beneath the sovereign's raised hand. The monarch observed, transfixed, as his sickly scion transformed into a storm incarnate.
"Imperial Father… mercy…"
The plaintive cry hung unanswered. Ye Ling's boot found its mark with precision—a brutal arc toward princely ribs that drew forth a scream to wake entombed emperors.
"Enough!" The Dragon Throne's roar finally stilled the tempest.
Imperial Mantles and Hidden Verdicts
Emperor Shang severed the onslaught only when bloodshed seemed imminent.
Ye Ling discarded his brother like spoiled silk, the fluid brutality of his motions arresting the monarch's breath. When had this frail fourth son transformed into a tempest capable of besting the crown prince, renowned swordsman and strategist, through raw force?
"Dare you lift your fist against your blood elder in the Sanctum of Ancestors?" Ye Changfeng licked copper from his lips, malice glinting through swollen eyes. "This barbaric desecration seals your doom! Not all the Taoist immortals could salvage your fate now."
The crown prince adjusted his ripped dragon robes, savouring sweet anticipation beneath the masquerade of pain. A beating meant nothing against the coming triumph—the throne now stood beyond Ye Ling's polluted reach.
"Holy Father", he croaked, summoning counterfeit tremors, "this lunatic's attack defies all decency! I beg celestial justice!"
"Father!" Ye Ling thrust the scrolls forward like sacred sutras. "This adder coiled around Virtuous Consort Fu—commanding her to wither my grain stores meant to feed starving provinces!"
Ye Changfeng's triumph curdled as vermilion seals glared from parchment. That witless concubine had preserved damning evidence!
"Forged filth!" he screeched. "The sl*t conspired with this b*st*rd to frame me!"
Emperor Shang's fingers indented the scroll's silk. "The accused names Fu Yuanyuan; her name breathes accusation. Do serpents always eat their tails?"
"I—the letter's artifice—" Ye Changfeng's tongue tangled in its poison. "Merely logic—among his harlots—"
"Silence." The imperial voice cracked like ice over the Yellow River. "You've bartered ancestral honour for gutter schemes."
The chamber froze. In the suspended breath between heartbeats, dragon-robed wrath hovered near patricide.
"Vacate our presence," the Son of Heaven decreed, each word a jade execution token.
Ye Changfeng gaped—was this expulsion the prelude to disinheritance or paradoxical protection?
"August Father!" Ye Ling pressed, the image of wounded virtue. "Shall the empire watch justice wither?"
"**Depart!**" The roar scattered eunuchs like autumn leaves.
Understanding flooded Ye Changfeng—this theatrical wrath concealed imperial mercy. He scrambled crabwise across polished floors, phoenix crown askew, his heir's dignity pooling like spilled ink beneath the throne.
The hall echoed with the dissonance of jade tablets trembling in their niches, ancestral spirits murmuring disapproval through centuries of dust.
Jade Mandates and Hidden Retributions
The scrolls' revelations, if pursued to their logical end, would have cost Ye Changfeng more than titles—they'd have annihilated his impending nuptial alliance with Fu Xianxian, a political cataclysm the prince evaded through frantic retreat.
Clutching his battered dignity, Ye Changfeng limped from the Hall of Celestial Accord, his bloodied gaze etching vows of retribution into the palace's vermilion pillars.
***
Within the chrysanthemum-scented inner sanctum, Emperor Shang traced the damning brushstrokes. "Post-nuptial confinement—three moons' solitude," he decreed, the weight of compromise furrowing his imperial brow. "This... resolution must taste of ashes to you."
The unspoken truth thickened the incense-heavy air: the Chen clan's shadow still loomed too vast for true justice.
"Should the Son of Heaven recognize injustice," Ye Ling replied, his smile a masterwork of filial grace, "then no injury remains unsoothed."
"You wield restraint as a sage wields wisdom." The emperor's hand lingered on his son's shoulder, a monarch's apology in the gesture. "The celestial scales shall rebalance."
"The crown prince's bridal procession promises... spectacle," Ye Ling mused, envisioning purple bruises peeking through ceremonial powder. Though the Chen hydra remained unvanquished, this humiliation would fester silently—Ye Changfeng's shame too acute for public grievance, while the throne misread Ye Ling's strategy as noble sacrifice.
"And your violation of the Ancestral Hall's sanctity?" The Emperor's reproof carried theatrical warmth.
"What son of heaven's blood wouldn't duel dragons for his woman's honour?" Ye Ling's mock indignation drew rumbling laughter, artfully obscuring relief. Consort Chen's tireless campaigns for mercantile privileges had been derailed by the diversion.
"Bring forth the Ninefold Dragon Sceptre," the Emperor commanded abruptly.
The jade token materialized—a palm-sized cosmos where nine celestial serpents writhed around the imperial seal, its touch said to freeze executioners' blades mid-swing.
"August Father, this sacred heirloom—"
"Let it quell today's embers," the monarch interposed, paternal remorse crystallizing in nephrite.
Ye Ling bowed, the sceptre's glacial kiss seeping into his veins like mountain snowmelt. Behind lowered lashes, strategies bloomed—this symbol of trust would cut deeper than any assassin's dagger in coming gambits.
Celestial Jade and Viperine Plots
Were it not emblazoned with the imperial crest, Ye Ling might have believed the sceptre was carved from glacial essence by winter spirits. The nephrite's frigid luminescence and sinuous dragon reliefs proclaimed it a treasure beyond mortal appraisal, though its divine connotations rendered it magnificently illiquid.
Yet this day's stratagem had borne fruits surpassing gold: Ye Changfeng's public disgrace, the crown prince's muzzled outrage, and this transcendent emblem of celestial favour. Ye Ling's spirit soared as moonlight cascaded through the sceptre's crystalline arteries, each ripple a symphony of triumph.
***
"This tripartite prophecy of harvests—" Emperor Shang's query cleaved through his contemplation.
"Under heaven's beneficence, the trials show nine-tenths auspice," Ye Ling parried, veiling his near-absolute certainty. "Truth unveils itself with patient seasons, as grain swells in silence."
The deflection flowed like imperial ink—no verdant shoot had yet breached soil to validate his agrarian revelation. Let empirical truth flower in its hour. For now, Solanum tuberosum could bide; tonight's conquest transcended earthly ambitions.
"The Mandate rests upon your shoulders," the Emperor proclaimed, observing his son's departure with suspiciously glimmering eyes. This once-feeble prince had morphed into the realm's final bastion—an inadvertent titan bearing the yoke of shattering Chen dominance.
***
Through labyrinthine corridors, a disfigured countenance approached Consort Chen's pavilion.
"What blasphemy?!" The consort's cry dispersed caged orioles, her phoenix coronet quivering like storm-lashed chrysanthemums.
"Imperial Mother!" Ye Changfeng's lament emerged mangled through fractured teeth. "The mongrel struck me before the Dragon Throne itself!"
As the chronicle unfolded, Consort Chen's jewelled talons eviscerated silk. "The missives... rest in the Emperor's grasp?"
"Yet Father exiled rather than condemned!" The prince clutched his ravaged loins, each tremor exquisite torment. "His clemency confirms enduring favour!"
"Clemency?" The consort's mirth frosted the air like hoarfrost. "That doddering relic still quakes before our clan's spectre. But these parchments..." Her gaze acquired ophidian sharpness. "That concubine's breath must be stilled—eternally."
Ye Changfeng convulsed, spectral pains igniting beneath her poisoned cadence. "And Ye Ling? His effrontery—"
"Shall harvest a hundredfold anguish." Her jade bangle shattered against moonstone tiles. "The fields he cherishes? The harlot he shields? All tinder for immolation."
In the consort's silvered glass, twin visages grinned—one a grotesque carnival of bruises, the other honed to a dagger's edge. Beyond latticed windows, autumn's first leaves spiralled downward, scarlet as freshly drawn regicide.
Frostbitten Loins and Phoenix Rage
"Your bridal procession approaches like plum blossoms gracing winter's end," Consort Chen murmured, her benevolence as thin as rice paper. That cursed night summoned every trauma physician from the Hall of Heavenly Remedies, their needles and salves deployed to erase the prince's disfigurement before nuptial rites.
Yet as the hour of the rat deepened, Ye Changfeng's bellows tore through the palace's brocade tranquillity. "Clumsy charlatans! You mince my flesh like a butcher's offal!"
The consort paced vermilion colonnades, her nails etching bloody hieroglyphs into jade-inlaid pillars. Superficial wounds demanded no such protracted theatrics. A viper of foreboding coiled beneath her diaphragm.
When the physicians emerged at last, their pallor mirrored funeral silks.
"The facial lesions..." The chief healer prostrated himself, lips brushing frost-chilled tiles. "Shall fade ere the next full moon. But His Highness's... nether injuries..."
"Cease obfuscations!"
"The trauma inflicted upon his... generative vessels..." The physician quivered like storm-struck bamboo. "May render progeny... a celestial improbability."
The consort's knees buckled. Her firstborn—scarcely beyond his majority—emasculated? A prince denied virility could never ascend the throne, though dragons themselves anointed him.
"That gutter-spawned cur!" Her hiss carried arsenic bitterness. "I should've fed him his mother's poisoned rice cakes when I had the chance!"
"Can your arts reverse this blight?" Her tone could've honed blades.
"Through... divine intercession..." The physician disassembled, knowing the prince's loins would never quicken life. "The entire College shall—"
"Empty the imperial coffers if need be." Her phoenix diadem trembled. "But tell him it's flesh wounds—three moons' rest."
Behind pearlescent screens, Ye Changfeng mewled into silk bedding, ignorant that his lineage's extinction had been decreed. Consort Chen glared at the moon's silver leer, envisioning Ye Ling's entrails festooning palace gates.
Dawn's first light gilded courtyard frost into diamond dust, its fleeting brilliance mocking the eternal winter now settling in her womb.
Silken Masks and Venomed Festivities
The physician pressed his brow to the frigid jade floor until crimson bloomed beneath the skin. "This unworthy servant shall guard this truth beyond mortality's veil," he pledged, the metallic tang of dread sharp on his tongue.
Consort Chen's smile glittered like a blade hovering above a swaddled heir. "Let court whispers speak only of bruises and protocol."
***
Days later, within Qian Manor's cloistered gardens:
"Consort Lü," steward Liu Ren fretted, wringing hands roughened by decades of service, "ancestral edicts decree His Highness must grace the crown prince's nuptials..."
Lü Wu contemplated the moonlit study where candle shadows danced behind rice-paper screens. "Let His Grace's devotion to the realm remain undisturbed. Should propriety demand blood, mine alone shall stain the censer."
The unspoken truth draped heavier than ceremonial dragon robes—the Emperor's withheld nuptial honours and the Chen faction's serpentine silence reeked of venom steeping beneath courtly formalities.
"Where lingers Consort Fu?" Lü Wu enquired, her voice a lotus petal adrift on still waters as carriages stood waiting.
Rong Mama bent nearly double. "Her Ladyship's humours flow contrary..."
When Fu Yuanyuan emerged at last, unshed tears of acrid recognition pooled beneath lowered lashes. Lü Wu stood transfigured in peony-embroidered brocade, the phoenix pin at her temple blazing with celestial mandate—no vestige remained of the pleasure quarter's songbird, while Fu Yuanyuan's erstwhile "jewel of literati" now hung about her neck like a fool's golden bell.
***
Beneath vermilion ramparts, the bridal pageant unfurled its poisoned splendour. Fu Xianxian blushed beneath her phoenix-encrusted headdress and scarlet ceremonial silks, while Ye Changfeng's lingering disfigurement festered beneath gilded powder.
Emperor Shang absented himself after cursory rites, his vacancy resonating louder than war gongs. The crown prince withdrew soon after, citing sudden indisposition, abandoning Consort Chen to host the revels with a rictus of frost-edged courtesy.
Minister Fu, the bride's sire, floated through the banquet drunk on visions of future regency. Across the hall, Fu Hai—Fu Yuanyuan's progenitor—clutched his wine cup like a dagger's hilt, bitterness fermenting behind a scholar's smile. This glory should have crowned his lineage! This throne-adjacent prestige was pilfered by that accursed Ye Ling!
As pipa notes entwined with the clatter of jade utensils, the palace walls seemed to perspire vermilion lacquer, their once-proud hues now bleeding the cloying stench of ambition curdling into regret.
Vermilion Strikes and Princely Defiance
Amidst the banquet's gilded cacophony, Fu Yuanyuan's glance crossed her father's. Fu Hai's countenance twisted with viperous revulsion before he averted his gaze, his silent repudiation keener than any blade's edge.
"Approach, child." Consort Chen's dulcet summons severed the pipa's melody. All ocular orbs tracked her gem-laden gesture toward Fu Yuanyuan.
"Your Benevolence's solicitude humbles this undeserving soul," Fu Yuanyuan intoned, her voice sepulchral as a burial urn, retracting frigid digits from the consort's clutch.
"Aristocratic lineage remains impervious to mongrel shadows," Consort Chen proclaimed, her grin serrated. The unvoiced barb crystallized—Lü Wu's vulgar provenance, though unnamed, toxified every syllabic breath.
Lü Wu stood petrified, her phoenix diadem abruptly weighted as a millstone. Whispers undulated through the throng like venomous serpents scenting vulnerability.
"The Consort's magnificence eclipses even Yangzhou's legendary peonies," Consort Chen crooned, invoking the city synonymous with groomed courtesans. Lü Wu's phalanges blanched against her peony-stitched sleeve.
The strike's reverberation echoed like ritual bronze, arresting pipa strings mid-vibration. Cui Mama's palm imprinted a crimson nebula upon Lü Wu's cheek.
"Vermin require frequent reminders of their station," the matron hissed, flexing bejewelled digits.
Consort Chen sipped osmanthus infusion, her timbre cloying with feigned clemency. "Tut-tut, let not peasant gracelessness taint our revelries."
"**My** consort's luminosity demands no rabble's endorsement."
Ye Ling tempested into the hall like an earth-cloaked monsoon, his boots trailing consecrated loam from experimental paddies. All petrified—the prince resembled a field hand mid-harvest, yet brandished regal wrath like an ancestral sword.
"Nephew!" Consort Chen's ocular slits narrowed to stiletto wounds. "You grace us with... agrarian punctiliousness."
Hisses resurrected—"Desecrates ceremonial sanctity!" "Churl's mire in the Hall of Equilibrium!"
Deaf to the cacophony, Ye Ling interposed before Lü Wu like a rampart. "When imperial granaries burst, ritual silks pale beside soil-stained labour." His thumb grazed Lü Wu's marred visage, the caress both penance and proclamation.
Banquet flames guttered as if sensing tectonic rupture—a prince's mud-caked soles trampling millennia of decorum, his consort's blooming contusion transformed into a heraldic standard against gilded duplicity.
Celestial Jade and Rebellious Storms
A murmuration of disdain rippled through the hall, courtiers shrinking back as if from a spectre, their silken sleeves recoiling from Ye Ling's mud-caked figure.
"Delayed by agrarian colloquies with the Celestial Sovereign," Ye Ling drawled, leaning indolently against a vermilion pillar, "who found my experimental terraces more enlightening than this gilded farce."
"The tripartite yield revelation?" Minister Fang's gasp fractured the tension. Whispers erupted like shattering porcelain—Consort Chen's poise fissured, her phoenix diadem trembling like blossoms in a tempest.
The disclosure laid bare the Emperor's abrupt departure—and heralded tectonic shifts in imperial grace.
Ye Ling's gaze honed to obsidian edges as he pierced Cui Mama. "**Your** digits dared profane my consort?"
The matron's joints dissolved into mercury. "Sh-she breached decorum—"
"Indubitably." Ye Ling's finger-snap conjured Liu Ren from the shadows, propelling the quivering crone before Lü Wu.
"Ye Ling!" Consort Chen ascended, her voice clanging like fractured ceremonial gongs. "This is **my** principal stewardess!"
"Requite," Ye Ling ordained Lü Wu, dismissing the consort's wrath. "Decuple measure."
"Lèse-majesté!" Consort Chen's ululation summoned armoured thunder through colonnades. "He defiles the Sanctum with steel!"
Her triumph curdled as Ye Ling raised the Ninefold Dragon Sceptre—its nephrite serpents luminescing with plundered moonlight.
"Kowtow!"
The imperial guard petrified mid-assault, crashing prone as though divine shackles yanked their spines. Consort Chen's vermilion cosmetics crazed across alabaster cheeks, her machinations dissolving like ink in a monsoon deluge.
Within the petrified silence, Lü Wu's palm intersected Cui Mama's cheek—a thunderclap echoing through ancestral halls.
Imperial Mandate and Phoenix's Retribution
The characters **"By Royal Presence"** blazed vermilion upon the jade sceptre, its gilded dragons writhing like contemptuous deities. The Grand Judicator of the Supreme Court blanched—had not whispers proclaimed Prince Xu the celestial favourite? Yet here stood Ye Ling, wielding the Ninefold Dragon Sceptre with sovereign nonchalance.
**"Prostrate!"** Ye Ling's decree sundered the stagnant air. The assembly collapsed into reverence—save Consort Chen, her phoenix-embroidered nails clawing into damask cushions.
**"Does the consort still fancy this prince a rebel?"** Ye Ling's voice dripped with bored scorn.
**"Whence came this sceptre?"** Consort Chen's carmine lips peeled like cracked lacquer.
**"From the Son of Heaven's grasp—unless the Consort insinuates larceny?"** The hall gasped as one, to allege imperial theft, courted decapitation.
As Consort Chen knelt with poisoned grace, Ye Ling turned to Lü Wu. **"Retribution".
Cui Mama spat bloody defiance. **"Strike me, and you flay the Cui Clan's honour!"
The slap detonated like midsummer thunder. Lü Wu's gemmed rings etched rubicund rivers across the crone's cheek—a seismic crack stilling both pipa chords and courtiers' breaths.
**"Execute her by lingering degrees."** Ye Ling tossed the sceptre to his guard captain.
**"You overreach?!"** Consort Chen's scream reverberated through ancestral corridors. **"She shares my ceremonial blood! The Cui lineage flows—"**
**"—through seditious channels,"** Ye Ling overrode. **"This day I excise rot from the dynastic oak."
As dragon-scaled guards hauled the howling matron away, Consort Chen's mask of composure crumbled. **"The Cui lineage shall sup on your vitals for this sacrilege!"
Ye Ling advanced, his whisper a silken blade. **"Let them sup. Each affront to my phoenix…"** His thumb caressed Lü Wu's blooming bruise. **"...kindles pyres beneath their ancestral tablets."
The Ninefold Sceptre pulsed with ominous radiance, its nephrite serpents coiling in silent acclamation.
Crimson Reckonings and Fallen Phoenixes
The Dragon Guard stood as unyielding as jade monoliths, their allegiance sworn solely to Ye Ling. Consort Chen's threats dissipated like mist before the sun of imperial mandate—her lacquered nails clawed futilely at the void as Cui Mama's shrieks crescendoed into death's silent hymn.
"Harm my phoenix," Ye Ling proclaimed, his gaze a honed sabre sweeping the prostrate assembly, "and you summon the headsman's axe."
Lü Wu stood transfigured—no longer the songbird of pleasure lanes, but a consort clad in her lord's unbreakable devotion. Whispers of wonder and jealousy rippled through the gathered women, their silken sleeves trembling like aspen leaves before a tempest.
Fu Yuanyuan's rueful smile mirrored fractured celadon. Had their roles been reversed, would this maelstrom of protection have shielded her? She diminished into obscurity, a pawn discarded from the imperial chessboard.
"Mercy... *cough*... Your Benevolence...!"
The matron's death rattle echoed through ancestral corridors. Consort Chen's vermilion-stained visage contorted into a grotesque masque. "This outrage shall poison your lineage's roots!"
Ye Ling's laughter rang like unsheathed ceremonial steel. "Appeal to the throne freely, Aunt. Let the realm hear how you struck the Son of Heaven's chosen daughter!"
When the Dragon Guard cast Cui Mama's broken form before the consort's dais, the corpse's clouded eyes stared skyward in eternal indictment.
"A memento for your collection," Ye Ling murmured. "Entomb your hound with honours—or let temple curs feast. The choice seasons your disgrace."
Consort Chen's collapse unfolded with theatrical precision—a phoenix's orchestrated descent, jade hairpins scattering like fallen constellations.
"Fetch the imperial physicians!" Her handmaidens fluttered like startled sparrows.
Ye Ling reclined in the vacated seat of honour, Lü Wu's quivering hand enveloped in his. "Let the mountebanks compound their draughts. Certain afflictions…" He raised a goblet to the corpse-laden hall. "...require purgation by flame."
The nuptial pipa players plucked dissonant chords, their melodies drowned beneath the patter of fleeing courtiers' slippers. Fu Yuanyuan retreated into the shadows, her father's contempt now reflected in every averted visage.
As the midnight bell tolled, the Ninefold Sceptre's dragons seemed to coil in approbation—their nephrite spirals constricting around a dynasty reborn through sanguine defiance.
Crimson Oaths and Phoenix's Venom
Fu Yuanyuan withdrew to her seat, her gaze lingering on Ye Ling and Lü Wu with a bitterness that seeped into her very marrow. To be shielded with such fervour by one's lord—what celestial benediction! Her nails carved lunar crescents into her palms, the sting a paltry distraction from the virulent envy gnawing her spirit.
***
Within the Hall of Eternal Blossoms, Ye Changfeng stormed through vermilion corridors, his wedding robes a grotesque parody of nuptial splendour. "Worthless vermin!" he thundered at cowering eunuchs. "Should my mother falter, your ancestral tablets shall feed temple flames!"
The crown prince's wrath transformed him into a rabid beast, his fury as indiscriminate as winter hail. Servants pressed their brows to frigid jade tiles, their trembling forms reduced to insignificance.
"Her Grace is afflicted by fire surging to the heart," the imperial physician quavered. "Medicinal decoctions and stillness shall restore balance."
Matron Lu, her voice frayed like moth-eaten silk, added: "The Ninefold Sceptre... it petrified the guards. We could but witness Cui Mama's..." Her words dissolved into silence.
"That relic belongs in a beggar's ditch!" Ye Changfeng shattered a celadon urn. "Since when does that gutter rat command imperial treasures? Speak!"
The silence that followed was damning—a testament to the Chen faction's crumbling dominion.
***
Consort Chen's awakening brought no solace. Each cough rattled like bones in a funerary urn. "Where... is the Emperor?"
"Weary from governance," Ye Changfeng lied, his tongue smooth as polished onyx. Both knew the truth: Shang Huang's absence was imperial censure made manifest.
The consort's talon-like fingers clawed at brocaded sheets. "I should have drowned that b*st*rd with his wh*r* mother! And that brothel-cursed viper Lü Wu! And Fu Yuanyuan—that mewling failure—"
Her tirade dissolved into viscous rasps, eyes blazing with visions of sanguine retribution. Ye Changfeng clasped her skeletal hand, his rage hardening into diamond resolve.
***
Meanwhile, Ye Ling presided over the wedding feast as the conqueror, not a guest. "Let music soar! Let dancers ignite the night!" he commanded, chalice raised to hollow revelry. Lü Wu's laughter shimmered like wind chimes, her trauma veiled beneath an armour of devotion.
Pipa strings twanged dissonant harmonies, drowned by the patter of fleeing courtiers. Fu Yuanyuan lingered in shadows, her father's disdain now mirrored in every averted gaze.
As the midnight bell tolled, the Ninefold Sceptre's dragons coiled in silent acclaim—their nephrite spirals constricting around a dynasty reborn through fire and defiance.
To be continuous…