Chapter 40 Wei Qi wants Princess Jiangning to become like him...
On the second day of the second month of the twenty-third year of Xuanyuan's reign, the day of the plowing festival, Crown Prince Xie Yu of Dacheng was assassinated.
Martial law was declared in Yongdu, and no bells or drums were to be rung.
Every spring, the emperor would personally visit the Shennong Temple in the southeast of the imperial city and perform the "personal plowing" ceremony at the temple's agricultural altar, praying for favorable weather and a bountiful harvest in the coming year.
Emperor Xuanyuan was not fully recovered, so Crown Prince Xie Yu took over the plowing duties.
In addition to the Eastern Palace Guards, several Imperial Guards were also present as escorts. Emperor Xuanyuan assigned Lin Zhong, the commander of the Imperial Guards, to Xie Yu.
Shennong Temple is not far on foot; you can set off early in the morning and turn back around late afternoon.
At 2:45 PM, Rong Jun, the Imperial Guard of the Eastern Palace, appeared at the Donghua Gate covered in blood.
"Prince Qi and Lin Zhong, the commander of the Imperial Guards, are plotting a rebellion!"
***
The former residence of Emperor Xuanyuan, though located in a bustling city, now feels desolate and bleak.
The courtyard was desolate, and crows cried mournfully.
Since Emperor Xuanyuan ascended the throne, his former residence had been closed for a long time, and apart from a few old servants guarding the house, there was no one else in the huge mansion.
Xie Wenjun awoke in the darkness once again.
She has lost count of how many times she has fainted and then woken up.
My vision remained completely black; I couldn't see my own hand in front of my face. Even the slightest movement of my neck caused intense pain.
"The princess has woken up."
His chin was gripped by a withered hand, and a moment later, a bean-sized object was stuffed into his mouth.
The medicine had a strong, bitter taste on my tongue.
Wei Qi stood not far from her, forced her to swallow the pill, and then bowed and greeted her as usual.
The surrounding area was all stone walls, and it was very spacious.
When she first woke up here, she could still smell the stale, decaying odor, but now she can't smell anything at all.
The excruciating pain of my tendons and veins snapping returned, and my clothes were soaked with sweat, as if I had been drenched in water.
cold!
It's so cold!
Despite the excruciating pain, Xie Wenjun's forehead and back were once again covered in cold sweat.
Soon her consciousness will fade again.
While she was still relatively lucid, she asked the question: "Where is this? What are your intentions?"
“The incinerator.” Wei Qi’s lips were somewhat pale as he answered her first question.
Fearing she might not recognize it, he explained what the furnace was.
"The former Prince Hui's residence, this is underground."
Xie Wenjun curled up, hugging herself into a small ball.
She felt her veins spasming, and her bones seemed to be cracking and shattering, starting from her finger bones and continuing down to her foot bones.
Every time I wake up, I have to go through that excruciating pain all over again.
If there were a knife next to her, she thought she would pick it up without hesitation and plunge it into her heart.
After news of Xie Yu's murder reached the Eastern Palace, she ran all the way to Chongzheng Hall. Like a gust of wind, her figure swiftly swept across the palace walls.
Wei Qi chased after her.
She dared not stop for a moment.
She rushed to Chongzheng Hall, only to find it filled with armored guards. Still catching her breath, she asked, "Where is my brother?"
After Rong Jun finished reporting the details of the Crown Prince's assassination while kneeling, he kowtowed and said, "His Highness the Crown Prince's body... is still kept at Shennong Temple."
The word "parking" is a bit softer.
In reality, after Xie Yu was stabbed in the heart from behind by Lin Zhong, his body collapsed hastily on the farm altar, and no one has yet come to collect it.
Emperor Xuanyuan slipped some things into her hands.
"Wei Qi, Rong Jun, escort the princess to Linxia."
He gave her some instructions, it seemed, to convey a message to the Prince of Shen...
A message to King Shen... What?
She started to lose her senses again.
"What exactly... do you want to do?" Xie Wenjun asked weakly.
What is he going to do? What are his intentions?
He walked over and slowly knelt beside Xie Wenjun. "This servant would like to tell the princess a story."
More than 20 years ago, there was a natural disaster: a severe drought.
The people were destitute, and corpses of the starving lay everywhere.
People ate anything to survive. Eventually, they ate all the grain and livestock in their homes, all the dry grass by the roadside, and all the bark on the trees... The clay from the temple became the last thing they could eat to stave off hunger.
Hungry people, driven by their most primal survival instincts, began to kill each other.
The land of China was submerged, and people resorted to cannibalism.
What was the royal family doing at that time?
The Rebellion of the Five Kings was a power struggle for the throne.
The imperial court ordered all men over the age of ten to be conscripted into the army, leaving many families with only the elderly, the sick, the disabled, orphans, and widows.
"Does the princess know that a five-year-old child can feed a family for two or three days? In the end, the meat will rot."
At this time, someone brought food.
But there's no such thing as a free lunch. The price of getting the food was children; a bag of food for a child.
It's more accurate to call it a burlap sack than a bag.
How much grain is in a sack? Maybe three pounds, maybe five pounds.
It's been too long, and Wei Qi can't remember how much grain those people gave him in exchange.
But he clearly remembered his mother sobbing uncontrollably as she took the burlap sack, pushing him into the hands of the soldiers distributing the grain, and saying to him, "Son, come with the soldiers, live on..."
He was eight years old at the time.
Live on.
How extravagant!
The old residence had a secret passage leading directly to three miles outside the city, and he was secretly brought here through the passage.
It's underground, there's no sunlight.
The only ventilation opening was above the incinerator, but later the ground was paved with bricks and stones to completely block it up.
There were many children here who had been brought in in exchange for a bag of grain. Without exception, they all had lifeless eyes, sunken cheeks, and were extremely thin. They were about the same age, the youngest being four or five years old and the oldest being only seven or eight. He was one of the older children in the group.
They stared blankly at the surrounding fortified walls.
They dared not speak, for if they did, they would be dragged out and beaten.
It was very dark around, with only a few torches illuminating the area, making it feel like being inside the mouth of a giant monster, about to be swallowed up at any moment.
People kept being brought in, and within a few days the room started to feel a bit crowded.
A group of soldiers in uniform came and roughly forced each of them to swallow a pill...
After taking the medicine, my internal organs felt like they were being burned by flames, my limbs spasmed, and the pain became increasingly intense... The pain gradually subsided after about an incense stick's time, and then it started all over again.
This cycle repeats endlessly, making life worse than death.
For countless days and nights afterward, they were forced to practice a kind of evil Eastern Yin magic.
This practice is extremely evil.
A person's skin and internal organs will slowly shrink, and the person will look like they have been dried out, wrinkled and shrunken together.
Every day, someone dies on the spot because they can't make it.
Children who have experienced famine have a natural fear of hunger. In order to avoid starvation, everyone is trained to be like obedient puppets.
Fewer and fewer people survived, from hundreds to dozens.
Then, new children were brought in.
Wave after wave of living people came in, and pile after pile of corpses were burned. The smell here was often a mixture of burnt flesh and rotting flesh.
When only Wei Qi remained of the original group of children, the first batch of secret guards was finally trained.
After achieving their goal, their bodies stop developing, they age much faster than ordinary people, and their lifespan is much shorter. However, their joints are exceptionally agile, they are small in stature, and they are extremely good at concealment, tracking, and assassination.
A single, fatal blow; appearing and disappearing without a trace.
"What are your intentions, servant?" Wei Qi prepared to answer her second question.
After thinking for a long time and remaining silent for a long time, he still did not answer.
What is his intention?
"The debts of the father must be repaid by the son."
He was tired of this world where human life was as worthless as grass.
He hated the emperor who sat high on the dragon throne, and he also feared him.
Therefore, he lay low.
They lurked in the shadows, lurking in every corner of the palace, waiting for an opportunity to ambush and kill those princes and phoenixes.
In those years, the princes and princesses in the palace either fell off the artificial hill, drowned, or contracted diseases, and died one after another in accidents.
No one ever suspected him.
What's the point of killing them all? So he stopped.
He wanted to wait a little longer; he wanted these members of the Xie royal family to kill each other for the sake of imperial power.
He grabbed Xie Wenjun's wrist and opened her palm.
Sweating profusely.
Wei Qi placed his palm on top, enduring the pain, and transferred the energy within his body to the affected area.
Xie Wenjun screamed in agony as her palms felt like they were being ripped apart by a knife.
"This inhuman, ghostly state is a gift from him; now his children will taste this excruciating, agonizing pain!"
The corpses of several old servants lay across the courtyard of the former residence.
All things returned to silence, leaving only the sound of the wind.
Someone will be here soon. He abducted Xie Wenjun from the Eastern Palace Guards, and Rong Jun is currently searching for him.
There was a long, secret passage leading from the furnace to the outside of Shangyong City. That was the way he had come when he was eight years old.
Xie Wenjun lay on the ground covered with a layer of dust.
He waited for her to wake up.
He knew she would wake up again. So many years had passed, and like the "secret guards" on Bo Gong Ridge, he was already exhausted. The little bit of energy he could transfer wouldn't kill her, but it would leave him completely drained.
It doesn't matter, not everyone wants to live.
He was clearly a normal person, yet he was forced to perform the lowest and most menial tasks, behaving like a eunuch, and acting with servility and obsequiousness.
The emperor has harmed him to this state, yet he still considers himself benevolent for not exterminating them all.
He understood this emperor. He wasn't inherently cruel; he didn't easily kill his former followers and attendants. He even specially sent people to Liangxi City every year to purchase special medicinal herbs to prolong the lives of these people who were no longer of use to him.
But those years of fratricide made him afraid to believe in blood ties and family affection anymore.
He was a man who had once possessed loyalty and righteousness, but he also ended those relationships with his own hands, which is why he became paranoid and suspicious.
After Xie Lin ascended the throne, he treated them like trash, locking them up in an alley on the edge of the imperial city.
He was unable to possess the dignity of a "human being." Although his body was still intact, the medicine and his cultivation techniques had damaged his very foundation, leaving him with no chance to marry, have children, or enjoy family life.
He would rather have died in the year of the famine and become food for his parents and brothers.
For the past twenty-odd years, the excruciating pain of being devoured and having one's bones tempered still occurs from time to time, making it impossible to survive.
He watched as one by one his companions, in a state of delirium, ended their own lives in a frenzy.
I can't remember from which year it started, but he was the only one left in that alley.
He was unwilling to die.
Finally, in the autumn of the sixteenth year of Xuanyuan, he saw the emperor he had longed for day and night and hated to the bone.
Make the most of everything!
To his surprise, Princess Jiangning did not show any fear or disgust because of his strange appearance.
This made him feel as if he had returned to the human world from a living hell.
He tied a brocade bundle around Xie Wenjun's waist; it was an extremely important item.
That thing will once again unleash a chaotic world of fratricide.
Keep killing!
Having done all this, he knelt down to the side, closed his eyes, and waited.
The underground was quiet; the only sound was the breathing of two living people. As he waited, Xie Wenjun trembled.
Opening her eyes, she stared blankly at the bottomless darkness before her.
Wei Qi knelt properly before Xie Wenjun and kowtowed three times respectfully, saying, "Princess, I killed Consort De for you. This is the last thing I can do for you. I pray that you live a long and healthy life. If you die young, it doesn't matter. I will still serve you in the afterlife."
The pill they fed her was a fake, and its effectiveness was only two or three tenths of what it used to be.
That's enough.
It was enough to make this pampered royal princess lose her mind at some point and become cruel and bloodthirsty.
He wanted Princess Jiangning to become like him.
"Princess, kill me."
He no longer referred to himself as a servant. He handed Xie Wenjun a short dagger.
Light shone through the long, deep passageway, accompanied by the chaotic, hurried sound of footsteps.
Xie Wenjun looked ahead in the dim light, but her gaze was empty, as if nothing entered her eyes.
Kill me!
Wei Qi called out, his voice urgent as he followed the sound of their approaching footsteps.
As if receiving some kind of command, Xie Wenjun gripped the short dagger and viciously stabbed it into the throat, which was as thin as a withered tree trunk.
Author's note: Thank you for reading this far!
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