“Father, since I am not capable, why don’t you place your hopes on your grandchildren? You are still young and strong, and you can be emperor for another twenty or thirty years without any problem. By then, your grandchildren will have grown up, and you can choose the most outstanding one from among them to inherit the throne, right?”
After the grand court assembly ended, Ye Jingchen shamelessly followed the emperor and had breakfast at Chengqian Palace, where he also made the following suggestion to the emperor.
"Don't you want to be emperor at all?" The emperor looked at Ye Jingchen with a probing gaze.
Ye Jingchen sighed deeply, "It's not that I don't want to at all, but I have no children, right? This position will eventually have to be given to my nephews and nieces, so it's better to skip the process altogether!"
"You wouldn't be deliberately making yourself incapable just because you don't want to be emperor, would you?" the emperor asked abruptly.
Ye Jingchen looked at the emperor with a shocked expression, "Father, I'm just a little lazy at most, I wouldn't be so ruthless to myself!"
"You're not just a little lazy!" the emperor said casually.
Throughout history, there have been many crown princes who were overly diligent, but it is rare to see one as lazy as Ye Jingchen.
The emperor pondered the feasibility of this matter. At his current age, he should be able to live for another twenty or thirty years without any problem, which would be enough time to cultivate a new successor.
But he felt very unwilling to give up the crown prince like that.
The Crown Prince may be lazy, but he is still capable. Even if a new heir is cultivated, can he be as outstanding as the Crown Prince?
Furthermore, the Crown Prince may seem uninterested in the throne now, but once he gains access to greater power and experiences the pleasures it brings, will he still be willing to relinquish the throne?
The emperor felt he couldn't judge others by his own standards.
The reason why this rebellious son is so magnanimous now is simply because he has not yet tasted the power.
As for the imperial grandson, apart from Jingming, none of the princes have married, so where did the imperial grandson come from?
He clearly has seven sons, but if things continue to develop in this way, he is really worried about whether he will be able to have seven grandsons!
Where exactly is the problem?
He would rather his princes not be so ambitious, and just focus on getting married, having children, and continuing the family line.
After all, there are plenty of people who can handle things in the imperial court, but you can't ask someone else to do childbirth for you!
But soon, the emperor had no time to attend to these matters.
On the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, the Lantern Festival is celebrated. The streets and alleys of the imperial city are adorned with lanterns, and throngs of people stroll about admiring the lanterns, solving riddles, performing rituals to ward off illness, and releasing lanterns to pray for blessings...
"Look! The moon has been bitten by a celestial dog!" Someone shouted on the bustling street, attracting many people to look up at the sky.
The jade disc that had been hanging high in the sky was indeed no longer as round as before.
"The moon has been bitten again!"
"The celestial dog really ate the moon!"
"Run!"
I don't know who shouted it first, but the street suddenly became chaotic.
The officials in charge of maintaining order in the imperial city, including the yamen runners of the Jingzhao Prefecture, and the guards that the emperor had specially summoned to the imperial city that night, quickly set out to maintain order on the streets.
Inside the Eastern Palace, Ye Jingchen was drinking alone under the moon.
Xie Chang'an was originally going to spend the festival with him, but the Lantern Festival is a day for family reunion. Xie Chang'an has several elderly relatives at home, so there was no reason for him not to go home and spend the festival with his family. Therefore, Ye Jingchen sent him back.
As for Ye Jinghe, he will be on duty tonight, leading the guards to patrol the streets and alleys of the imperial city to protect the safety of the people.
This was a task specifically assigned to him by the emperor, and for this reason, the emperor reinstated him to his original position.
Ye Jinghe really didn't want to be on duty on this special day, but Ye Jingchen persuaded him to leave the palace.
Every year on this night, the imperial city is at its liveliest. In order to maintain order in the city, the emperor would send a portion of the imperial guards into the imperial city.
This year, because of that inexplicably appearing nursery rhyme, the emperor has deployed even more guards to the imperial city as a precaution.
Ye Jingchen knew there would really be a lunar eclipse tonight, so he specifically told Ye Jinghe to be careful.
Therefore, as soon as the riot began, Ye Jinghe immediately ordered his guards to control the situation and arrange for the people to return home in an orderly manner.
While the potential unrest in the capital city was brought under control, the turmoil in people's hearts was beyond control.
Within the next hour, not only the people of the imperial city, but also people in many other parts of Dayuan, could see the moon disappear little by little, as if it had really been eaten by something.
This perfectly confirms the first two lines of the nursery rhyme: "On the Lantern Festival, the celestial dog eats the moon."
After a night of widespread anxiety, the next day was overcast and rainy, with no sun and no moon.
This also confirms the second half of the nursery rhyme: "The sun and moon have lost their light, and the sky is dark."
The atmosphere at the morning court session that day was exceptionally solemn.
The emperor summoned the Director of the Imperial Observatory to the palace last night and ordered him to observe the celestial phenomena. The Director predicted that the next few days would be cloudy and rainy.
In this era, the celestial dog eating the moon is an ominous sign in itself. With the emergence of such a nursery rhyme, if someone with ulterior motives secretly incites people, chaos will surely ensue in the Great Abyss.
The emperor ordered the imperial guards to protect the capital, and the troops under the jurisdiction of each prefecture and county to be on high alert.
After three days without seeing the sun, new rumors began to circulate in the capital.
"Being hidden from the light of day is a sign of Yin dominating and Yang declining! Only by having the most noble and pure Yang body in the world marry a man whose birth chart is also pure Yang can this problem be solved!"
The emperor is the most noble person in the world, but with countless concubines in his harem and a multitude of children, it is impossible for him to still have a pure yang body.
Besides the emperor, the crown prince was the second most honorable person in the land.
A crown prince who cannot have sexual relations is naturally still a virgin.
"absurd!"
"Nonsense!"
"It's just been raining for a few days and the sun hasn't been out. What does that have to do with the Crown Prince? From ancient times to the present, has there ever been a precedent of a Crown Prince marrying a man? Investigate for me, who is harboring malicious intentions and trying to harm the Crown Prince?!" The Emperor was so angry that he threw the memorial in his hand at people.
Sun Yan stood there motionless as he smashed the memorial, a bloody scratch on her face from the corner of the document, a testament to the emperor's fury.
However, no matter how hard the Imperial Guards investigated, they could not find the source of the rumors, and the rumors in the capital city only intensified.
By the seventh day, the contents of the rumors appeared in the imperial memorial and were even sent to the emperor's desk.
The emperor summoned those who had submitted memorials to the palace, berated them severely, gave them a beating, and finally had them carried out.
For seven consecutive days, it rained and the sun and moon were obscured. If it weren't for that nursery rhyme, it might not have caused panic. But it was because of that nursery rhyme that the entire imperial city was plunged into panic.
The situation outside the imperial city is probably no better.
After that, every day that the sun and moon were not visible, the people's panic grew stronger than the day before, and their desire for the so-called solution became more urgent.
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