He suddenly called her name.
"Listen carefully. What I'm about to tell you will never be known to anyone else in this world. But no matter what you hear today or what you discover in the future, you must remember the promise you made to me that night at the Qinghuai Marquis's mansion."
Will she never leave him no matter what?
Her heart beat faster and faster, but she nodded.
"good."
He looked at her deeply, and before she could figure out the meaning behind that look, his voice sounded deep.
"It all started with my father. The Su family was once a family of powerful officials, with many good strategies but insufficient strategic planning. But by the time of my father's generation, everything was different. He was born to be an emperor, his thoughts as profound as a secluded chamber, and no one could understand his innermost thoughts. However, fate played a trick on him. He spent half his life scheming and calculating, but his fortune was dominated by an unlucky star. No one around him had a good end, and his descendants were even more miserable."
"My father had two sons. The eldest had double pupils, the younger had only one. Both died before the age of ten. An alchemist entered the palace to perform divination and said that within the palace walls lay the remains of the previous dynasty, entrenched in a place of yin energy. So my father ordered all the lakes and ponds within the palace to be filled. However, there was only one muddy lotus pond that refused to be filled. The alchemist tried his best but could not find a solution, so he resorted to storing water to preserve it."
Hearing this, Xiao Nanhui suddenly remembered Yao Yi's previous business.
"Moon Lake?"
He glanced at her.
"Heard of it?"
Not only had she heard about it, she had also peeped at him choosing a wife from the hill outside the palace wall, and had a quarrel with Xu Shu about it, and on the way back she even picked up Su Pingchuan's underwear.
She sniffed.
"I just heard what people said."
He pretended not to see the little movements she made when she lied, and continued to explain it slowly.
"After the Lotus Pond incident, my father concluded that the alchemist was merely talking nonsense, so he summoned the now-retired Qu family of Buxu Valley to make a final decision. The head of the Qu family, after a single day in the palace, declared that the pond's remaining water wasn't a sign of impurity, but rather the unending fate of the previous dynasty. This energy, trapped within the palace walls or hidden in the wilderness, was growing stronger and stronger, requiring its source to be contained. Upon hearing this, my father's confusion was resolved, and he agreed. He immediately killed the alchemist and set out to find this energy of the previous dynasty."
Hearing this, she couldn't help but be shocked.
Thinking of Hao Bai's somewhat artificial face, Xiao Nanhui really couldn't imagine how reliable the rest of the Qu family could be, to the point that a king of a country would go to such great lengths to search for a vague energy channel.
Perhaps it was not a word from the Qu family that drove the emperor to take this path, but simply an ambition to maintain power at all costs.
"For as long as I can remember, my father has been consumed by worry over the investigation of this matter. He seemed possessed, obsessed, day after day, poring over ancient books and illustrations, searching for every scrap of information about the Qiu family, even forgetting that this vast land already lay beneath his throne. The unsuccessful search drained his energy, and worry and suspicion consumed his soul. His body quickly withered, and the palace physicians were helpless. And at the time, he had only one son: me, who had long been absent from the palace."
He suddenly paused here, and when he spoke again he seemed to be intentionally hiding something.
"My father and I have always had some discord. Until the very last moment, he was unwilling to give me the throne he had held for so many years for nothing. So he placed three life-or-death challenges before me. He took me to my mother's grave and made me swear that if I succeeded to the throne, I would accomplish three things in my lifetime. This was the price of my new life. If I disobeyed, he would kill me on the spot and find another bloodline of my family to succeed me."
How could this be a case of discord? It was clearly a deep-seated hatred. Otherwise, why would they choose to kill their own child and find another son to succeed them?
Xiao Nanhui knew that there were some things he had not fully said.
But she didn't plan to ask for the time being, because she guessed that it might be related to his mother, and that was another sad story.
"So...what are the three things?"
"The first is to recover the secret seal, the second is to quell the rebellion in Bijiang, and the third is to permanently eliminate the threat from the previous dynasty."
"The trouble from the previous dynasty?" She found it a little unbelievable. "Could it be referring to the previous dynasty's energy meridian that has not yet been found?"
"Perhaps. I've been carefully planning this for years, and I've figured out the first two things, but the third remains elusive. At first, I thought it might refer to the secret seal, but knowing my father's life, I know he specifically mentioned it, so it couldn't just be a repetition; it had something else in mind. I should have asked my father for clarification, but he was already gravely ill by then, and died within three days of the Yu'an Rebellion. His closest guard was also convicted for failing to serve the emperor, and soon left Que City to guard the Su family's final resting place."
"You're talking about Mr. Zong, right?" Xiao Nanhui suddenly recalled the scene at the Yulin Villa that night. "Zong Hao once told me that he traveled the world for half his life, collecting all the brocades containing the prophecy, but only one thread is missing. Could it be that the entire Xiao family was killed just for that one thread? Is that the secret that the royal family wants to eliminate?"
She suddenly felt that everything had become absurd and ridiculous.
The man who told her that the prophecy was false ended up taking the lives of seventy-nine people because of this non-existent falsehood.
But she knew that Zong Hao was just a sharp knife, and the person holding the knife on the throne was the truly cold-hearted person.
Her heart was churning, and she tried not to think about the blood flowing in the body of the man in front of her.
"But why didn't you do it earlier or later, but at that time..."
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