Chapter 7 Xiangye: "Your Highness, please don't give me away! How can a man..."
Clang!
A silver plate filled with snacks was knocked to the ground. Su Xiaotang, who was busy with her work, looked in the direction of the sound and was caught off guard by this scene.
He lowered his head, staring at a few dirty, dusty buns that had fallen to the ground, his eyes gradually reddening.
"How could Your Highness possibly put such disgusting things in your mouth?"
The person in front of him was still hurling insults, then stomped on a dirty piece of bread that had rolled to the side of his shoe, causing cocoa paste to spill out. "As the prince's official husband, Lord Su, even if you're not exactly diligent, you shouldn't be sleeping until noon. We've been waiting for ages. And now you've come to make this utterly unpresentable food yourself..."
The boy before her was dressed in a pale yellow brocade robe, with delicate eyebrows and large eyes, a nose as smooth as goose fat, and lips like a peach. He was innocent and cute, but his lips and tongue seemed to be soaked in poison, each word piercing Su Xiaotang's heart.
"...Those who know him are the eldest son of the Minister's family; those who don't might think he's a street vendor—ah!"
Snap!
Su Xiaotang, her hand covered in flour, slapped the man hard across the face and said fiercely, "Say one more word?"
He slapped her with all his might, making Xiangye dizzy and disoriented. She staggered a few steps and fell to the ground with a thud. Her mind went blank, and all that remained was the increasingly intense, cracking pain on her face.
Xiangye had long heard that the young master of the Su family was delicate and dignified, and remained calm even when provoked to his face. Therefore, she wanted to give him a hard time—but she never expected that he would fight her for a few ugly pastries!
What happened to being a proper man? Have you forgotten all your manners?
Xiangye never expected that she would have such thoughts one day.
He knew very well that his provocation of the king was an act of insubordination, and if discovered, he would certainly be punished according to family rules. Therefore, he sent the kitchen staff away early in the morning. Unexpectedly, this move backfired, and when he was beaten, no one stopped him.
And how come Su Langjun is so strong?!
Is it possible to have such strength in your hands if you only eat half a bowl of rice per meal?!
Yesterday it was supposed to be his turn to accompany His Highness. Although he had prepared himself to be alone in his room, it would be a lie to say that he didn't hope His Highness would leave his consort behind and come to his courtyard.
He gazed at the main courtyard from afar, brightly decorated with lanterns and colorful firecrackers, filled with joy and celebration, while he could only keep watch over a dim lamp until the oil ran out and he could barely fall asleep.
The next day at dawn, according to custom, Xiangye and the other servants came to the main courtyard to pay their respects to the King, but they waited and waited and waited and no one came. Only then did they realize that Su Xiaotang had become arrogant because of the King's favor and had slept until noon.
Before the King could speak, they couldn't leave first, so they could only wait in the hall, their backs ramrod straight, until their buttocks went numb and they were so hungry that their chests were sticking to their backs, before Zhang Mama finally took the initiative to ask them to leave.
The servants were naturally indignant.
In the past, there was no master in the palace to manage the inner quarters, so the servants inevitably spoke without restraint. On the way back, they started talking about the new king's faults.
Xiangye listened listlessly, not wanting to get involved, but someone deliberately prevented him from staying out of it, nudging him with their elbow and jokingly saying, "Little Xiangye, you probably won't see His Highness for many more days in the future."
Xiangye was young, tender, and delicious, with a sweet and cheerful voice, and she knew how to please His Highness. Although His Highness did not favor men, he would spend five or six days a month in Xiangye's room. Although the servants did not say anything, they were already dissatisfied and encouraged him to test whether the new royal consort had any tolerance. After all, in their eyes, the royal consort had made them wait for a long time on the first day of his marriage, which must have been a way of putting them in a bad light.
When the snipe and the clam fight, the fisherman benefits. Your Highness has always preferred peace and quiet. Seeing the King and Xiangye being jealous and envious, you may become annoyed and even dislike them.
At that time, they will have the opportunity to regain favor.
With everyone stirring things up, even if Xiangye were made of cotton, she would have gotten hard by now. Her heart was burning with jealousy, and when she found out that the king was in the kitchen, she led her servants and rushed over aggressively.
He saw Zhang Mama, the prince's wet nurse, standing guard at the entrance of the kitchen from afar. Knowing that she was not someone who could be dismissed with just a few words, he immediately felt uneasy.
But unexpectedly, his servant made up an excuse and actually managed to lure Zhang Mama away, which was incredibly successful.
With Granny Zhang gone, the people in the kitchen are no longer a threat.
Xiangye walked in and openly scrutinized the new king consort with a critical eye—
Putting aside whether the object between his legs would satisfy His Highness, just looking at his figure: too tall, not slender enough, neither male nor female, like a freak; his vigilance is even worse, he was oblivious to the fact that everyone around him had been cleared out, still fiddling with some disgusting thing, brownish-black, sparse...
Xiangye bared her teeth, a sense of foreboding creeping into her mind.
Even worse, the prince was muttering something to himself, seemingly in high spirits. Xiangye approached and listened, discovering he was humming out of tune, "Your Highness, Your Highness..."
So it was made for His Highness—no, how could such filthy food enter His Highness's mouth?!
Xiangye was instantly enraged and threw the silver platter containing the finished product over the ground.
—Then Wang Fuyang knocked him to the ground.
Do you know how many people in Tianyuan are still suffering from hunger?
Su Xiaotang's eyes widened in anger, and she gritted her teeth, saying each word clearly, "Do you know how unbearable hunger is?"
Before he got married, hunger was almost a daily occurrence for him. Whether it was his mother or his father, the word he heard most often from them was "eating too much".
He had grown accustomed to the torment of an empty stomach and heartburn—but that didn’t mean he could take it for granted.
On the contrary, he felt extremely painful every time, and no matter how many times, he found it unbearable.
Therefore, Su Xiaotang cherishes every grain of rice and every leaf of vegetable.
Seeing this boy, who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, suddenly attack and overturn the dirty buns he had painstakingly made, he naturally couldn't suppress his anger.
Although Xiangye came from a poor family, she had lived a life of luxury in the Prince's mansion for several years and had long forgotten the bitterness of not having enough to eat. Upon hearing this, her face gradually turned pale, and her lips trembled as she uttered a single word.
— Clap, clap, clap.
Soft clapping came from the doorway. The two looked in the direction of the sound and saw Yuan Mingjin, dressed in a saffron-yellow Hu-style robe, walking steadily in. Xiangye panicked immediately, crawling two steps on her knees towards her feet, and cried out urgently, "Your Highness…!"
Yuan Mingjin reached out and held his chin with his thumb and forefinger, looking down at him—Xiang Ye was only sixteen years old, with beautiful eyebrows and eyes, and a pretty and sweet face, as clear and translucent as a freshly peeled lychee.
She was crying so hard that tears streamed down her face like broken beads, and anyone who saw her couldn't help but feel sorry for her.
Just as the murky tears mixed with makeup were about to roll onto her hand, Yuan Mingjin quickly withdrew her hand. She suppressed a wave of dizziness, steadied herself, and the double images in her vision merged back into one.
“What the King said is right,” Yuan Mingjin said softly, as if talking to himself. “I still remember when I first met you, you were thin and small, and your mother and father chained you up outside the door like a dog, feeding you only some chaff and that was it.”
秕 refers to hollow or unfilled grains of rice; 糠 refers to the husks removed from rice and wheat.
These things were meant to feed the livestock, but the family was so poor that they had three sons before finally having a daughter. The eldest brother, Zhaomei, married at the age of fourteen, and the second brother, Panmei, was sold into a brothel as a "slim horse" in exchange for the rice gruel to feed their youngest sister.
"I couldn't bear to do it, so I spent ten taels of silver to buy you. In the blink of an eye, you've grown to bark so loudly."
Yuan Mingjin seemed lost in thought, while Xiangye's pupils trembled more and more violently.
Among the aristocratic class, giving one's husband to another woman was a common and effective way to quickly build relationships and win people's hearts. Scholars and literati not only considered it an elegant pursuit but also embraced it as a social trend.
If a servant is exceptionally talented or has outstanding looks, he will undoubtedly circulate among countless young women.
This is not a blessing, but a curse.
"It seems I have taken excellent care of you."
The sentence was light and airy, devoid of any emotion, yet it made Xiangye tremble slightly—he was all too familiar with this tone of assessing goods.
His parents had considered selling him as a prostitute, but seeing that he was too young and feeling guilty towards his two older brothers, they reluctantly gave up the idea.
But staying at home might have been worse than being sold as a fat horse. He lived like a stray dog with withered fur, barely clothed and starving. When he squatted by the roadside, even the horse-riding women and servants who wanted to take advantage of any man in distress wouldn't give him a second glance.
On the day he met His Highness, he accidentally spilled the goat's milk that his mother had painstakingly prepared for his younger sister. As a result, his enraged father hung a rope around his neck and chained him outside the door like a dog.
It was the dead of winter, with rain and snow falling heavily. Her tattered hemp clothes couldn't keep out the cold, and Yingmei's hands and feet were swollen and red, her lips were purple, and her teeth were chattering. Every inch of her skin and every crevice of her bones was stinging from the cold wind.
Just moments before he fainted in the snow, he vaguely saw a person riding a tall horse galloping towards him, clad in silver armor, with a heroic and dashing appearance, like a goddess reborn...
Xiao Yingmei thought it was a hallucination she was having before she died.
Later, His Highness threw ten taels of silver at his parents, put him on a horse and took him away, making him a servant in the Prince's mansion, and gave him a new name, Xiangye.
But he was never summoned again.
Perhaps out of resentment towards his mother and father, perhaps out of ambition to rise above others, or perhaps out of a desire to repay the debt of saving his life, he was unwilling to be forgotten by His Highness.
A few years later, he turned fifteen, and one day, taking advantage of the princess's drunkenness, he climbed into her bed.
Xiangye lunged forward, wanting to hug her calves, but then suddenly remembered her obsession with cleanliness and stopped herself. She simply lay prostrate at her feet, her black hair cascading down her slender neck like a waterfall, her thin spring dress outlining her round, pert buttocks and beautiful curves.
"Please, Your Highness, don't give me away! How can a man serve two wives..." Xiangye cried.
Yuan Mingjin ignored him, only glancing at the few dirty buns on the ground, her brows furrowing almost imperceptibly.
From the moment she appeared, Su Xiaotang completely forgot about Xiangye; her heart was entirely focused on her. Seeing her staring blankly at the dirty bun that had fallen to the ground, she thought she wanted to eat it and hurriedly said, "Your Highness, you mustn't! I... I don't have enough cocoa powder, let me get some more!"
After saying that, he hurriedly ran outside, wanting to go to Wanqianlou to get some more cocoa powder from his master's wife.
As they passed each other, Yuan Mingjin stretched out two fingers, grabbed his sleeve, and whispered something in a low voice, his lips brushing against his earlobe. Before he could hear clearly, he closed his eyes and collapsed, only to be caught in Su Xiaotang's arms.
A note from the author:
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It's been so hot lately, everyone should drink more water. I didn't drink much water yesterday, and my throat hurt terribly this morning. [crying emoji]
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