Chapter 38 Concubines



The emperor sang and danced with the singing girls in the palace and drank until dawn until he was drunk. Nine singing girls left with their clothes in disarray and their faces covered.

Why is his clothing so unkempt? The most disgusting thing is the ancient humanistic style of the narrative, which is only briefly introduced in a few words and does not know how to fill in the details. This foolish monarch is holding a party at such a young age.

Zhang Yuanqing was clicking his tongue while reading about the emperor and his concubines boating on the lake. He ordered the singing girls to take off their clothes to perform and the palace maids to take off their clothes to serve tea and water. The emperor would catch prostitutes and have fun with them wherever they went, and would return at sunset. He would have his favor with all the palace maids on the boat.

After all the favors were paid, Zhao Shun had a good kidney. Could he also be a night-wandering god? Zhang Yuanqing sighed and turned the page.

The emperor wanted to visit the queen, and when he met Concubine Rou on the way, Concubine Rou asked, "Your Majesty is very busy, do you remember where the door of the Xinghua Palace is?"

The emperor rejected Concubine Rou!

"Alas, Your Majesty, do you remember that year when the apricot blossoms were in the rain? You said that there were three thousand officials in the harem, and three thousand of them favored me."

The emperor felt ashamed, so he took Concubine Rou to see the empress and wanted to sleep with her in the same bed. The empress was furious and scolded him for being stupid.

"The emperor shouted that although Zhuang is the mother of the country, the honor and disgrace are up to me. How do you know that I dare not depose the queen?"

Is this too much? Letting the queen and the concubine sleep together?

Can the main wife and the concubine be treated the same? Shouldn't the ancient people have a strong sense of this?

Zhang Yuanqing had a new understanding of Zhao Shun's absurdity.

When the emperor was visiting the West Garden, he suddenly heard the sound of a zither and went to follow the sound. He met a woman playing the zither in a pavilion. The woman had a face as beautiful as a peach or a plum, and was very graceful. It was a pity that such a beauty was wasted in the palace.

The woman servant said: "I am the concubine of the previous emperor. Since the previous emperor passed away, I have lived in the Western Garden, leading a hard life, and my beauty is gone."

"The Emperor said: Flesh can make one lose one's soul, but one's bones are pitiful. I am afraid that life will not come true. If I can find a pair of mandarin ducks and say goodbye to death, I would rather be a mandarin duck than envy the immortals!"

He took the woman away and stayed in the West Garden that night.

Even my dad’s woman is not spared!

Zhang Yuanqing found that he had underestimated Zhao Shun. He thought about it again. After the emperor died, the concubines in the palace seemed to have only a few choices: one was to be buried alive with the emperor, two was to keep vigil, three was to be forced to become a nun, four was to be banished to the cold palace, and five was to be favored by the new emperor and be taken back into the harem.

Zhang Yuanqing flipped through the pages quickly. Ever since he met the late emperor's favorite concubine, Zhao Shun seemed to have opened the door to a new world and had been lingering in the Western Garden for two months.

To sum up, all the eleven ladies, twenty beauties and thirty-six palace maids in the West Garden were favored by him.

The previous emperor's favorite concubine became his favorite concubine, and the beautiful palace maids also became his.

Wow wow wow.

The pages turned quickly, the daily record became thinner and thinner, and Zhang Yuanqing read it more and more seriously.

Zhao Shun was poisoned three days ago, but that doesn't mean the spy came into contact with him on the same day. If it was a chronic poison, it might have started affecting this body a few days ago.

Therefore, all the concubines that Zhao Shun had come into contact with in the past half month were Zhang Yuanqing's key inspection targets.

The reason why the spy poisoned the emperor was simple. If the emperor suddenly died during the war, it would inevitably cause political turmoil in the Southern Dynasty.

Especially since this tyrant emperor was extravagant and licentious, he had no children.

Once the Southern Dynasty becomes riven by turmoil over the throne, the central government will likely recall the troops from the front lines to fight for imperial power. In short, as long as the relatively stable regime of the Southern Dynasty is disrupted, it will definitely affect the army.

By then, the Northern Dynasty’s expedition to the South will be twice as effective with half the effort!

Therefore, the spy either sneaked into the palace recently, or had infiltrated the emperor's palace a long time ago but kept his troops inactive until the war broke out and then approached the emperor.

He read it tirelessly from the beginning, not out of bad taste, but because he hoped to learn as much as possible about the number, personalities, styles and family backgrounds of the concubines in the harem from the daily records.

Old palace maids like the Empress and Concubine Rou are most likely not spies, because the censorship system for palace maids is different from that for concubines.

If one wants to become the emperor’s concubine, the emperor’s entire ancestry must be known in detail, but the scrutiny of palace maids is not that strict.

Therefore, the spy would most likely enter the palace as a palace maid and then use her beauty to seduce the emperor and wait for an opportunity to poison him.

Anyway, Zhao Shun is an old pervert. He will not let go of any young or beautiful women, unlike Zhang Yuanqing who only likes young and beautiful women.

To get back to the point, as long as you have a good appearance, you will have no problem getting close to the emperor.

Half an hour later, Zhang Yuanqing finally finished looking through the daily records. He then asked someone to bring the harem roster. After reading the life stories of the concubines, he locked on five targets.

Target 1: Wan Meiren!

The Diary of Emperor Wu recorded: At night the emperor strolled in the imperial garden, admiring the flowers and the moon. Suddenly he heard the song of an oriole coming from among the flowers. He parted the flowers and saw a young girl sitting among them. She had newly painted eyebrows and eyes, a bun hanging down her head, and was singing softly. He was shocked by her extraordinary beauty, so he used the flower carpet as a mattress and a silk belt to gently separate her from his body. A drop of red blood was as colorful as the flowers. When he returned to the palace, there was a bloodstain on his dragon robe. The next day he named her Concubine Wan.

Zhang Yuanqing locked her up as a suspect because she was screaming like a ghost in the Imperial Garden in the middle of the night. It was obvious that he knew Zhao Shun had the habit of wandering at night and was waiting to seduce him.

It doesn't matter at ordinary times, but seducing the emperor at such a sensitive time is highly suspicious.

Target 2: Lady Chu.

According to the daily records, the emperor and his concubines were touring the Three Sacred Mountains for hunting when they suddenly saw a female hunter rushing in. She rode her horse like the wind without a rein. The emperor was very pleased and ordered his attendants to capture her. He was overjoyed to find that it was a little girl of about thirteen years old and named her Beauty Chu and brought her into the harem.

Target three: Concubine De.

Defei was actually an old lady in the palace. Her father was the Shang of Huchaobu. His entire family was executed by the emperor years ago. Since then, her temperament changed drastically and she often complained about her father. However, because she was too beautiful, Zhao Shun would still visit her from time to time.

Concubine De had motives to murder the emperor, after all, it was a revenge for the extermination of the entire family.

Target 4: Madam Ya.

Lady Ya was a concubine that Zhao Shun had snatched back when he was on tour. She was a young and beautiful woman. She was married and married to Zhao Shun. Later, her husband was dissatisfied and wrote a letter in blood to the prefect to accuse the emperor of the time of abducting a woman. He was then beaten to death with eighty strokes of the cane.

Madam Ya also had the motive to become a spy and murder the emperor. Taking a step back, what if the scene of forcibly seizing the woman's private parts was a trap set by the Northern Dynasty?


Recommendation