100. Sin
◎Fall in love with Ji Ci◎
Chapter 100
The continuous heavy rains in recent days have scattered many of the flowers and trees in Guihong Courtyard. The footsteps of the imperial physician and servants coming in and out have trampled the petals on the ground that are not strong enough into mud.
Jiang Qiuye sat on the edge of the bed, holding Ji Ci's hand tightly. The jade ring on his thumb hurt her. Her face was covered with tears, and her eyes were red. She seemed to have been crying for a long time.
"Princess? Let go, Princess." The imperial physician was anxious when he saw her gasping for breath, but he didn't know how to comfort her.
Jiang Qiuye looked back at the imperial physician's face in a daze, full of confusion.
The imperial physician said respectfully, "Princess, please allow this old minister to feel the prince's pulse."
"Oh, okay." She finally reacted, immediately let go of his hand and stepped aside.
The imperial physician's expression grew increasingly rigid as he examined the pulse. Jiang Qiuye paused, staring intently at his expression.
She hesitated and asked, "How is the prince? Why did he suddenly faint?"
The Imperial Physician stood up and bowed to her, saying, "Princess, the prince's symptoms are somewhat similar to those of poisoning, but they are not completely intoxicated. All I can do now is prescribe some detoxifying remedies for the prince. Please give me some time to research the detoxification method."
"Excuse me, Imperial Physician."
She looked at Mingyue, who was standing beside her with an equally anxious expression, and ordered, "Send the imperial physician's order down to help boil the medicine, and have someone bring a basin of hot water."
"Yes, Princess."
After Mingyue and the imperial physician left, only Tianqu was left in the room, besides Ji Ci who was lying unconscious on the bed.
Tian Qu stared at Jiang Qiuye with a strange and angry look on his face. As he worked closely with the prince, he naturally knew the true identity of the woman in front of him.
As a spy from Feiyan Pavilion, he couldn't understand why the prince didn't just imprison her and force her to confess, but instead forbade him from revealing a single word to anyone. Now that the prince lay there, his face pale, it was hard not to suspect this woman was behind this.
On impulse, he took two steps forward and tightly grasped Jiang Qiuye's wrist. She was holding a handkerchief in her hand, ready to wipe Ji Ci's face.
Jiang Qiuye was startled, looking at her grabbed wrist with displeasure, then frowned and shifted her gaze to his angry face, feeling him tightening his grip and waves of pain coming over her.
"Tianqu, what do you want to do by committing such a treasonous act?"
Tian Qu gnashed his teeth and said inwardly, "Princess, the prince is lying here like this now. What does this have to do with you?"
She narrowed her eyes and sneered, "Tianqu, what do you mean?"
"Princess, the prince is so good to you, yet you still harm him like this! Do you still have a heart? I've heard the story of the farmer and the snake before, but I never thought it would happen to you and the prince."
"I don't understand what you are saying! I am worried and heartbroken seeing the prince in this state!" As she spoke, her eyes turned red again and tears kept falling from her eyes.
She gently turned her captured hand over and broke free from Tianqu's shackles. "Tianqu, instead of wasting your energy arguing with me, why not go find Tang Taifu and the other regents? The prince is incapable of handling state affairs in his current state. The war in the north is raging, and the young emperor is still young. He has always trusted Tang Taifu. If he leaves the matter with Tang Taifu, the prince will feel at ease."
Tian Qu was blocked and speechless. Thinking of what Ji Ci had said, although he was so angry that he wanted to kill this black-hearted spy directly, he had no choice but to turn around sharply and walk away.
Jiang Qiuye let out a breath. At this time, Mingyue also brought hot water and decocted medicine. She asked them to put them down and left directly.
After waiting until no one was around, she sat back on the edge of the bed, soaked the handkerchief in hot water, gently wiped the sweat from his forehead, and reached out to smooth his hair.
"Ji Ci, you are so stupid. Do you trust me so much? You are so kind, how can you let a despicable person like me suffer?"
Her hand gently stroked his nose and cheekbones. She had always admitted that Ji Ci was the most handsome man she had ever seen. It wasn't that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but he was truly handsome.
She was a vulgar person to begin with. Perhaps she was attracted by his appearance when she first saw him in the Zhang Mansion.
"When I was unconscious, you took care of me without asking anyone else. Now it's my turn, my brother Jian Xi."
She stayed awake all night by the bedside, speaking a lot of words intermittently. From her amazing stealing skills as a child to the days when she was with the courtesan in Chunhualou, she told him every word without missing a word.
As the night deepened and dawn passed, she finally leaned over and gave him a sweet kiss on the corner of his lips, but the man beneath her remained motionless.
Three days passed, and the Imperial Physician was helpless to address Ji Ci's condition. Somehow, news of the incident leaked out, reaching the streets and alleys. The Regent, having only been in power for a short time, was assassinated and poisoned, and remains in a coma. Those within the court who were ready to take action began to make moves, and factional strife intensified. Fortunately, Imperial Tutor Tang and others maintained a stable government.
As time passed, Ji Ci still didn't regain consciousness, but victory arrived from the northern campaign. Zhou Chenghu's army defeated the 50,000 Li troops lingering west of the Huai River, and seized the opportunity to launch a counterattack, capturing a Li city in two days.
Feiyan Pavilion seemed to be getting even more restless because of this. Concubine Shu's secret letters with threatening words came one after another. When Jiang Qiuye burned the last secret letter in her hand, she finally left the bedroom.
This was the first time Ji Ci stepped out of the room during the days he was in a coma.
She was calm and composed, ignoring the servants working in the yard, and went straight to the study. She glanced around and came to a secret compartment with ease.
The mechanism of this secret compartment is hidden. If she hadn't learned about it from Ji Ci that night, she might never have known where it was.
Reaching out to the back of the bookshelf, he gently turned an inconspicuous protrusion, and a wooden board in the bookshelf fell down. Then he pushed it towards the exposed wall, and the secret compartment opened.
There were several confidential documents inside, so she took them all out at once, placed them on the desk, and searched through them. Sure enough, the Shengjing City Defense Map was among them.
When she unfolded the map, she finally understood why Feiyan Pavilion had gone to such great lengths to find it.
It turns out that Emperor An of Jin had only just managed to escape from Ganyang when the First Jin Dynasty fell, and the sacrifices he made were immense. When he arrived in Shengjing and established the Later Jin Dynasty, he had learned from this experience and secretly built a secret passageway beneath Shengjing leading to the city.
The secret passage is divided into three routes, from the Taiji Hall of Jinhe Palace, one goes directly to the river, one goes to the neighboring city, and one goes into the barren mountains.
This secret passage was a double-edged sword. If Shengjing was breached again, the Ji family could easily escape through it. However, if it fell into the hands of the enemy, they could enter through the secret passage and attack the emperor directly.
Jiang Qiuye didn't hesitate any longer. Now that things had progressed to this point, she had no choice but to go all the way. She tucked the city defense map into her arms and was about to put the remaining documents back into the secret compartment when she accidentally opened another file, causing her to suddenly stop.
She picked up the file, her eyes wide, staring intently at the woman in the portrait. Memories flooded back. The person in the portrait seemed familiar to her; it was the real Qiu Ziye! The edge of the file was torn, and one could imagine the rage she'd felt when she'd first seen the portrait.
She trembled, smiled bitterly, and gently let go. Her arms lost strength, and after staggering for a while, she leaned against the desk and managed to steady herself with difficulty.
turn out to be......
It turned out that he had known his identity for a long time, but he had remained silent.
At this moment, her heart was filled with shock and separation like a landslide, and the flesh and blood that had been torn apart by her was slowly reshaping.
When did he know?
He can still be so kind to me.
If it were her, could she do this?
No wonder he used to keep asking himself what he was hiding.
Her brother Jian Xi is really stupid.
She lowered her eyes, grabbed the hibiscus jade pendant at her waist, and slowly stroked the edge of the petals with her fingers. It was originally smooth and white, but at a certain point it became rough and prickly.
Perhaps the luckiest thing in her life was meeting her brother Jian Xi.
Jiang Qiuye stood there for a long moment, stunned. Suddenly, he heard the ticking of a clepsydra, and only then did he come to his senses. With his arms as if filled with lead, he returned the portrait to its secret compartment, then closed it and reset it.
She opened the study door, took a deep breath of the clean air from the rain, looked at the closed bedroom on the other side, clenched her hands, and finally turned around and left the palace without hesitation, heading straight for Jingshan Academy.
Yan Wu seemed to have expected this, so he dressed up as a pale-faced scholar and stood at the gate of the academy waiting for Jiang Qiuye's arrival.
After seeing her figure, he ignored the anger in her eyes and took her directly to the backyard.
A few bluebirds were perched on the treetops. Yan Wu did not urge them at all. He just found some bird food and put it in his hand. The bluebirds then flew over and pecked at the rice grains bit by bit.
Jiang Qiuye didn't say anything, just staring at his movements. After a long silence, Yan Wu finally tilted his head and said, "Have you got the things?"
She didn't answer, but pulled out the city defense map from her bosom and threw it at Yan Wu, scaring away the bird in his hand. He was also quick, throwing away the remaining rice grains in his hand and then catching the map steadily.
He smiled and glanced at her, then unfolded it, looked at the contents and nodded, "It's true."
"Of course it's true!" Jiang Qiuye rolled his eyes, took a few steps closer, and said unhappily, "Where's what I want?"
Yan Wu folded the city defense map again, put it in his arms, took out a pill and handed it to her.
She took it, examined it in her hands, sneered, crushed it with two fingers, looked back at him and said, "Yan Wu, I know you too well. This is not the final antidote at all. Are you kidding me? If you don't believe me, will I kill you?"
Yan Wu was not surprised by her behavior and smiled, "Sister Ye'er, you are smarter than I thought. Sister Ye'er, how about... don't leave. I will give Feiyan Pavilion to you in the future, and you will be the next Pavilion Master. Prince Qi is unconscious now, he is nothing, why do you still have to stay with him?"
"There really is something wrong with the medicine you gave me." She smiled sarcastically, "Tell me, how can I wake him up?"
"Why do you have to do this, Sister Ye'er?" Yan Wu looked puzzled. "What if I tell you that he will never wake up?"
Jiang Qiuye trembled, his eyes reddened, and he was furious: "Yan Wu, you are looking for death!"
Seeing that she was about to lose control, Yan Wu, who didn't want to attack her, sighed slightly. Finally, he raised his hand and shot a hidden weapon at the bamboo curtain with lightning speed. A person standing behind the bamboo curtain was hit by the hidden weapon. After blood splattered in star-shaped patterns, he fell to the ground and couldn't get up.
Then, a sudden, sharp pain shot through Jiang Qiuye's bones, causing her to instantly feel dizzy and drop to one knee. She rubbed her aching head and chest, her face grim as she looked up at Yan Wu's cold gaze, then at the masked figure lying on the ground in the distance. The fresh, post-rain air was tinged with a nauseating, bloody odor.
As the man twitched for a while and gradually stopped moving, the severe pain in Jiang Qiuye's body also dissipated bit by bit, as if something had disappeared. Then came a strange feeling of emptiness.
She didn't know where this frustration came from. For the past decade or so, she had been living with this poison every day. She hated the shackles that controlled her, and she hated Feiyan Pavilion. Ji Ci had once called himself a sinner, but wasn't she also a sinner?
Thinking of the scroll I found in the study today, I felt filled with emotion.
She was guilty, but her guilt wasn't the dark decades of the past, the people she'd killed, or her own selfishness. She'd simply lived to survive, never feeling guilty about anyone. She'd committed the heinous crime of lingchi, punishing only one person. Now, she had only one wish: for the rest of her life, she'd pass the shackles, originally created by poison, into his hands, bound by him, led by him, to atone for her sins.
Her breathing gradually steadied, the buzzing in her ears subsided, and a voice, smooth and unwavering, reached her ears. "Sister Ye'er, your Gu has been removed. From now on, you are no longer a member of Feiyan Pavilion."
"Gu..." She laughed sarcastically, "So it's a Gu, and it's so easy to cure."
Yan Wuxin looked calmly at Jiang Qiuye, who had regained her strength and slowly stood up on her knees. He smiled and said, "Sister Ye'er, it's finally your first day of freedom. Why don't you have a drink with me?"
Jiang Qiuye looked at him with a puzzled look, then turned to look at the corpse of the mother Gu lying on the ground. Suspicious about his purpose, she nodded, waiting to see what he was up to.
The two of them sat around the stove. Yan Wu poured the cooked wine into the cup in front of Jiang Qiuye and asked, "Sister Ye'er, what do you want to do most after you are free?"
Jiang Qiuye was on guard and didn't drink. He just said casually, "I want to go look for the Pear Mountain I saw in a travelogue."
"Lishan? Why?"
She frowned. Could it be that Yan Wuzhen just wanted to chat with her? How could it be possible?
"I heard there's a moon butterfly in Lishan that can resolve the sins of this life."
Yan Wu drank his wine and said with a smile, "Sin? What sin has Sister Ye'er committed? I don't know. If you see Yuedie, just push your so-called sin onto me. You hate me so much anyway, don't you?"
Jiang Qiuye was stunned and didn't say anything.
Instead, he became curious and asked, "Sister Ye'er, after all these years of companionship, I thought I knew you very well. You, who are clearly a careless person, why did you... become obsessed with Prince Qi?"
She turned her head to look outside the academy and chuckled. "If you ask me, I probably won't be able to give you an answer. Just like if you ask me why it rains, I don't know either. I can only guess that it might be because Lei Gong and Mica are arguing."
Yan Wu couldn't help but smile when he heard this.
Jiang Qiuye continued, "And I fell in love with Ji Ci. It might be because flowers bloomed by the roadside, Jianjian secretly ate some snacks, and a rainbow happened to appear after the rain. How can I describe it? In short, it should be... beautiful."
"Beautiful... no wonder." He whispered with a wry smile.
"What?" Jiang Qiuye didn't hear clearly.
She glanced at the street outside the window again, her heart anxious, but Yan Wu saw through the perfunctory expression on her face. "Sister Ye'er, no one who has entered Feiyan Pavilion has ever left Feiyan Pavilion unless they die. You are the first."
He didn't know whether his decision to send her to Prince Qi was right or wrong. But now she had found her love and grown wings, and was no longer his bird on a golden chain.
Jiang Qiuye didn't answer. After pondering for a long time, he pulled out the golden anklet from his sleeve, placed it on the table, and pushed it in front of him. He said, "Yan Wu, I agreed to talk to you for a few words, not to chat with you, but to return this item to you. Now that I am free, from now on, any chains are useless to me, and I don't want to see you again."
"You asked me why I was attracted to Ji Ci, and I really can't answer. But one thing is certain: in the past ten years of my life, I haven't had a single happy day. It's all darkness and pain. But in less than a year with him, every day has been happy."
After she finished speaking, Jiang Qiuye stood up and left Jingshan Academy without looking back, her steps more brisk than ever since she could remember. She had already done her best for Feiyan Pavilion, and she had nothing to say.
The crackling fire under the stove in front of him made him feel a little dazed.
Feiyan Pavilion was originally founded by King Yan Xing of Li, who was actually Yan Wu, the third prince of Li. Although he was the heir to the throne, he was attacked and injured during a polo match when he was young, and has been unable to move since then.
Having lost his inheritance rights, he began to take charge of Feiyan Pavilion from then on.
Perhaps life was inherently dark, until that day when he stumbled upon her, a spirited girl in the darkness of the pavilion. She had appeared then in her youthful form, tender and pure, newly promoted to Silver Ghost. Having spent some time with the Oiran, she had also learned to dress herself up daily.
Everyone was dressed in black, but she was the only one in the crowd, dressed in pink and white, with a golden hairpin on her head and the most fashionable makeup. She acted coquettishly and talked about the tricks she learned from the courtesan, making others laugh so hard that even she curled the corners of her lips.
From that moment on, he secretly regarded her as a ray of light, shining into the endless darkness of Feiyan Pavilion and his heart.
She said, a flower blooming by the roadside.
She was the flower that happened to bloom in his heart at that moment.
Although he couldn't possess her, he could give her what he considered the best. Her inner strength, conditioned by medicine, her skin, which would never bear a scar, and her mind and body, which could endure any torture.
He originally thought that as a killer, she would like this, until the day she threw the gold anklet she made herself in his face, and then he suddenly realized that what she wanted was just a word called "freedom".
Although he was angry that his love was not recognized by her, he still gave her this opportunity.
Until just now, she told him that there had not been a single happy day in her life in the past, but now that she was with Prince Qi, she was happy every day.
He felt relieved instantly.
Yan Wu reached out and took the gold chain, carefully placing it in his arms.
Forget it. Although he was jealous, if he knew what would happen today, he might still make the same choice and give her what she wanted most, "freedom".
After sitting for a long time, Jiang Xiahua walked into Jingshan Academy from outside and said with a smile, "Pavilion Master, all the Feiyan Pavilion forces have gathered outside Shengjing City. Ben Zhi has sent a secret message saying that the Young Emperor's birthday banquet will be held tomorrow night. When everyone gathers, we can go straight into the Taiji Hall through the secret passage and kill all the Ji family members and the nobles and aristocrats of the Jin Dynasty."
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