Chapter 880: Kill

“Take it off.”

“All of it.”

“Down there too.”

“Nothing left on.”

“Stand straight.”

“Squat.”

“Stick your backside up.”

“All right.”

Zhao Yuannian’s face had gone slightly red as he put his clothes back on.

Third Master picked up a cup of water and handed it to him.

“Down it in one.”

Zhao Yuannian did not hesitate. He drained the cup in a single gulp and immediately felt a burning heat spread through his chest.

“Pay attention to your piss and shit over the next few days,” Xue San reminded him. “If the color changes, or there’s blood, tell me.”

“Thank you, Third Master.”

Zhao Yuannian understood that Third Master was examining his body to see whether anyone had tampered with him or planted some kind of poison.

There were too many methods in this world capable of killing a man invisibly.

Some did not even kill until several days or half a month later.

“All right. Get out.”

“Third Master, then my mother...?”

Xue San raised an eyebrow.

“Are you teaching me how to do my job?”

“I wouldn’t dare. I wouldn’t dare.”

“Then hurry up and leave.”

“Yes.”

Zhao Yuannian went out.

A short while later, the Princess Consort of Prince Fu entered.

She looked at Xue San.

“Third Master, do I need to take off my clothes?”

Xue San smiled.

“How would I dare?”

The Demon Kings and their Master had an excellent relationship.

The problem was that there was only one Master and seven Demon Kings.

Supply and demand had been unbalanced from the very beginning.

So in daily life, one had to pay attention to little details like this.

“Drink this cup of tea in one go first. I’ve prepared a medicinal bath inside. Soak for fifteen minutes. To be honest, I think the Silver-Armored Guard must know we’ll examine you carefully, so they probably wouldn’t waste effort on tricks like this. But everything is for safety, isn’t it?”

“Third Master is right.”

The Princess Consort drank the cup dry, then walked into the inner section.

Not long afterward, the sounds of someone entering the bath could be heard.

Xue San stepped outside the tent.

Chen Xianba and a group of armored guards stood there.

“Third Master.”

“Guard the place carefully.”

“Yes, Third Master.”

Xue San walked a little farther away.

Holding a silver needle, he began picking his teeth.

A’Ming came over with both hands in his pockets.

“Finally going home.”

“Missing the wine cellar?”

“Yes.”

“But I still haven’t had enough fun this time.”

Third Master sounded distinctly depressed.

Throughout this entire invasion of Qian, A’Ming had followed Master through a bloody breakout.

Fan Li had followed Chen Yang into Shangjing.

And Xue San?

He and Chen Xiong had wandered around Xiangsi Mountain in circles like a pair of idiots.

Again and again.

In the end, when Master finally broke out, it was not even Xue San who received him.

It was the Peng Family Manor.

Strategically, Xue San understood perfectly well that placing his piece on the board had been necessary.

But from a personal perspective, he had perfectly demonstrated what it meant to coast through the entire campaign.

“There will be more opportunities later,” A’Ming consoled him.

“Even with that vampire skull of yours filled with blood and red wine, you should be able to see that after this war, there probably won’t be another major conflict for several years. And if there are only little skirmishes, Master won’t personally take command anymore. Then what? Fan Li and I still haven’t leveled up!”

“Levelling up is for enjoying life better. You don’t live for the sake of levelling up.”

“Remember that sentence. I’m definitely throwing it back at you someday.”

“Go ahead.”

At that moment, Zhao Yuannian cautiously approached and stood nearby, reserved and somewhat awkward.

A’Ming turned and glanced at him.

Zhao Yuannian asked quietly:

“Gentlemen, do my three consorts also need to be examined?”

“You care about your wives that much?” Xue San asked.

“Uh... they are the wives who shared my hardships, after all.”

“That expression doesn’t seem especially suitable for someone like you,” A’Ming said.

“Then... affection grew with time,” Zhao Yuannian replied.

“That fits better.” Third Master nodded. “So you care about them very much?”

“I... of course I should...”

“You’re a feudal Prince of Qian. Once you return, the Emperor of Yan might very well bestow a woman of the Ji imperial clan upon you.”

Zhao Yuannian went silent.

“And then what?” Xue San continued. “You plan to make a woman of the Ji imperial clan a concubine or secondary consort? Does that sound appropriate to you?”

“It... doesn’t seem appropriate.”

“Oh, Master seems to have an equal-wife arrangement.”

Xue San suddenly remembered.

That had come from a decree by Little Sixth.

Little Sixth had known about Siniang’s existence for a long time.

He also knew the depth of Zheng Fan and Siniang’s feelings.

So his decree granted Prince Pingxi the right to have two coequal principal wives.

Naturally, in practice, this had not raised Siniang’s status much.

If anything, it had left the Princess rather overwhelmed by favor.

How could this little sister possibly possess enough virtue to share the status of “equal wife” with Elder Sister?

“But you?” Xue San asked. “Do you have those qualifications?”

“I...”

The Emperor bestows a Ji-clan woman upon you, and you still want to negotiate for an equal wife?

What are you thinking?

Who do you think you are?

“So. Do you value those three consorts of yours very much?”

Zhao Yuannian had been talked in circles.

Following that line of thought, he asked:

“Could it be that I need to...”

Zhao Yuannian made a cutting motion with one hand.

Then he immediately shook his head violently.

“No. No. I can’t do that. I’ve already betrayed my ancestors. I’ve betrayed my dead father. I’ve bowed and scraped and lowered myself. At this point, there are only two things I want. First, once I reach Yan, I want to escape this identity of a pig-like feudal Prince. For once in my life, I want to try doing something myself. Whether I succeed or fail, at least I can try. Second, I want to protect my family. My mother. My women. I turned my back on the dead because I chose to think about the living. That is the bottom line I use to make myself feel a little less miserable every night before I sleep.”

Xue San and A’Ming exchanged glances.

They discovered Zhao Yuannian was actually rather interesting.

“Third Master, please examine my wives as well.”

Zhao Yuannian bowed to Xue San.

Xue San waved dismissively.

“The fact that I couldn’t even be bothered to examine them proves they really aren’t important. Why would the Silver-Armored Guard waste effort tampering with your three wives? If one of them dies, who cares? The only people worth targeting are you and your... your mother.”

Understanding dawned across Zhao Yuannian’s face.

He bowed again.

After he left, Xue San asked:

“Do you think that bastard is acting?”

“Acting affectionate and righteous in front of us?” A’Ming asked back.

“True. That would be casting flirtatious looks at a blind man.”

As he spoke, Xue San suddenly thought of something.

“Hahaha. When I remember the Blind Man is still in Zhao, I feel much better. At least I got to ‘buy soy sauce’ in this war. He didn’t even get to smell the soy sauce.”

After bathing and changing clothes, the Princess Consort of Prince Fu proactively requested an audience with Prince Pingxi.

Very proactively.

When Chen Xianba came to report it, Prince Pingxi sat inside the command tent and hesitated for a moment.

In the end, he nodded.

The Princess Consort entered the command tent.

She simply stood there, looking at Zheng Fan seated above.

At first, Zheng Fan continued reading the memorial in his hands.

Then, using the corner of his vision supposedly fixed upon the memorial, he watched her.

She said nothing.

She did not lower her head.

She did not offer greetings.

Both hands rested neatly before her as she stood there openly and naturally.

The Prince lowered the memorial.

He looked at her.

Then said:

“You’ve gotten fatter.”

A faint smile appeared at the corner of her mouth.

“How could I dare lose weight? I was afraid your hands wouldn’t like the feel anymore.”

This woman was still just as skilled at flirting.

She knew exactly when to pluck a man’s heartstrings.

In truth, Siniang was even better at it.

But Zheng Fan knew how formidable Siniang was.

Before Siniang, the Prince had always occupied the “weaker” position.

Before this woman, by contrast, he could maintain a sense of control.

Yet although they had not been separated for very long, seeing her again now gave him a strange impression.

As though the thin veil that had once covered her had finally been removed.

In the past, her bowing and flattery had always contained a trace of someone under another person’s roof, meat upon another person’s chopping board, forced to bend because she had no other choice.

Now, that feeling was gone.

Instead, there was something like a lotus rising clean from clear water.

Before this, she would never have dared stand there and look straight at him like this.

“You’ve suffered,” Zheng Fan said.

The Princess Consort pressed her lips together.

For a moment, her expression almost seemed about to break.

She lowered her head, drew a breath, then said:

“To be able to see Your Highness again makes me very happy. Truly happy.”

Zheng Fan nodded.

“You’ve had a tiring journey. Rest properly.”

The Prince picked up the memorial again.

“ZHENG FAN!”

The Princess Consort shouted.

The memorial almost fell out of his hand.

Outside, Chen Xianba and Zheng Man both shuddered.

Not because the shout itself frightened them.

They simply had not imagined there could actually be someone inside the command tent who dared call their Prince directly by name.

Still, neither of them was stupid.

No matter how loudly the person inside shouted, they certainly were not going in to take a look.

Inside the command tent, the Prince frowned faintly.

“Zheng Fan, I’m back.”

“I know.”

“I’m back.”

“I can see that.”

“I’m back.”

“I’m back.”

“Why won’t you come hug me?”

“...” Zheng Fan.

Elsewhere inside the army camp, crying now shook the heavens.

A funeral was being held there.

The funeral of the Empress of Great Qian.

Zhao Mugou and the members of his diplomatic mission were responsible for the arrangements.

The crowd mourning outside consisted of the Qian Princes and nobles who had been captured and had only just regained their freedom.

The coffin had been found nearby.

Once the initial rites were completed, the Empress’s body would be placed inside and returned to Shangjing.

The “incident had occurred suddenly.”

Everything therefore had to be kept simple.

Besides, they were still standing inside a Yan military camp.

The number of Yan armored soldiers nearby suddenly increased.

The mourning cries immediately weakened.

Zhao Mugou, draped in white mourning cloth, saw Prince Pingxi approaching with the Princess Consort of Prince Fu.

He stepped forward and offered them each a bundle of incense.

After the Prince and Princess Consort entered the tent containing the Empress’s body, the Qian Princes and nobles outside looked at one another.

Then began crying even louder.

Inside the tent, there was no one else.

Only a bed bearing the Empress’s body.

The Princess Consort walked to the corpse.

It had already been prepared.

The Empress wore formal robes.

Around her neck was a shallow, almost perfunctory bruise.

Heavy powder had been applied across most of her body.

Only the neck had barely been touched.

Almost as though everyone were afraid the mark might accidentally be concealed.

“How did Her Majesty die?”

The Princess Consort looked at Zheng Fan beside her.

“What do you think?”

“You didn’t order it. She was only a powerless woman. Even if she was an Empress, you wouldn’t have ordered her killed.”

“I’m not that noble.”

Zheng Fan paused.

Then he casually tossed the incense in his hand onto the Empress’s body, apparently unconcerned whether Her Majesty might choke while eating the incense smoke in the afterlife.

“I did nothing. And precisely because I did nothing, she died. The Qian made a deal with me. They added a few extras to the bargain. I understood what they meant, and I agreed. After that... she was suicided.”

The Princess Consort did not ask why the Qian wanted the Empress dead.

She was a woman too.

And like the Empress, she was a woman of exceptionally high status in Qian.

She understood perfectly.

An Empress whose capital had fallen, an Empress who had been captured by an enemy army and yet had remained alive—that alone was already treated as some enormous crime.

The Princess Consort said:

“The men were useless. They failed to protect their women and allowed outsiders to carry them away. And yet in the end, the fact that she survived became something those same men were too ashamed even to mention. So ashamed they would rather she died early. Is a man’s face truly that important?”

“Are you asking me?”

“Yes.”

“Of course it is.”

The Prince’s answer was extraordinarily straight-male.

But it could not really be called wrong.

This was, after all, an age ruled by ritual morality.

Yan’s moral restrictions were not as severe as Qian’s, but even in Yan, this answer would still have been accepted.

However, the Prince added another sentence:

“Provided you can actually protect your own woman.”

The Princess Consort reached out and adjusted the Empress’s headdress.

“You never touched her.”

“You’re that certain?”

“If you had, she wouldn’t be dead.”

The Princess Consort turned her face toward Zheng Fan and smiled beautifully.

“In Qian, many scholars wrote stories about you. About you and those Queen Mothers, Empress Dowagers, all kinds of things.”

Zheng Fan said:

“Some of it was exaggerated. But perhaps even they never realized it wasn’t entirely fabricated from nothing.”

He had taken no small amount of tofu.

“They probably never imagined the stories they invented would ultimately kill their own Empress.”

The writers had spun too many unspeakable tales about Prince Pingxi and Queen Mothers from other states.

Prince Pingxi’s fondness for noble married women had long since become famous everywhere.

So once their own Empress fell into his hands, how could she possibly have escaped untouched?

In the future, every lurid story about some foreign Queen Mother or Empress Dowager could simply have its heroine replaced with the Empress of Qian.

Mocking other countries had been harmless.

Amusing, even.

When it happened to their own, it became unbearable national humiliation.

“This has nothing to do with me,” Zheng Fan said. “Even if the commander had not been me and was some other general instead, once the mother of a state had been carried away by a foreign army, whether she was actually violated no longer mattered. Her own people had already decided in their hearts that she was defiled. But at the root of it, they simply needed an excuse. An excuse for their own wounded face, their own uselessness, their own incompetence. Her death lets them transform the humiliation on their faces into tragedy. Into some ridiculous shared hatred against the enemy.”

The Princess Consort stood and leaned against Zheng Fan’s chest.

When she began lifting one hand toward him, the Prince stepped half a pace back.

“That hand just touched a corpse.”

The words were exceptionally impolite.

The body of the Empress of Great Qian, in Prince Pingxi’s eyes, was simply a corpse.

“Our Prince is actually afraid of the dead?”

“Who knows where that hand of yours might wander later.”

“My mistake.”

“Finished looking? The dutiful sons and worthy grandsons outside are about to cry themselves hoarse.”

The Princess Consort looked back at the Empress lying there.

“The men of Qian traded even more things to buy her death. My man traded a whole crowd of Princes and nobles to get me back. Your Highness... does that mean you redeemed me with a dowry?”

“Do you have a fever?”

“I don’t care. That’s what I’m going to believe.”

“I don’t have the patience for this nonsense. I’m idle, not bored.”

“Mm?”

“I hate trouble.”

“Your Highness, will you come with me to wash my hands? Just... stay with me a little longer.”

The Prince and the Princess Consort walked outside.

Only then did the crowd of Princes and nobles finally stop wailing.

Afterward, the Prince entered the tent assigned to Prince Fu Residence.

The Princess Consort washed her hands and sat beside him.

Zhao Yuannian was not there.

He had already gone back to serving as a clerk inside the army.

This Prince Fu’s enthusiasm for doing real work was genuinely astonishing.

A woman entered carrying a pot of tea.

It was the secondary consort with the millstone backside.

The Princess Consort paid absolutely no attention to the fact that her daughter-in-law was present and simply leaned her entire body against the Prince’s shoulder.

The secondary consort began pouring tea.

The Princess Consort seemed to remember something.

“Oh, right. I have something to show you.”

She stood and walked toward a cabinet.

Halfway there, she slipped a coil of silver wire from around her wrist.

Then, with perfect naturalness, she turned around, seized both ends, and looped it directly around the secondary consort’s neck.

The wire was extremely thin.

And extremely sharp.

It cut straight into flesh.

The secondary consort’s eyes filled with horror.

She began struggling.

The Princess Consort clenched her teeth and pulled backward with all her strength.

A vicious look suddenly appeared in the secondary consort’s eyes.

There was no surge of blood qi from her body.

But clearly, she knew certain techniques.

Under this kind of threat, instinct and training immediately took over.

She twisted around.

One hand continued gripping the silver wire.

The other reached for the Princess Consort’s wrist.

At that moment, Prince Pingxi, still seated nearby, moved.

Without hesitation, one hand seized the secondary consort by the throat and slammed her to the ground.

The Prince might have spent years cultivating the habit of extraordinary caution.

But whatever else could be said, he himself was still a Fifth Grade expert.

“Someone!”

Only then did Chen Xianba and the others enter.

“Take her away and keep her under guard.”

The Prince released his hand.

Chen Xianba and the guards seized the secondary consort and dragged her outside.

The Princess Consort took out a handkerchief and pressed it against both palms.

The silver wire had cut her too.

Blood continued seeping through.

“Your Highness should know that the Silver-Armored Guard likes assigning wives to officials’ households.”

Zheng Fan turned his head and looked at her bleeding hands.

“You could have poisoned her. Why insist on doing it yourself?”

The Princess Consort shook her head.

“I don’t know how to poison people.”

“Why not?”

“Because from beginning to end, any tea or food that passed through my hands... you never once put it in your mouth. I don’t want that to remain true in the future.”

[End of Chapter 880]