A Single Tie Of Long Hair Seals A Lifelong Commitment - Chapter 40

In the twenty-third year of Xuanyuan, on the second day of the second lunar month, the Day of Tilling, Crown Prince Xie Yu of the Great Lin Dynasty was assassinated.

The capital, Yongdu, was placed under strict martial law, and no bells or drums were rung.

Every spring, the Emperor would personally visit the Shennong Temple, located in the southeast of the Imperial City, to perform the “Imperial Plowing” ceremony on the temple’s agricultural altar, praying for favorable weather and a prosperous harvest for the year.

Since Emperor Xuanyuan had not fully recovered, Crown Prince Xie Yu was tasked with performing the plowing ceremony on his behalf.

The accompanying guards included the Eastern Palace Guards and a number of Imperial Guards. Emperor Xuanyuan also assigned Lin Zhong, the commander of the Imperial Guards, to Xie Yu.

Shennong Temple was not far. Leaving on foot early in the morning, they were expected to return shortly after Shenshi (3:00 PM – 5:00 PM).

At the second ke of Youshi (5:30 PM), Rong Jun, the Colonel of the Eastern Palace Guards, appeared at the Donghua Gate, covered in blood.

“Prince Qi and Lin Zhong, the commander of the Imperial Guards, have committed treason!”

Emperor Xuanyuan’s former residence, the Hidden Estate, was located in a bustling area yet felt desolate and bleak.

The courtyards were sparse, and crows cawed dryly.

Since Emperor Xuanyuan’s enthronement, the Hidden Estate had been sealed for a long time. Apart from a few old servants guarding the residence, there was no other sign of human life in the vast mansion.

Xie Wenjun awoke in the darkness once again.

She could no longer remember how many times she had fainted and then woken up.

Her vision was still pitch black; she couldn’t see her fingers when she raised her hand. A violent pain shot through the back of her neck as soon as she moved slightly.

“The Princess is awake.”

Her chin was clamped by a dry, withered hand. A moment later, a small, silkworm-bean-sized object was shoved into her mouth.

The medicine had an intense, bitter taste that filled her oral cavity.

Wei Qi stood not far from her. After forcing her to swallow the pill, he saluted and greeted her as usual.

The surroundings were stone walls and very spacious.

When she first woke up here, she could still smell the musty, decaying odor, but now she couldn’t smell anything at all.

The sensation of all her tendons and veins being severed attacked her again. Her clothes had been soaked in sweat multiple times, as if splashed with water.

Cold!

So cold!

Under the extreme pain, beads of cold sweat once again surfaced on Xie Wenjun’s forehead and back.

Soon, her consciousness would blur again.

Taking advantage of her remaining clarity, she asked the question: “Where is this? What is your intention?”

“The Burning Furnace,” Wei Qi’s lips were somewhat pale. He answered her first question.

Fearing she wouldn’t know, he explained what the Burning Furnace was.

“The former Prince Hui’s residence. This is underground.”

Xie Wenjun curled up, hugging herself into a small ball.

She felt her tendons spasming, and her bones seemed to be cracking and shattering, starting from her finger bones and cracking all the way to her toe bones.

Every time she woke up, this agonizing pain of severed tendons and broken bones had to grind her over again.

If there was a knife nearby, she thought she would take it and plunge it into her own heart without hesitation.

After the news of Xie Yu’s assassination reached the Eastern Palace, she ran from the Eastern Palace all the way to the Chongzheng Hall. Like a gust of wind, her figure swiftly flitted past one palace wall after another.

Wei Qi pursued her from behind.

She dared not stop for a moment.

Rushing into the Chongzheng Hall, she saw it filled with iron-clad guards. Without catching her breath, she asked, “Where is my Imperial Brother?”

Rong Jun, kneeling, finished reporting the full details of the Crown Prince’s assassination. He kowtowed once and said, “The Crown Prince’s body… is still at the Shennong Temple.”

The word ‘still’ softened the reality.

In fact, after Xie Yu was pierced through the heart from behind by Lin Zhong’s sword, his body lay haphazardly on the agricultural altar, still uncollected.

Emperor Xuanyuan stuffed some objects into her hand.

“Wei Qi, Rong Jun, escort the Princess to Linxia.”

He gave her some instructions. It seemed to be about giving an order to Prince Shen…

An order to Prince Shen… what?

She was starting to become delirious again.

“What exactly… do you want to do?” Xie Wenjun’s voice was faint.

What does he want to do? What is his intention?

He walked over and slowly knelt beside Xie Wenjun. “Your servant would like to tell the Princess a story.”

Over twenty years ago, there was a natural disaster—a great drought.

The people suffered greatly, and the roads were littered with the dead.

To survive, people ate everything. When they ran out of grain and livestock, they ate the dry grass by the roadside, the bark of trees… the guanyin (a type of white clay) in the temples became the last thing they could use to fill their stomachs.

Hungry people were fully stimulated by the most primitive animalistic instinct for survival and began to kill each other.

The land was devastated, and people resorted to cannibalism.

What was the Imperial Family doing at that time?

The Rebellion of the Five Princes, fighting for power and position.

The court ordered all males over the age of ten to be conscripted into the army. Suddenly, many families were only left with the old, the weak, the sick, orphans, and widows.

“Does the Princess know that a five-year-old child could feed a family for two or three days? By the end, the meat had already begun to rot.”

Then, someone brought grain.

But nothing is free. The price for receiving grain was a child—one sack of grain for one child.

Calling it a sack is generous; it was more like a burlap bag.

How much grain was in one bag? Perhaps three jin (approx. 1.5 kg), perhaps five jin (approx. 2.5 kg).

Too much time had passed, and Wei Qi couldn’t remember exactly how much grain those people used to exchange for him.

But he clearly remembered his mother, weeping inconsolably, pushing him into the hands of the officer distributing the grain and saying to him, “My son, go with the officer, live…”

He was eight years old then.

To live.

How luxurious.

The Hidden Estate had a secret tunnel that led three li outside the city wall. He was secretly brought here through that tunnel.

It was underground, with no sunlight.

The only ventilation hole was above the crematorium, but later the ground was paved with bricks, sealing it completely.

There were many other children here who had been exchanged for a sack of grain. Without exception, their eyes were dull, their cheeks sunken, and they were weak and skinny. They were all about the same age, the smallest being four or five, the oldest no more than seven or eight. He was considered the oldest among this group of children.

They stared blankly at the bronze walls surrounding them.

They dared not speak; speaking would result in being dragged out and beaten.

It was very dark around, with only a few torches providing light. It was like being inside the mouth of a giant monster, about to be swallowed at any moment.

People were constantly being brought in. In just a few days, the room felt a little crowded.

A group of men dressed as officers came and roughly forced every one of them to swallow a pill…

After taking the medicine, their internal organs felt like they were being scorched by a raging fire, their limbs spasmed, and the pain intensified… After the time it takes an incense stick to burn, the pain slowly subsided, only to return again.

This cycle repeated, a fate worse than death.

For countless days and nights thereafter, they were forced to practice an evil technique from Dongyin.

This martial arts technique was extremely sinister.

The person’s skin and internal organs would slowly contract, and the person would shrivel up, wrinkled and compressed, as if they had been air-dried.

Every day, someone failed to endure and died on the spot.

Children who had experienced famine had an innate fear of hunger. To avoid starving, everyone was trained to become like obedient puppets.

Fewer and fewer people survived, from hundreds to dozens.

Then, new young children were brought in.

Wave after wave of living people came in, and pile after pile of corpses were burned. The air here often mixed the smell of burnt flesh with the smell of decay.

Until only Wei Qi remained from the original group of children, the first batch of secret guards was finally trained.

After the training was complete, their bodies stopped developing, the speed of aging was much faster than normal people, and their lifespan was even shorter than normal people. However, their joints became unusually agile, their stature was small, and they were extremely skilled in stealth, tracking, and assassination.

A single fatal blow, coming and going without a trace.

“What is your servant’s intention?” Wei Qi prepared to answer her second question.

He thought for a long time, and then remained silent for a long time, still not answering.

What was his intention?

“The father’s debt is paid by the child.”

He was weary of this world where human life was treated as mere grass.

He hated the emperor sitting on the dragon throne, and he was equally afraid of him.

So he lay in wait.

Lurking in the dark corners of the Imperial Palace, looking for an opportunity to ambush and kill the Dragon Sons and Phoenix Chicks.

In those years, the princes and princesses in the palace either accidentally fell off rockeries, drowned, or succumbed to illness, one after another dying unexpectedly.

No one ever suspected him.

What was the point of killing them all? So he stopped.

Wait a little longer. He wanted these members of the Xie Imperial Family to kill each other for the sake of imperial power.

He gripped Xie Wenjun’s wrist and opened her palm.

It was clammy with sweat.

Wei Qi covered her palm with his, endured the pain, and transferred the qi energy within his body to her.

Her palm felt like a knife gouging out flesh, and Xie Wenjun screamed tragically.

“This inhuman, ghost-like appearance was granted by him, and now I shall make his children also taste this bone-gnawing, heart-piercing agony!”

The corpses of the old servants lay horizontally in the courtyard of the Hidden Estate.

All things returned to silence, only the sound of the wind remained.

Soon, someone would come looking. He had seized Xie Wenjun from the Eastern Palace Guards, and Rong Jun was actively searching for him.

The Burning Furnace had a long secret passage leading outside the capital, Shangyong. That was the path he took when he was eight years old.

Xie Wenjun lay on the dust-covered floor.

He waited for her to wake up.

He knew she would wake up again. After so many years, he, like the “secret guards” on Thin Bow Ridge, was already running low on qi energy. The little bit of qi he transferred wouldn’t take her life, but it would hasten his own demise.

It didn’t matter. Not everyone wanted to live.

He was clearly a man with intact t male anatomy, yet he had to serve as the lowest-ranking rough servant, kneeling and fawning, just like a eunuch.

The Emperor had mutilated him into his current state, yet he still considered himself benevolent for not completely exterminating people like them who were no longer useful to him.

He could clearly see the true nature of this Emperor. His underlying nature was not cruel; he did not easily kill the officials and attendants who had followed him in the past. He even specially sent people every year to travel to Liangxi City to purchase special medicinal herbs to prolong the lives of those who were of no further use to him.

But the years of fratricide prevented him from trusting blood relations and kinship any longer.

He was a person who had experienced affection, but then personally ended that “affection,” so he became paranoid and suspicious.

After Xie Lin ascended the throne, he treated them like garbage, locking these ghost-like people in an alley on the edge of the Imperial City.

He could not possess the dignity of a “person.” Although his body was still intact, the damage caused by the medicine and the martial arts technique had ruined his fundamental health. He was no longer destined to marry, have children, and enjoy the pleasures of family life.

He would rather have died during the famine that year and become a meal for his parents and siblings.

For these past twenty-odd years, the excruciating pain of devouring flesh and purifying bone still flared up from time to time, making life unbearable.

He watched one after another of his companions end their own lives in a moment of crazed delirium.

He couldn’t remember the year the alley was left with only him.

He refused to seek death just yet.

Finally, in the autumn of the sixteenth year of Xuanyuan, he once again saw the Emperor he had longed for and hated so bitterly.

Use things to their fullest extent!

To his surprise, Princess Jiangning did not show fear or disgust because of his grotesque appearance.

This made him feel as if he had returned to the human world from the unmentionable living hell.

He tied a brocade-wrapped bundle around Xie Wenjun’s waist; it was a matter of utmost importance.

That item would once again ignite a world of fratricidal chaos.

Continue the slaughter!

Having done all this, he knelt on the side and closed his eyes to wait.

It was very quiet underground. The only sounds were the breathing of two living people. As he waited, Xie Wenjun trembled.

Opening her eyes, she stared blankly at the endless darkness before her.

Wei Qi knelt squarely before Xie Wenjun and properly kowtowed three resounding times. He said, “Princess, your servant has killed Concubine De for you. This is the last thing your servant can do for you. Your servant will pray for your longevity. If you die young, it doesn’t matter; once you arrive there, your servant will still serve you.”

The pill he fed her was only a counterfeit, its effectiveness less than two or three parts out of ten compared to the original medicine.

But it was enough.

It was enough to make this golden-branch-jade-leaf Imperial Princess lose her sanity and become cruel and bloodthirsty at a certain moment.

He wanted Princess Jiangning to become the same kind of person as him.

“Princess, kill me.”

He no longer referred to himself as a servant. He handed a short dagger to Xie Wenjun.

Light appeared in the long, deep passage, accompanied by chaotic, urgent footsteps.

Xie Wenjun looked ahead through the faint light, but her gaze was empty, as if nothing could enter her pupils.

“Kill me!”

Wei Qi was rushed by the sound of the rapidly approaching footsteps of those searching for them.

Xie Wenjun seemed to receive some kind of command. Holding the short dagger, she savagely plunged it into his withered, stick-like throat.