Chapter 97

When the old Grand Historian tremblingly read out that entry, Empress Wei, who had been imprisoned for over a month and had aged dramatically from the ordeal, suddenly seemed to regain her vitality, as if she had been rehydrated. She immediately understood the deeper meaning behind her father’s demand to examine the daily records.

With this realization, she straightened her back, placed a hand on her waist, and glared defiantly.

“Your Majesty, have you forgotten? How could you put me in such an embarrassing position? Just because you no longer love me, are you willing to let the royal child in my womb suffer such disgrace?”

After saying this, she let out a heart-wrenching cry and lunged toward a pillar, intending to dash her head against it.

The officials, young and old, would never allow the Empress to die in such a manner in the imperial court.

She was quickly restrained, and then she began to weep and wail, crying out that she would go to the ancestral temple to seek justice from the ancestors of the Feng family.

She refused to let herself be wronged and tarnish the reputation of the Crown Prince!

The court erupted into chaos, resembling a bustling marketplace.

The old ministers who had supported the Crown Prince all urged the Emperor to reconsider, suggesting that perhaps he had been too drunk to remember the encounter.

It wasn’t that they were particularly sympathetic to the Empress, but if the Crown Prince were implicated in this scandal, it would greatly affect their own interests.

They couldn’t let all their previous efforts go to waste!

However, if the Empress were caught red-handed and admitted to carrying an illegitimate child, there would be nothing they could do as ministers.

After all, the Emperor had already thrown the Imperial family’s dignity to the wind by dragging the Empress into the imperial court.

Such a scandal, even in the countryside, would result in the woman being drowned in a pond.

Who would dare speak up for an adulterous couple? They would be cursed for generations.

And this was the Emperor’s own wife! If the evidence were conclusive and Emperor Duanqing had brought it into the open, who would dare advise him to swallow his anger and continue sitting on the throne with a cuckold’s shame?

But now things were different.

The daily records were vague and ambiguous, and the historian responsible for recording them claimed he didn’t know what had happened between the Emperor and Empress during their private moment.

He had simply recorded the facts as he saw them, striving for impartiality.

Empress Wei, with tears streaming down her face, insisted that she had been wronged and firmly declared that the child in her womb was the Emperor’s.

With this room for maneuver, the old ministers didn’t need to consult Duke Wei for a script.

They all understood what needed to be done next.

The story would go like this: The Emperor, drunk and mourning his lost love, encountered the Empress, who had come to bathe unaware of his presence. In his drunken state, he saw her exposed beauty and, in a moment of passion, impregnated her. However, upon sobering up, he thought it had been a dream and forgot about the encounter.

But surely the Emperor couldn’t depose the Empress and harm the Crown Prince just because he had been drunk?

Until the Empress’s innocence was proven, the old ministers had a duty to urge the Emperor to investigate thoroughly and avoid becoming a laughingstock for generations to come.

From the moment Emperor Duanqing heard the distorted daily records, his large hand gripping the armrest of the throne trembled with rage.

Did they all think he was a senile old fool?

He had indeed been drinking that day, but the wine wasn’t strong.

That shrew had come to pick a fight with him, her face heavily made up, hurling bitter insults at him.

Even if he had been drunk, her words would have sobered him up.

How could he have had any appetite for intimacy with her?

Damn that vile woman! She actually wanted to pin this bastard child on the royal Feng family’s lineage.

Over his dead body!

Although Emperor Duanqing knew the daily records had been tampered with, the historian insisted on their accuracy.

Once the brush had touched the bamboo slips, it was set in stone.

Even future historians would rely on these records.

He wouldn’t waste time arguing about it, as he had direct evidence of the Empress’s adultery: the eunuch Mao Yunsheng.

Emperor Duanqing had personally seen that Mao Yunsheng had not been fully castrated and had imprisoned him in the cold palace, guarded day and night by soldiers.

All he needed to do was bring Mao Yunsheng to the court, strip him, and show the ministers that he was still intact.

That would prove the Empress’s infidelity.

So Emperor Duanqing ordered Mao Yunsheng to be brought forward.

Soon, two guards dragged a eunuch into the hall.

Mao Yunsheng was the chief eunuch of the Empress’s palace, a man of considerable status in the court, and most of the ministers had seen him before.

He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a square face.

While not particularly handsome, he had a certain charm that made it hard to believe he was a eunuch.

But now he was hunched over, weak, and barely alive, dragged into the hall and thrown to the ground.

Emperor Duanqing looked down at Mao Yunsheng, sneering inwardly.

How laughable that the Wei family had made such a fuss over a vague line in the daily records, causing such a stir in his court.

They wanted to pin this on him? Let’s see what the ministers have to say when they see this fake eunuch’s fully intact body!

When Empress Wei first discovered she was pregnant, she had panicked and immediately thought of getting rid of the child.

She had sent Mao Yunsheng to find a reliable abortion remedy outside the palace, bypassing the imperial physicians.

But shortly after sending him out, Emperor Duanqing, having caught wind of something, sealed off her palace and personally entered her chambers.

He ordered several female officials to hold her down while the imperial physician took her pulse.

When the diagnosis confirmed her pregnancy, the Emperor’s face twisted with glee.

After berating her for her promiscuity, he ordered her diet and daily life to be strictly monitored, determined to drag her, heavily pregnant, into the imperial court.

Empress Wei had initially held out hope that Mao Yunsheng had escaped and, hearing of the trouble, wouldn’t dare return.

As long as there were no men in the palace, she could insist the child was the Emperor’s.

But she never expected that Mao Yunsheng had already been captured by the Emperor.

Seeing the situation, she realized they were about to strip him and expose the truth.

So Empress Wei’s sobs gradually quieted, and she glared at the Emperor with venomous eyes, feeling that his elaborate scheme to trap her was utterly despicable and hateful!

How laughable that she, in her youth, had been lured by the vanity of the Empress’s position, stepping into this rotten palace to live with this cold, unfeeling man, her life growing more rotten and unbearable by the day.

Heaven had pitied her and allowed her to meet Mao. But now, this loving pair of mandarin ducks had been struck by disaster, exposed in the imperial court.

All she could hope for was that in the next life, the matchmaker would take pity and let her and Mao be reunited as husband and wife, growing old together.

However, Emperor Duanqing, seated on his throne, savored the despair flooding Empress Wei’s eyes.

Even Duke Wei, who had been so vocal earlier, now looked pale, his hands trembling slightly inside his long sleeves.

This gave Emperor Duanqing even more satisfaction.

Even if it meant sacrificing his dignity as Emperor, seeing these old ministers, who had once forced him to relinquish power, looking as if they had lost their parents, was worth it!

After enjoying the scene for a while, he waved his hand, ordering Mao Yunsheng’s pants to be stripped.

Then he raised an eyebrow, watching Empress Wei’s expression as if she were being slowly dismembered.

Mao Yunsheng was indeed the first man to be publicly stripped in the imperial court.

But when his pants were pulled down, Emperor Duanqing let out a shocked cry and jumped to his feet.

Empress Wei turned to look, then collapsed backward, fainting on the spot.

Duke Wei, ignoring his unconscious daughter, wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and bowed.

“Your Majesty, what is the meaning of bringing a eunuch to the imperial court and stripping him? What are you trying to prove?”

It turned out that Mao Yunsheng’s “gift” had been completely removed, and the wound was still bleeding profusely.

Emperor Duanqing was furious.

At this critical moment, someone had tampered with Mao Yunsheng, who had been imprisoned in the dungeon.

The wound hadn’t even healed yet.

Did they take him and the ministers for fools?

At this thought, Emperor Duanqing could no longer contain his rage.

He roared, “Duke Wei, are you blind? This Mao Yunsheng has clearly just been castrated! He was a fake eunuch, serving closely by the Empress’s side. What good could come of that? Look at the daughter you raised—a shameless adulteress!”

At this moment, Mao Yunsheng weakly lifted his head and said in a feeble voice, “Your Majesty, this servant was castrated late in life, and the wound never healed properly… In the cold dungeon, the wound reopened and was gnawed on by rats, causing the bleeding…”

By the end, Mao Yunsheng was sobbing, as if recalling the horror of the experience.

The guards who had been overseeing him also chimed in, “It’s true! Yesterday we heard the prisoner screaming in his cell. When we arrived, we saw several rats gnawing at the wound. We drove the rats away and applied medicine, but the bleeding hasn’t stopped.”

Emperor Duanqing, seeing that both Mao Yunsheng and the guards were insisting the wound had been caused by rats the previous night, trembled with rage.

How dare they spout such absurd lies in the imperial court, as if he, the Emperor, were a fool! He wished he could have their entire families executed.

Duke Wei, now emboldened, knew that only his grandson, Feng Liwu, could have orchestrated such a flawless castration.

Confident that everything had been taken care of, Duke Wei stood firm against Emperor Duanqing, declaring this a historic injustice and urging the Emperor not to let personal grievances cloud his judgment and wrongfully convict the Empress, lest the people lose faith in the court.

As the old ministers knelt en masse, pleading with the Emperor to investigate thoroughly and not wrong the Empress, a eunuch entered the hall to report that the Crown Prince had returned from his border inspection and was about to enter Luo’an.

Emperor Duanqing knew that the Empress was a toothless tiger, trapped in the palace and powerless.

Duke Wei, though influential, had no reach within the palace.

The only one who could have orchestrated this without his knowledge was that rebellious son of his.

Now, hearing that Feng Liwu was about to enter Luo’an, Emperor Duanqing’s frustration grew.

He sneered and said, “Since the matter of the Empress has not yet been clarified, and it involves her, the Crown Prince should avoid any appearance of impropriety. Inform the Crown Prince to remain outside the city until his mother’s situation is resolved.”

Upon receiving the Emperor’s decree, the Crown Prince set up a temporary camp outside Luo’an, waiting daily for news from the court.

When Jiang Xiurun finally arrived in Luo’an after a long journey, she noticed the makeshift camp outside the city gates.

She stepped out of the carriage and walked into the camp, where she saw the Crown Prince rinsing his mouth with water from a flask, attended by a servant.

A pot of leftover porridge from the previous night was warming on a stove nearby.

Jiang Xiurun was shocked by the Crown Prince’s poor living conditions and hurried forward to pay her respects.

She asked why he wasn’t staying in a nearby villa.

Feng Liwu replied calmly, “My mother is suffering an unjust accusation in the palace. As her son and a subject of the Emperor, how could I seek comfort in a villa while she endures this?”

Jiang Xiurun glanced at the nearby road, where the morning light was beginning to reveal the flow of people coming and going…

She thought to herself, “Well, Your Highness is certainly making a statement by camping right outside the city gates, adding to his father’s troubles!”