Xiangge's hands were shaking. He clenched them into fists, but the trembling wouldn't stop. His chest felt tight, each breath harder than the last.
Was it Anger? Pain? Hatred?
Or was it jealousy?
He couldn't tell.
He pressed a palm against his ribs, as if pressure could stop the ache spreading beneath bone.
There had been a time, long ago, when he too was small like the Crown Prince. When he too had cried in the night.
His throat tightened.
Back then, wasn't that the same way Mingxuan had coaxed him to sleep?
Xiangge had lived at Feilong Palace with Mingxuan for many years. In those days, his world existed only if Mingxuan was there.
He would study only if Mingxuan was willing to teach him. He would seek Mingxuan whenever something confused him, a passage in a text, a sword form he couldn't master.
It had been his habit to enter the imperial chamber without asking, a privilege no one else held.
That night, at eighteen, he'd entered with a book of sword spells.
He never opened it.
But why did everything have to end like this?
After that night, Xiangge had been bedridden for a week. Even after the physicians left, he was too weak to stand.
He moved to Yumeng Palace the moment he could walk again. For six months, he did not see Mingxuan's face.
He hadn't wanted to. Couldn't bear to.
Not long after, he learned the truth. That his parents had been killed by Mingxuan.
Xiangge didn't really remember his past. Even the fragmented memories he could recall were all woven around Mingxuan caring for him.
His parents had died when Xiangge was an infant. He couldn't even remember having an elder sister.
But once he learned the truth of their death, the first thing he did was confront Mingxuan. He only wanted to know if it was true, and if it was, then why.
Mingxuan had been in the middle of a night court session. But Xiangge had barged in. He had offended the Emperor to the extreme.
Mingxuan had only looked at him coldly, and then spoken his decree:
"Crown Prince of the Hua Clan, Xuanji, is wild and misbehaved, unfit to inherit the throne. Zhen hereby strips him of his title. The Silver Throne shall be abolished. He is to be confined at Yumeng Palace for four weeks to reflect on his faults."
And so, the throne he would have claimed at the age of twenty shattered like a dream.
The memory of that decree still rang in his ears. His jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.
In those darkest days of his life, Shenya had been his only solace.
It was true her marriage with Mingxuan broke his heart. It wasn't clear whether it was because of Shenya or Mingxuan.
But even after marrying Mingxuan, she was still willing to come to meet him secretly.
Though after the marriage, their meetings were solely based on her fake excuses of having medications, though he treated her only as a patient and nothing more, in the depths of his heart, to see her hang around him as he worked made him feel he wasn't alone in this world.
The ache he felt everytime she laughed beneath the trees, as she helped him dry herbs under the sun, the way she did not forget to bring his favourite sweets everytime she came...
Hatred boiled inside him, because Mingxuan took her away from him too.
And yet tonight, seeing Mingxuan bleed, his hands had moved on their own. Cleaning the wound. Forcing the pill past his lips.
His body betrayed him even when his mind screamed to let him die. He didn't understand it. Didn't want to.
He stepped up the hanging bridge crossing the two peaks.
The waterfall thundered beside him, down a ten-thousand-foot precipice. It splattered icy drops of water on his robes.
The slap of them on his face was like the sting of needles.
He rarely used this path because of getting wet. But now he needed cold. Even if it meant for him to die from it.
The yew trees that protruded out of the cascades were covered with frosty dew.
The place was dark and empty, him being the only person living here. The hanging lanterns on the bridge were the only things that made the place alive.
These lanterns were powered by Mingxuan's cultivation.
Like the millions of lamps that brightened the streets of Yunshan at night. Or the hundred thousand lanterns that brightened the stairway up the Cloud Mountain.
Or those spiritual lamps that hung down the walls of the three hundred palaces at the mountain peaks.
They flickered only at night, igniting at dusk and vanishing at first light.
When he came to Yumeng Palace, he found a sealed wooden box by the doorsteps. The smell of herbs wafted from it. On the box was a half eaten raw radish.
Xiangge took the box in and slid the door shut.
***
Meanwhile, at the imperial chamber, Mingxuan tossed and turned. No matter how many times he shifted, sleep would not come. He felt half empty and half numb.
A faint weight settled against his chest. Ruhan's body, warm and trusting. Small. Fragile.
Once, another child had been this small. Mingxuan remembered the soft press of a mouth against his wrist, the tender pull as an infant fed.
Mingxuan had bled willingly then. Gladly.
Now his chest bled from a blade.
The weight felt the same. The warmth, unbearable.
Ruhan shifted in his sleep, and pain flared where the wound met small ribs pressing against gauze. The ache pulled him back, dragging him into a memory he'd tried to bury.
Eighteen. Xiangge had been eighteen that night.
He'd entered the imperial chamber with a book of sword spells, as he always did when something confused him.
Mingxuan had been the one person he sought without hesitation, without asking permission first.
That privilege had been Xiangge's alone.
But the book never opened.
Mingxuan had been drugged in his wine meant for assassination. When Xiangge entered, he was drunk and had already lost control.
Mingxuan's jaw tightened. He forced the images down, but they surfaced anyway. Not the act itself. He would not let himself remember that.
Only what came after.
Xiangge had been bedridden for a week. The physicians treated internal bleeding, ruptured tissue.
What he had done to Xiangge that night under the drug's influence left damage that took months to heal.
Xiangge vomited blood for weeks. The physicians could mend torn flesh. But even Rumeng, for all his skill, could not mend what had broken inside Xiangge's mind.
The sheets had been gold that night. By twilight, they were black with blood.
Mingxuan had wept once in fifteen years of rule. That morning, watching Xiangge barely breathe.
Ruhan's breathing was soft and steady now, a gentle rhythm against his neck. Peaceful. Untroubled.
Once, Xiangge's breath had sounded like that too. But now when he breathed, it was shallow. Guarded. Like even the air might betray him.
Mingxuan shut his burning eyes.
Virginity, once taken, could not be returned.
In his long life of discipline and perfection, that night remained his only mistake. And it cost him everything.
Since that night, he had never seen Xiangge smile again.
Instead, he saw only the cold, expressionless face of someone who now hated him to the core, someone who wanted to take his life.
That child would never seek him when confused. Would never call him gege. The boy who had trusted him with everything now trusted him with nothing.
In the end, beneath the mask of the cold Emperor, Mingxuan was still human.
He had the power to rule nations. But not the courage to ask forgiveness.
A faint stir beside him pulled him from the flood of memories. The little prince shivered in his sleep, murmuring that it was cold. He had kicked off the quilt.
Mingxuan gently pulled the golden covers back over Ruhan and drew him closer.
The quilt was warm and comforting.
But it could never warm his frozen heart.