A thousand years of recuperation — or, more honestly, of hunched and wheezing survival — had brought the Great Song's population to roughly twenty million, and yet the ministers entitled to attend court on an ordinary day numbered barely a hundred.
But today was the Longevity Festival. More than half the officials of the fourth rank and above from every corner of the realm had hurried to Lin'an to wish His Majesty long life, and with the delegation of Perfected Ones from the Mountain-Moving Sect come to attend the banquet, the crowd waiting outside the Golden Throne Hall numbered well over two hundred.
"Presenting — Qian Shouye, Governor of Nan Commandery, for audience!"
The eunuch stood at the palace doors calling the names one by one, sending each official inside to pay his respects to the Emperor.
Mercifully, the various ceremonial procedures had already concluded, and since the day was one of national celebration, the assembled officials were not required to stand stiffly at attention outside the hall; they could move about freely and chat.
I've been careless!
Li Fei crouched in the corner of the wall, cigarette between her lips, impatience written all over her face.
Two hundred-odd people, each going in to present a gift and offer a few lines of congratulation — even at top speed, that was a minute apiece.
And it was worse than that. Whenever the Emperor took a liking to a gift, the minister had to explain it at some length; and whenever a minister he had his eye on came before him, a few words of encouragement or warning were unavoidable…
By Li Fei's estimate, it would be a full two hours before anyone got to eat.
"You really mean to use those two things as birthday gifts?" Nie Yunyi asked out of nowhere.
For some upright, incorruptible official, presenting the Emperor with a bit of local produce would have been perfectly fine.
But what sort of person was Li Fei?
They hadn't known each other long, yet Nie Yunyi had already noticed how skilled she was at working an angle. Not only had she quietly finagled herself a post as imperial physician, but on the night she met Zhao Bing at the Prime Minister's Residence, the sheer artistry of her flattery would have shamed a career sycophant.
Turning up now with two items that looked worthless from any angle, as a birthday tribute to the Emperor — it simply didn't fit the way she operated.
"This humble hermit has her own clever schemes." Li Fei kept him in suspense, smiling slyly. "You'll see soon enough anyway."
Nie Yunyi shrugged, leaned back against the wall, raised his gourd for a sip of wine, and waited quietly as the ministers filed into the Golden Throne Hall in turn.
Li Fei, meanwhile, gathered the two little sprites into her arms as pillows and shut her eyes to doze.
She had no idea how long had passed before the eunuch's shrill, carrying voice woke her:
"Presenting — Imperial Physician Li Fei, for audience!"
Li Fei opened her eyes and found the space before the hall swept clean and empty, with only saber-bearing guards standing watch and patrolling.
Clearly the birthday audiences proceeded in order of rank. The post of imperial physician was nowhere near lofty enough to place her among the great lords of the court; Li Fei was a special case, but in the end she had still been slotted in dead last.
"Only right that I'm the closing act."
Li Fei laughed softly and climbed the steps with unhurried grace. Eva and Sasha followed behind her, each holding up in both hands an object draped in yellow silk, butterfly wings fanning gently.
As for Nie Yunyi — former Commander of the Demon Suppression Bureau, pillar of the Great Song, the last spine left in the court — he held the right to enter the hall armed and shod and to walk before the throne without hurrying. Sword-case on his back, he strolled as if through his own garden toward the place that haunted the dreams of every subject in the realm.
The moment the two humans and two sprites stepped inside, several hundred pairs of eyes swung around and fixed on them.
Station shapes bearing, and comfort shapes the body: everyone with the standing to be here was either imperial kin or a high officer of the court, and their glances alone carried weight. Anyone of weak nerve would have felt their legs go out from under them on the spot.
Li Fei couldn't have cared less. Under the ringed stares of the assembly, she let her gaze sweep the room and walked straight toward its center.
The hall had been prepared in advance — lanterns and streamers everywhere, incense burning, musicians playing — so that its grandeur carried an added warmth of festivity. The ministers and even the Mountain-Moving Sect's Perfected Ones were all seated, though no one lifted a chopstick until the last gift had been presented.
Naturally, set against those ministers and Perfected Ones sitting bolt upright in court robes and Daoist vestments, Li Fei's party looked thoroughly out of place.
Nie Yunyi went without saying — he reeked of the wandering rivers and lakes. Li Fei wore a white flowing gown, her black hair a waterfall, fragrance rising with every dainty step, and at some point a glittering golden glove had appeared on her left hand. And Eva and Sasha were plainly not human at all.
"How dare you!"
Before Li Fei had even reached the Emperor, a dark-faced man slammed his table and rounded on her, pointing at the two sprites. "Demons plague this world and have butchered the common folk beyond counting, and yet you two parade monsters into the imperial palace as though it were nothing! Nie Yunyi, what exactly are you scheming?"
Li Fei's eyes slid coolly over and recognized him at once: Lu Qianfan's adopted son, eighth in the ranking, one Xu Yuzhong.
Having silently sentenced him to death, Li Fei let out a cold laugh and gave no ground at all.
"Monsters? What monsters! These are plainly auspicious omens!"
"A mere imperial physician, and yet — no regard for rank or station—"
Xu Yuzhong glared her down and was about to press harder when a mild voice came from the front of the hall.
"Minister Xu, today is a day of great joy. That temper of yours could stand a little reining in."
"We have met those two butterfly sprites before. They are indeed clever and well-mannered, without the faintest trace of demonic aura… Besides, even if they truly were wild and untamable, with all of you here versed in both letters and arms, are you telling Us that two little spirits could turn the heavens upside down?"
"Your Majesty is wise!" Li Fei called out at once, striding forward a few paces and bowing over her clasped hands. "This humble servant greets Your Majesty! May Your Majesty live ten thousand years, ten thousand years, ten thousand times ten thousand years."
"Minister Li, this makes the second time you and We have met, does it not? Have you collected any new masterworks these past days?" Zhao Bing said with a smile.
"This humble servant has had no leisure these past days for painting or calligraphy, and so no chance to stumble across any further immortal works." Li Fei's manner was scrupulously respectful. "Your servant was blind that day and failed to recognize the true dragon. I beg Your Majesty's pardon."
"Failed to recognize Us? It seems Our imperial physician is not only unmatched in medicine, but a genius at playing dumb." Zhao Bing's smile deepened, and he waved a hand. "Present your gift, then. We are very much looking forward to it."
"Yes."
Only then did Li Fei raise her head to look at the Emperor and the Empress seated directly before her.
Draped in golden dragon robes, Zhao Bing could just about be called imposing, with some measure of a Son of Heaven's bearing. But seated side by side with the Empress — stately, magnificent, beauty without peer — he was so thoroughly outshone that he took on the comic air of a monkey in a hat.
"Though today is Your Majesty's birthday banquet, the true dragon and the true phoenix have always been one heart, guarding the fortunes of the Great Song together."
The imperial physician turned a radiant smile on the composed, self-possessed Empress, her eyes curving into crescent moons. "Therefore this humble servant has brought two gifts today — one for the Empress, one for His Majesty — with the wish that the Great Song endure a thousand autumns, dragon and phoenix in harmony."
Su Wen's eyelids fluttered, and her hands tightened on the arms of her chair.
"Minister Li is most thoughtful." Zhao Bing sounded genuinely intrigued. "Let Us see them, quickly."
Li Fei waved her right hand. Eva flew forward on beating butterfly wings, wearing an innocent smile that couldn't have harmed a fly.
Under the gaze of the entire hall, Li Fei lifted the silk cloth away, revealing the wooden tray Eva held up in both hands.
On the tray sat a wholly unremarkable rock.
"This is an immortal stone your servant brought back from the immortal realm. It is a gift for Her Majesty the Empress."
Amid the uproar that swept the hall, Li Fei pointed without a flicker of embarrassment at the rock she had hauled in from some forgotten corner outside the city walls, and introduced it with the utmost gravity.
"Preposterous! Nie Yunyi, is this the person you recommended?"
"An immortal stone? Utter nonsense!"
"Laughable! Simply laughable!"
Seeing Li Fei play such a foolish card, the ministers of Lu Qianfan's faction could no longer keep their seats, and set upon her with tongue and brush alike.
Xu Yuzhong, silenced for only a moment, was the loudest of them all.
"Your Majesty, this woman makes sport of us all and deceives the throne! Her heart deserves the executioner. Your servant begs Your Majesty to consign this enchantress and her demon-mongering lies to the imperial dungeon at once, interrogate her under torture, and seize her associates along with her!"
In the space of an instant Li Fei had become the target of every arrow in the room, denounced by a thousand fingers — and no small number of officials were also aiming their innuendo squarely at Nie Yunyi.
Zhao Bing gave Li Fei a long, searching look, pressed a hand down to quiet the assembly, then said gravely, "Since Minister Li calls this an immortal stone, presumably it possesses some marvelous property?"
"Your Majesty sees clearly!" Li Fei said admiringly. "This stone is called the Beauty Stone. There is a spirit within it, and it can distinguish good from evil, fair from foul."
"If a woman of middling looks and poor conduct touches it, the Beauty Stone is no different from any common rock. But if a beauty of one in a thousand should touch it, and your servant then works an immortal art upon it to wake the spirit inside, it will transform of its own accord into snow-white silver. And of course — should some woman who unites beauty and virtue in one person stroke this immortal stone, then a single immortal technique from your servant will turn it into pure, solid gold!"
"Sheer nonsense!"
Xu Yuzhong was widely read and knew perfectly well that in all of history there had never been an art for turning stone into gold, so he adopted a tone of open contempt and sneered, "If that rock turns into gold, I'll eat it right here where I stand!"
That he dared cut in while Li Fei was speaking with the Emperor, on the strength of being Lu Qianfan's adopted son, said everything about how arrogant Lu Qianfan's faction had grown.
"Those are your words, remember." Li Fei shot him a look that was not quite a smile.
"Enough quarreling from the two of you. True or false, we shall all see soon enough." Zhao Bing showed no anger; his measuring gaze simply rested on Li Fei.
"Even so… a woman of peerless beauty and unblemished conduct is one in ten thousand. Even for your humble servant, the best I can manage is to turn it to silver…"
Li Fei complained with a show of mild distress, then turned to the Empress. Before the Emperor and the entire civil and military court, she extended her hand and smiled brilliantly. "Her Majesty the Empress is mother to the realm, a beauty to shame the nation itself, and your servant has long admired her… Your servant makes bold to ask Her Majesty to lend me a hand. That way, surely, no bright pearl will be cast into darkness, and no fine thing wasted."
How dare she? Has she no fear of losing her head?
Su Wen inclined her head, her composure in ruins.
The two sessions of treatment and massage in Funing Palace had already broken every rule there was, and Su Wen had made up her mind to keep what happened inside the palace strictly secret — once they stepped past the palace gates, the two of them were nothing but physician and patient.
What she had never imagined was that the imperial physician would dare, on the Emperor's birthday, inside this sacred and solemn Golden Throne Hall, in front of the husband who was hers in name only, to confess her feelings.
And it was a confession. To everyone else, there was nothing improper about one woman praising the Empress so lavishly — but in Su Wen's ears the deeper meaning came through effortlessly.
A bright pearl cast into darkness, a fine thing wasted — wasn't that precisely her marriage to Zhao Bing?
In that moment the bewitching voice of the immortals within the mirror began to coil around her ears again. Su Wen lowered her head and fought to steady herself, terrified that the ministers would catch some clue and get the imperial physician killed on the spot.
And while Su Wen was forcing down the storm-tossed ocean inside her, Li Fei tilted her head, puzzled.
It was just a bit of casual flattery. Why have you frozen up?
"Empress, why not give it a try?" Zhao Bing said, smiling.
The Emperor's voice sent another tremor through Su Wen. Along with the thin threads of guilt and tension came an inexpressible thrill of excitement, welling up unbidden — like slipping out into the streets as a child behind her elders' backs, knowing full well it was wrong and doing it anyway.
For Su Wen, who had spent years walking the straight and narrow, whose life differed in no way from stagnant water, that feeling was the lush forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden — and Li Fei was the serpent coaxing her to eat it, drawing her in deeper than she could climb out of.
Fortunately, years of meditation practice and the arid life of the inner palace had forged real steadiness in her. In the space of a few breaths she pressed her scattered thoughts flat, turned a deaf ear to the venomous whispering the demon in the mirror sent up from the depths of her consciousness, and said quietly:
"Then let Us try."
The Empress, magnificently formed, rose slowly to her feet, and the glittering tassels hanging from her phoenix crown did not sway so much as a hair. Her bearing was without equal; the gaze she cast down over the hall stopped the ministers' breath in their throats. She walked toward Li Fei wrapped in the faint elegance of plum blossom, her golden-red shawl trailing behind her like a bridal train — and though she said not a word, every inch of her carried presence.
Tea fragrance met plum fragrance. Su Wen looked deeply at Li Fei; her slender jade finger rested plainly on the stone, and yet it felt as though it were pressing into the imperial physician's chest. A thousand words crossed within those phoenix eyes, and in the end distilled into one:
Must it come to this?
Li Fei met her gaze, gentle and unruffled.
Her Art of Tea might be profound to the point of transcendence, but it still fell some way short of mind-reading. She could tell the Empress had something on her mind, yet couldn't pin down what — so she simply deployed her all-purpose weapon: pure, disarming tenderness.
Then the imperial physician read threads of sorrow in the Empress's eyes, which seemed to say:
We… cannot.
Though she had only half understood the question, Miss Top Courtesan did not panic in the slightest, and delivered an answer worthy of the number one firm in the public relations industry.
With eyes that likewise seemed freighted with a thousand unspoken words, she gazed at the Empress and murmured:
"Having once seen the boundless sea, no other water is worth the name; and save for the clouds of Mount Li, no cloud is a cloud to me."
The Erudition Earring's formidable translation function had swapped Mount Wu for Mount Li — a famous peak in Nan Commandery, celebrated for the beauty of its mists and rosy vapors.
In the eyes of the assembled ministers, this was the imperial physician praising the Empress: profound and beguiling as the vast ocean, beyond the rival of any ceaselessly flowing river; lush and lovely as Mount Li, beside which all other peaks lost their color.
But Su Wen heard it plainly for what it was — a love poem.
Apart from you, no one else can enter my eyes.
Li Fei gently extended her fingertip in its golden silk glove and touched it to the stone — and, as if by accident, brought it into contact with the Empress's fingertip.
The touch was nothing at all, yet the thrill of the Forbidden broke against the Empress's heart like a tide. Beside her upswept black hair, strand after strand of tassels began to tremble, ringing faint and sweet.
But every burning gaze in the hall was fixed with total concentration on that "immortal stone," and no one noticed the barely perceptible bashfulness and unease of the mistress of the Empress's palace.
[Midas Gloves]
Equipment Grade: Full Moon
Attributes: Attack Speed +30%
Enchantment: Alchemy (Lv10)
Alchemy (Lv10): Automatically accumulates one point of energy per day. Each point of energy can transmute a target weighing 275 grams with insufficient resistance into an equal weight of gold. (Current energy: 51/9999)
Note: May be charged with Mana Crystals.
On raw attributes alone, this piece of equipment was the bottom of the bottom among Full Moon grade gear. The reason Li Fei had paid the steep price of twenty-five thousand gold coins for it was that the glove amounted to a miniature gold mine in its own right — and could obliterate most extraordinary beings at Sequence 7 in an instant.
A flash of golden light came and went, veiling the momentary daze in Su Wen's eyes. When it faded, that stone had become brilliant, solid gold.
"Stone — stone into gold?"
"Unbelievable."
"This is truly the art of the immortals…"
The hall erupted. Xu Yuzhong's face went white, and he shouted his remonstrance:
"Your Majesty, look closely! This must be some sleight of hand by that enchantress!"
But his shouting was doomed to be ignored. There were adepts enough in this hall; there was no chance Li Fei could have pulled the wool over their eyes.
Zhao Bing sat stunned for a moment, then turned his gaze to an old Daoist with the bearing of an immortal.
"Perfected Ge, does the Mountain-Moving Sect possess any such Daoist art for turning stone into gold?"
It was a question, but Zhao Bing already had his answer. After all, the Buddhist and Daoist schools of the Demon-Sealing Continent had long since sunk every skill point into slaying demons and exorcising evil. The Mountain-Moving Sect in particular, for all the court's patronage, still relied on heavenly treasure that surfaced once a century merely to regrow a severed limb — let alone anything as inconceivable as transmuting stone into gold.
The old Daoist shook his head slowly.
"In a thousand years, no such art has ever existed under heaven."
"…"
Zhao Bing said nothing more, but one word had taken possession of his mind: immortal.
"Minister Xu. Care for a bite?"
Li Fei glanced at Xu Yuzhong, who snorted coldly and turned his face away.
Mindful of the occasion, Li Fei didn't wait for the Emperor to smooth things over. Her expression cleared from storm to sunshine, and with a charming smile she turned her eyes to the Empress and offered up the gold in both hands.
"Her Majesty is cultivated within and without. Your servant's reverence for you is as pure as this gold."
"It is yours now."
The ingot was not large, yet it had cost the [Midas Gloves] a full twelve points of energy; it weighed over three kilograms and sat heavy in the hand. Su Wen seized it and closed her fist around it as though afraid Xu Yuzhong might snatch it away and eat it.
"Then We shall accept it."
Even with the gift in hand, the Empress's tone stayed cool, as though she were deliberately keeping her distance — unwilling to exchange a single extra word with the woman before her, lest anyone read her thoughts and bring lethal trouble down on the imperial physician.
Yet all the way back to her seat, her right hand stayed clenched tight around that gold, knuckles gone white without her noticing at all.
And amid the general commotion, Li Fei said with a bright, artful smile:
"There is one more — the gift your humble servant offers to His Majesty."
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