After fobbing the emperor off with some invented medical instructions, Li Fei walked alone into Funing Palace, sat down at the bedside, and poked a fingertip at the Empress's perfectly flat little belly. The feeling it left in her was hard to name.
She had never liked children.
Other people melted at the sight of a plump pink baby — wanting to kiss it, hold it, swing it up in the air. Li Fei possessed not one drop of that tenderness. Children only struck her as noisy.
Even knowing that the life growing in there was her own flesh and blood, she felt no anticipation, and less maternal feeling. Past the nerves and the tension, what she mostly felt was impatience.
After all, Li Fei only wanted to enjoy herself with the women she liked, not shoulder the labor of raising a daughter — and there was no dodging that labor, either. The child was her own bloodline. Selfish as she was, and fiercely partial to her own, she could never stomach the thought of a daughter of hers living a wretched life, and she wasn't keen on leaving Su Wen to raise the girl alone, like a widow.
So. Damned. Annoying.
Li Fei deflated and flopped listlessly across Su Wen's thighs.
"You're about to be a mother. What is this weary, lazy face?"
Su Wen nodded down at her, slid her fingers through that lovely hair, and scratched lightly at the back of Li Fei's head.
Li Fei narrowed her eyes, luxuriating in the scalp massage, and said something outrageous in a tone that was both lazy and utterly self-righteous:
"From now on you'd better look after the two of us properly, mother and child. If you ever let me be wronged, I'll run straight back to my mother's house."
Su Wen's lips curved.
"We will take responsibility for you, naturally."
She had noticed that ever since their physician-and-patient relationship went thoroughly off the rails, Li Fei had shown an entirely different side of herself — less of the smooth courtier who could face eight directions at once, and more and more willful and spoiled.
Su Wen never showed it, but it delighted her. Having never been in love before, she took it to mean Li Fei had fallen for her, and that was why this little-girl side came out — and in truth, a woman proud by nature and starved of affection for years, and the elder of the two, she loved being leaned on like this. All the tenderness she had kept sealed in her heart for so long tilted quietly toward her lover. She simply had no gift for saying so, and even less for pretty words of love.
"That's more like it."
Li Fei sniffed, then turned and offered comfort in her own fashion. "Don't worry, though. Once our daughter is grown and old enough to do her filial duty, she can take over some of the work of looking after me. I won't leave you toiling like this forever…"
"Scheming over my daughter already?"
Su Wen's hand paused, then drifted down to stroke her belly.
Li Fei had no readiness in her to be a mother — but then, was she herself any better prepared?
A tail came sidling up, nuzzling her cheek as if currying favor, then lingering at her lips, together with Li Fei's wheedling voice:
"Kiss her."
"None of your nonsense."
Su Wen swatted her.
Plagued since childhood by a stubborn illness, examined by every famous physician under heaven, and left with a great deal of idle time to leaf through medical books, Su Wen knew a few basic principles.
For instance: moderate exercise did the body good and no harm, and would not injure the child. But she also knew that Li Fei had never in her life understood the word moderate.
Never mind how she looked at this moment — a little bird nestling close, pitiable enough to melt anyone. Give her half an opening and she would want to bury everything, the root of her tongue and the root of her tail alike…
And considering the length of that tongue and that tail — measurements she had personally taken — Su Wen, as a mother, was not about to permit Miss Imperial Physician to go meeting her daughter at an inappropriate moment.
"Just once. Just a little once."
Li Fei pleaded pitifully, "I told you last time. If I go a few days without cuddling, this immortal blood of mine runs hot and heart-demons sprout everywhere…"
Miss Imperial Physician floated the bait out and watched to see how Su Wen took it.
Su Wen's eyelids fluttered. She pressed a hand to a faintly aching forehead, but in the end she let it pass, as though she had missed the meaning beneath Li Fei's words.
Then she yielded to the squirming, wheedling Miss Imperial Physician. A light flick of her sleeve, and the curtains across the room came down.
In these last years she had read the Daoist canon end to end and never once let her visualization practice lapse, laying a solid foundation. Now that her visualization method had broken through at a frankly unbelievable pace, her soul-force had become pure and vast beyond measure — enough that small arts like drawing objects through the air came to her with no teacher at all.
"Don't move. Otherwise you needn't come looking for me for the next ten months."
Out of a mother's sense of duty, the Empress — mother of the realm — laid down her verbal terms for Miss Imperial Physician, and then took sole command of how matters proceeded.
In the imperial study, Zhao Bing set down his brush, handed a sealed decree into a eunuch's hands, and instructed him, "Take it to the Hanlin Academy and have the Grand Academicians polish the wording. As it happens We go to the ancestral temple tomorrow — this business can be settled at the same time."
"Aye."
The eunuch took it, gave it no more than a passing glance — and went white. "Your Majesty, you…"
"What is it? You think it improper?" Zhao Bing said, with a smile that was not quite a smile.
"The matter is grave. This slave would not dare speak out of turn." The eunuch dropped to his knees with a thud, trembling with awe and dread.
"You dog of a slave. You've followed Us so many years, you probably know Us better than the worms in Our own belly," Zhao Bing said, cursing him fondly. "Say whatever you have to say. Are We going to punish you for it?"
The eunuch kept his head bowed and ventured carefully, "Your Majesty… the Great Song has not invested a Saint in three hundred years…"
"We know…" Zhao Bing sighed as well.
Both men in the imperial study understood perfectly well what the word Saint meant.
In every dynasty, only an Earthly Immortal who had broken through into the Heaven-Man Realm was ever crowned a "Saint." Such beings dwelt high above the clouds, looking down on the teeming multitudes; when they stirred, the sky fell and the earth split with their power.
And measured by the deeds of the Saints who had gone before, they had earned that single word. One Martial Saint alone could hold down a hundred li of rivers and mountains; though demons filled the wilds and enemy states pressed in on every side, none would dare invade lightly.
Such Saints were nothing less than the pillars of the court, the sacred instruments of the state. Only the higher, more elusive station of "Immortal" could haunt their dreams and leave them dying with regret.
Since the "Martial King" fought his savage battle against the Blood Sea Demon Lord and afterward passed away in stillness, the Great Song had produced no Saint for three hundred years — otherwise it would never have declined so far.
And now the Song Emperor meant to invest as a Saint a woman who had not even crossed into the Innate stage?
It was too outrageous for words. Once word got out, the four seas and the eight wastes would shake.
"Minister Li offered up the seed grain, and there will be no more famine under heaven. On that count alone she has saved lives beyond counting — the merit of a living Buddha to ten thousand households."
"The elixir of immortality that Saints themselves would covet, and the Heaven-Grasping Vase, supreme treasure of the immortal houses — she gave both away without a thought for herself, only so that the rivers and mountains of the Great Song would stand forever."
"The state cannot go a day without an heir. That method of Surrogate Birth was found by Lord Lu, true enough, but that pack of useless imperial physicians could not even read it. Only Minister Li, whose medicine touches the divine, took the whole business in hand and helped Our house spread its branches and leaves."
"And since she took over the Demon-Locking Tower she has worn herself to the bone at it, feeding the horses and sharpening the blades, never slack for a moment. We have seen the results with Our own eyes — in no time at all, the whole Demon Suppression Bureau, high and low, wears a new face! If that… what did she call it, that performance-review method of hers, were handed to the Ministry of Personnel and pushed out across the realm, it would surely sweep the sluggish, dying air out of officialdom and set Our officials striving and toiling without rest! Even the crafts, the farms and the merchants might benefit by it, and help the Great Song flourish… another achievement whose fragrance will last a thousand ages."
Zhao Bing stroked the bright green leaf sealed inside its clear crystal, deeply moved, and light glistened in his eyes.
"Minister Li has not long been in office, yet the things she has done, one after another, are every one of them feats that split heaven from earth — good for the state, good for the people, merit that will stand ten thousand generations! Set all the Saints of old before Us, and which of them would dare claim their contribution matched hers?"
"With such a servant of the state, how could We dare fail her?"
"Besides, she comes from the immortal realm to begin with. If We invest her as a Saint, the Saints of old, hearing of it, would likely count it an honor to share the name."
Zhao Bing wiped the tear-tracks from the corners of his eyes and waved a hand. "Go and see to it."
"Aye!"
The eunuch accepted the order, knocked his head deeply to the floor, and withdrew with the imperial edict held in both hands.
The night had gone deep, and Li Fei still sat unmoving at the window.
Tomorrow, everything would settle.
The Empress was carrying her first child, and by the rules of the imperial house, the emperor, the Empress and the whole body of officials would all travel to the ancestral temple to complete the sacrificial rite.
And at that rite there were means of verifying a bloodline. Su Wen had told her of an Empress in the past who lost her virtue, conceived by another man, gambled on her luck, and brazened it out all the way to the rite before she was exposed.
That scandal was never made public, but the private notebooks of certain great families recorded the boundless tide of blood that rose after it.
Palace guards drenched from head to foot ran back and forth without pause; blades rose and fell and heads rolled, and no one knew how many were dragged in. For three full months the smell of blood clung to the streets of Lin'an.
And now that crimson chapter of history was playing out again.
The child in Su Wen's belly had not one copper's worth of connection to Zhao Bing. If Li Fei's calculations were off anywhere, she would find herself behind bars, in danger past all reckoning.
She knew it herself. She had already sent the female ghost who worked most seamlessly with her out of the city ahead of time, taking Qiao'er, Miss Wang and the sprites along, so that none of them would be left somewhere she couldn't reach.
A figure flickered past outside. Li Fei rose and went out, and came upon Nie Yunyi drinking under the moon.
"Hero Nie." Li Fei came forward, her expression grave. "Her Majesty the Empress is with child. The arrow is on the string now, and there's no holding it back…"
This time Nie Yunyi did not crack open the red can. He set it aside instead and looked at her long and hard, his gaze sharper than she had ever seen it. "Why the Empress?"
The challenge did not surprise her.
The sky-stealing, sun-swapping scheme they had settled on earlier ran like this: they would pretend to have some woman bear a child for Zhao Bing and Lu Qianfan both, while in truth using the name of Surrogate Birth to get that woman pregnant with the Song Emperor's blood alone. Then Nie Yunyi would cast everything aside to strike Lu Qianfan dead and flee far away.
By then the dynasty would have its succession, the overweening minister would be gone, and both the Song Emperor and the Nine Thousand Years' faction would believe the child was Lu Qianfan's. Upheaval could not be avoided — but so long as Nie Yunyi was neither captured nor killed, every ambitious man in the capital would be too afraid of following the Nine Thousand Years into the grave to make trouble.
Add to that the bureaucratic bloc headed by Chancellor Liu, which could hardly sit and watch the realm dissolve into chaos and would have to step in to hold the balance; and the upright officials friendly with Nie Yunyi; and even the strength of the Mountain-Moving Sect, all of whom would lend a hand to keep things from spinning out of control.
It was on the strength of all these considerations that Nie Yunyi had agreed to Li Fei's plan — a pity that the plan died in the womb, because Lu Qianfan turned out to be more ruthless than anyone had imagined. Whether that straight-male dog had caught the scent of a conspiracy, or simply wanted to shore up his own position, he had gone and agreed outright to the dog emperor's request that he bear the child!
Nie Yunyi did not know that yet. But by the plan as they had agreed it, Li Fei could easily have found some pretext to let any other noble lady conceive the Song Emperor's child — anyone but Su Wen.
"For the altars of state!" Under that knife-edged stare Li Fei gave not an inch, her voice ringing with righteousness. "A child of the Empress inheriting the great line is proper and legitimate, the very mandate of Heaven! If some other noble lady carried the dragon son while the Empress's belly stayed empty, would the Su clan stand for it? Could they watch the seat of Empress Dowager settle on another woman's head? There would be undercurrents pulling in every direction."
"And once you assassinate that eunuch dog, Hero Nie, one stone will raise a thousand waves. Unnecessary trouble is best spared where it can be spared."
"Her nature being what it is, she would never have agreed to this," Nie Yunyi said, low.
"Do you know her so well? The fact is that she agreed." Li Fei pressed in hard. "I know you hold feelings for Her Majesty, Hero Nie, and I know what it costs a woman to bear a child for someone she does not love… But! This concerns the rivers and mountains of the state, the altars of grain, the teeming multitudes. One slip and it means households seized and mouths silenced, blood enough to float the shields! Other women may be sacrificed — and the Empress may not?!"
In that moment Li Fei radiated righteousness from head to foot, yielding not a step to Nie Yunyi, even turning the interrogation back on him, for all the world a martyr marching forward and never looking back.
"Then why was it Lu Qianfan who proposed the Surrogate Birth method?" Nie Yunyi asked.
"I judged that the eunuch dog would refuse to bear a child, so I aged the prescription on purpose and let his own people turn it up… A method they dig out for themselves is rather more convincing than one I press on them with a fawning smile, wouldn't you say?" Li Fei said without a flicker.
Nie Yunyi held her gaze a long moment, then sighed. "Tomorrow you all go to the ancestral temple, and the guard on Lin'an is bound to be thin… Before you come out again, I will have done what I have to do."
Something in Li Fei's chest gave a lurch.
By the original plan, the ancestral temple could only establish whether the child belonged to the Song Emperor; determining whether its blood bore any link to Lu Qianfan would require a separate examination, days later, by specialists brought in for the purpose.
That meant The Crown Prince Replaced by a Cat would not be exposed anytime soon, and Nie Yunyi had no need to rush.
His sudden decision to go kill the man caught her flat-footed. She and Lu Qianfan were on the same side now!
Li Fei pressed her churning thoughts flat and lowered her lashes. "There's no need for such haste, Hero Nie…"
"Long nights breed too many dreams." Nie Yunyi shook his head, said nothing more, and turned to go.
Li Fei stared down at the cola sitting alone on the stone block, lost in thought for a long while. Then she made up her mind and bought one unit of Fire Fiend essence-blood straight from the System Panel.
A transcendent material of Sequence 4 grade: even though it was not equipment, its price ran as high as a hundred thousand Wealth Points, dropping the hoard she had been so carefully not touching to nine hundred and forty thousand.
Her reason for flinging away a hundred thousand in gold was simple.
Even with the Furnace Battle-Qi in hand, she stood no chance against Nie Yunyi.
But if she used the essence-blood of a "Saint Realm demon" together with the [Blood Demon Scripture] to carry a sixth-tier spell she could cast in an instant — [Abyssal Lava]…
"Let's hope it doesn't come to that." Li Fei spared the can of cola one more glance, then kicked it into the pond.
The long night was thinning toward dawn. Alone, Li Fei changed into the python robe.
Only this time, what hung at her waist was no longer the Demon-Slaying Saber, made for cutting down demons and monsters, but a light, slender sword.
For killing people, the Blade of Joy sat better in the hand.
With the horizon spilling red dawn-fire ahead of her, Li Fei strode out to the gates of the imperial city. The emperor's procession had been waiting there since early: canopies banked like clouds, banners snapping, palace guards standing in ranks.
The officials arrived in a steady trickle, talking in low voices.
Li Fei let her eyes range over the crowd for a while, then stepped casually into the line. As she brushed past Xu Yuzhong, she said under her breath, "Send word to your foster father. Tell him to be careful today… now."
Xu Yuzhong glared at her, alarmed and uncertain, then set his teeth, turned, and hurried out of the ranks.
Li Fei walked on to where several Daoists of the Mountain-Moving Sect stood and cupped her hands. "Perfected Ge. I trust you've been well."
"The immortal maiden's bearing is finer than ever." The old Daoist, all immortal air and Daoist bone, returned the salute with an equally pleasant face.
The other Daoists crowded in as well, so attentive it edged into fawning.
This lot, their heads stuffed full of seeking immortality and questioning the Dao, had been drooling over her immortal arts for a long time, and had invited her up to the Mountain-Moving Sect for a talk more than once these past days. Yet all Li Fei had done was spend a thousand Wealth Points to redeem the first layer of a high-grade Meditation art and make a gift of it to Perfected Ge — a cultivation method unlike anything they had ever seen, a road to heaven that seemed to point straight at the estate of immortals and buddhas. It opened the eyes of the sect's leadership wide, and then left them unable to swallow their food or sleep at night, tormented by the sequels they could not obtain.
Which was precisely what Li Fei wanted to see.
She was no towering genius, but she always knew how to seize on the need at a person's center.
They traded courtesies for a while, one praising the other's lofty Daoist arts, the other marveling at her peerless immortal arts. When the polite noises were finished, Li Fei changed course without warning. "Perfected Ge, I actually think the Mountain-Moving Sect could be made the state religion."
"Oh?"
Perfected Ge's eyebrows twitched.
"Also, if you are so inclined, Perfected Ge, I could take you for a stroll through the immortal realm. If any immortal art there catches your eye, I would be glad to teach it to you and hold nothing back."
Li Fei smiled, tossing out once more a stake they had no way at all of refusing.
"Splendid, splendid!" Perfected Ge laughed aloud. "With the immortal maiden so generous, the whole Mountain-Moving Sect, high and low, will hold the kindness of that teaching firmly in mind. Should the immortal maiden ever have need of anything, this old Daoist would gladly serve her like a dog or a horse."
Plainly the old Daoist had grasped that after whetting their appetites so thoroughly, this sudden fit of open-handed generosity meant she wanted something in return.
"Am I the sort to trade favors for repayment?" Li Fei's smile carried a great deal of weight. "All I ask of you Reverends… is that you do nothing at all."
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