Chapter 20

Shen Qing’s fingers tightened on the page. Expressionless, she continued reading.
Thankfully, the next line was just barely acceptable:
“Or, if yin and yang walk as shadow and form for three months, then the yin body may attain long life.”
In other words, as long as she stayed by Li Daoxuan’s side, inseparable for three months, she could overturn her short-lived fate.
Difficult, yes, but infinitely better than the first requirement.
The characters further down the page grew more and more blurred, as if water had once been spilled here then dried, smearing the ink into patches. Only a few scattered words remained legible.
From those smudged fragments, Shen Qing roughly pieced together a vague message: that after rebirth, if she changed certain things, she would suffer certain side effects; that something-something death, method, doing good deeds, could offset something.
Combining that with how different this life already was from the last, Nine-headed Xiangyou resurfacing, the weasel demon appearing, Shen Qing boldly guessed: the missing lines had once said that because of her rebirth, she would face not only a shortened lifespan, but also changes in her blood or fortune that made her particularly alluring to evil creatures.
As the saying went: Fate is fickle, yin and yang in balance. All things in this world turn on cause and effect. What is gained must come with loss; what is won must bear its price.
Blessing hides within misfortune, and misfortune within blessing. Gain and loss are like yin and yang, born of one another, circling endlessly.
For a matter like defying Heaven to seize a new fate: she might have satisfied her wish for the moment and gained a great, unnatural boon, but walking against the will of Heaven, backlash was inevitable.
Still, it wasn’t unsolvable. The book’s answer was to do good, slay demons and cut down monsters for the people, distribute porridge to the poor, and so on.
If that was the case, then once she went home, she could ladle out porridge more often while also clearing out the creatures that stirred up trouble. That might help, might it not?
Just as that thought let her heart ease a little, another line caught her eye:
“For the Twin-Wings Rebirth Array to take effect, the yang party must consent of their own will.”
Shen Qing traced those few words with her fingertip. In her mind rose the image of Li Daoxuan the moment before she died in her past life, he’d looked ready to eat her alive. He would willingly agree? That was the joke of the century.
So it seemed this book did have its inaccuracies.
This page should have continued, but when Shen Qing tried to turn it, she realized she’d already reached the end. Looking closely, she discovered faint traces where several pages had been torn out.
She’d already gotten all the information she needed; the missing pages no longer mattered. Closing Xuan Ji, she set it casually on her bedside cabinet and sat in a daze for a while. Only when the sky darkened and the sun lost some of its bite did she finally head home.
All the way back, Shen Qing kept turning one problem over and over: how on earth was she supposed to stay inseparably at Li Daoxuan’s side for three whole months? Even a close personal attendant had days off, didn’t they?
Was she really supposed to disguise herself and sneak into his household as a personal maid?
The thought had barely climbed out of her mind before Shen Qing smacked it back down. Leaving aside the fact that there wasn’t a single maidservant in Li Daoxuan’s residence to begin with, the idea of her serving anyone was utterly unacceptable.
What a joke. Her parents had worked themselves half to death to raise her; how could she turn around and go be someone else’s maid?
Suddenly, Shen Qing found herself regretting having returned the double-fish jade pendant so quickly.
Her original intention had been to use the pendant to lure him into seeking her out, so she could “accidentally” reveal that she possessed the Glass Heart.
After all, a minister’s daughter didn’t get many chances to meet a prince. If their next meeting was months away, the Shen family couldn’t afford to wait.
True, she could use the Glass Heart as a bargaining chip, but asking him to spend three months joined at the hip with her? No matter how she framed it, that condition sounded suspicious. There was no guarantee Li Daoxuan would agree.
With his beloved jade pendant thrown into the bargain as well, her odds of success would’ve been higher.
She didn’t have long to stew over it, because once she got home, an even more shocking piece of news arrived.
No sooner had Shen Qing stepped down from the carriage than her mother’s maid hurried her into the main hall.
Her father and mother had been waiting there for some time, both of them wearing solemn expressions.
Perplexed, Shen Qing asked, “Mother, Father, what’s happened?”
Father Shen looked at his daughter, opened his mouth, but the words rolled around on his tongue and refused to come out. In the end, it was Mother Shen who beckoned. “You’an, come here.”
Shen Qing went over and sat beside her.
Mother Shen drew out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from her daughter’s nose and spoke slowly. “You’an, what do you think of Prince Cang?”
Shen Qing’s confusion deepened. Why bring up Li Daoxuan out of nowhere? After a moment’s thought, she chose to ask first, “Why has Mother suddenly brought him up?”
Mother Shen stopped circling around and came straight to the point. “His Majesty summoned your father and me today and asked about your marriage.”
A wild guess flashed up in Shen Qing’s heart. She blinked, a little dazed. “So…”
“His Majesty has a mind to grant a marriage between you.”
Shen Qing sat ramrod-straight. The bells in her hair jingled sharply, echoing her unsettled heart. “What?!”
In her previous life, there had never been any imperial betrothal at all.
Seeing her daughter so agitated, Mother Shen soothed her. “Don’t worry. Your father has just returned from the border in triumph. His military merit is fresh and his influence is at its peak; before His Majesty, he holds some weight. The Emperor didn’t force the matter.”
She stroked Shen Qing’s hair. “Right now, he simply wishes to hear your own thoughts. If you don’t wish it, I’ll have your father refuse this match.”
Shen Qing was about to say she didn’t, but suddenly she froze. The refusal on the tip of her tongue turned into, “Mother, let me think it over.”
Mother Shen didn’t press her. “Very well.”
Shen Qing quickly weighed the pros and cons in her heart.
At present, if she wanted to change this demon-attracting constitution of hers, she needed to accumulate virtue. But Xuan Ji hadn’t specified how many demons she had to slay or how long she had to do good. Add to that the fact that her senior brother would never allow her to run into danger, and the chance of him taking her along to kill some great fiend was extremely slim.
With Li Daoxuan, however, things were different. If they were married, “spending three months inseparably together” would be almost natural. On top of that, she could use the Glass Heart as leverage and demand that Li Daoxuan take her along to subdue demons. If she slew enough, her fortune should shift sooner or later.
Then there was the matter of imperial will. The Son of Heaven’s favor was not something she could simply brush off.
If she rejected an imperial marriage granted to His Majesty’s most beloved son, then even if the Emperor didn’t show it on his face, he would certainly harbor a thorn in his heart. As time went on, who could say that thorn wouldn’t turn into suspicion?
Taking everything into account, if this marriage went through, the only real downside was the prickling discomfort in Shen Qing’s own chest. For her, it was all gain and no loss.
She had no idea what Li Daoxuan thought of it, but she herself was starting to see it clearly. At worst, they could keep their distance after the wedding and later look for a way to separate.
True, one always said that divorcing from an imperial marriage was nearly impossible, but as the saying went, there are more solutions than problems. If things truly couldn’t be resolved… well, then she would just have to wrong Li Daoxuan. Being widowed wasn’t such a bad outcome either.
As that thought settled, her father burst out in anger. “When choosing a husband for our daughter, we might as well pick someone of a family slightly beneath our own. If she is wronged, at least we can still scold the other side!”
“Prince Cang has been arrogant and unbridled since childhood, indulgent and unrestrained, doing as he pleases. From what I’ve seen, he is by no means the sort of man who will cherish his wife! If our daughter marries him, who knows how much suffering she will endure!”
Mother Shen, however, was not convinced. “Look around, among all the young men of Chang’an, how many at eighteen have neither married nor taken a concubine, and have never even installed a bed-servant? Prince Cang’s residence has no inner-court women at all; from childhood he has not so much as kept a personal maid. You could fairly call him pure in conduct.”
She paused, took a sip of tea, then continued. “The boy may look wild and unruly, but he has his own kind of cleverness. He removed himself from court politics early and never joined the struggle for the throne. His life has been one of ease and freedom. If You’an were to marry him, leaving everything else aside, at least she would never be caught in the vicious infighting of an inner courtyard. Her days would surely be more comfortable than those of ordinary young ladies.”
“Even that unruly temper of his may well come from losing his mother so young. I, for one, am willing to believe that this child will cherish his wife in the future.”
With that, Father Shen seemed somewhat swayed; “keeping himself clean” alone was already rare enough. After a moment of thought, he said, “In the end, we should still listen to You’an’s wishes.”
Shen Qing lifted her head abruptly and gave her verdict. “Actually, your daughter does feel some goodwill toward him. If I must marry him, then I’m willing.”
Though Father Shen had mentally prepared himself, hearing his daughter say so still made his heart tighten.
“Very well. I’ll report back to His Majesty tomorrow.”
By the time Li Daoxuan, the person at the very center of all this, heard that he was about to be betrothed, several days had already passed.
Gu Yun had just vaulted over the courtyard wall when he saw Li Daoxuan practicing with a horse-lance.
In his hands, the long spear stirred the air with a fearsome momentum, carrying the force to sweep aside ten thousand troops.
When the spear’s tip swept past right in front of him, Gu Yun immediately hugged his head and stumbled back a few steps. “That was close, my hair!”
Just as he was silently celebrating that his hair remained intact, Li Daoxuan had already stopped and set the lance back on its rack.
He casually pulled out a hand towel to wipe the sweat beading on his face. “Skipping lessons to come find me, what is it?”
Today, Qiuren was unusually well-behaved, coiled neatly on the lance rack, its snake eyes half-lidded in a doze.
With no terrifying snake on his good brother’s person, Gu Yun breathed a huge sigh of relief, slung an arm around Li Daoxuan’s shoulder, and grinned in a way that could only be described as sleazy. “Who was it the other day who proclaimed, ‘Beneath the flesh, all are white bone. This prince has no interest in such vulgar mortals’? And yet today that same someone silently went and got engaged to said ‘vulgar mortal’?”
Li Daoxuan’s gaze sharpened. His hand stilled mid-wipe. “What did you say?”
Gu Yun, oblivious to the sudden drop in temperature around him, cheerfully poured oil on the fire. “Don’t play dumb with your own brother. If my father hadn’t whispered it to me in secret, I’d still be in the dark that tomorrow the imperial decree for your betrothal to Miss Shen is going to be issued.”
“You’d better not go back to Dongshan Temple, or the brothers who heard you spouting off that day will laugh you to death!”
“Old Huang!” Li Daoxuan suddenly barked.
Hearing his lord call, the senior secretary, Old Huang, came hurrying into the inner courtyard. For a man well past fifty, he moved fast enough to almost strike sparks from the flagstones. “Yes, Your Highness, this humble minister is here!”
“What are your orders?” he asked.
Li Daoxuan said coldly, “Send someone to the Prince Regent’s manor. Inform them that the heir apparent has skipped class and left Dongshan Temple. He is presently making a nuisance of himself in my residence.”
Gu Yun’s eyes went round. “A-Man! How shameless can you get! That’s just cheating!”
Old Huang glanced at Gu Yun, then at Li Daoxuan. “This…”
Li Daoxuan slanted him a look. “What, you’re not going?”
Old Huang straightened in a fluster. “This minister will go at once!”
Gu Yun, filled with righteous indignation, jabbed a trembling finger at Li Daoxuan. “You, you, you!” After several false starts, concern for his own backside finally prevailed. “Don’t you dare! I’ll go, all right? I’ll go!”
Before leaving, he couldn’t resist shouting, “A-Man! If you can’t take the heat, don’t play the game!”
He turned his sorrow and fury into strength, scrambled back over the wall he’d come from, and bolted toward Dongshan Temple like the wind.
Old Huang hunched his shoulders, wiping away the sweat at his temples with his sleeve. “Your Highness… should I still go?”
Li Daoxuan didn’t even bother changing his clothes and strode straight toward the outer courtyard.
“Go where? Prepare the carriage. We’re going to the palace.”
Old Huang was baffled. “Your Highness, it’s already late. Why suddenly enter the palace at this hour?”
Li Daoxuan sneered to himself. Why else? Naturally, to call the marriage off.