At the rebuke, Nalan Xuan looked up. Eight palace servants stood to either side in an imposing formation. At their head was the man who could truly be called Feng Xuanyi’s trusted confidant: Mo Yan. The sixteen attendants behind him all stood with lowered heads and respectful posture, eyes cast down and mouths firmly shut. Not one of them made a sound. Mo Yan himself remained perfectly composed—neither servile nor arrogant, neither impatient nor flustered. At times, Nalan Xuan could not help thinking that it was a terrible waste for a man like this to exist merely as a palace servant, someone with no real rights of his own who could be summoned and dismissed at another’s whim, his life and death entirely in another person’s hands.
Mo Yan still held one hand raised to stop the palace servant behind him from continuing his tirade. In his other hand was a yellow scroll, folded with immaculate precision and held with great respect. Nalan Xuan knew that sight far too well. Such a scroll could bestow favor, gifts, and supreme glory; it could just as easily carry cold-hearted rejection, punishment, and death. Somewhere inside, he understood at once. He had spent so many days waiting precisely for this moment: a single imperial decree, a handful of words capable of deciding a person’s fate—whether he stayed or left, whether he lived or died. Yet for Nalan Xuan, none of it seemed important anymore. A predetermined ending no longer held any power to threaten him.
He knelt respectfully. Throughout the main hall of Moon-Embracing Palace, everyone seemed to sense the pressure of an approaching storm. Faces turned pale as though catastrophe were about to descend. For one brief moment, the only sound was the soft rustling of the imperial decree as Mo Yan unfolded it.
“By the Mandate of Heaven, the Emperor decrees: On the seventeenth day of the third month, at the Hour of the Monkey, a palace-wide evening banquet shall be held. All consorts of every palace are to attend. Respect this decree.”
Elio’s Notes: The Hour of the Monkey (申時) traditionally spans roughly 3:00–5:00 p.m.
When Mo Yan finished reading, folded the decree neatly again, and respectfully placed it into Nalan Xuan’s hands, the catastrophe everyone in Moon-Embracing Palace had been holding their breath for failed to arrive. The servants all released their breath almost in unison. Nalan Xuan, by contrast, lost the calm composure he had maintained until then and looked up in genuine astonishment. “That’s all?”
For once, the eternal frost of Mo Yan’s expression seemed to thaw slightly. “Noble Lord should not overthink matters. Taking good care of your health is what matters most. You must not miss tonight’s banquet. This servant will return to the palace and report that the decree has been delivered.”
Mo Yan had arrived with great fanfare, stayed only briefly, and then departed just as quickly. After their false alarm, the servants of Moon-Embracing Palace immediately came back to life and began bustling about with renewed energy. Nalan Xuan, however, remained bewildered. The more Feng Xuanyi behaved this way, the less Nalan Xuan could understand what the man was thinking or what he intended to do. From lowly servant to court official, from a young general covered in military glory to a male consort confined within the deep palace, from a favored consort showered in imperial grace to a discarded concubine no one seemed to care about—through every rise and fall, Nalan Xuan truly could no longer understand or see clearly. Again and again he had warned himself not to sink too deeply. Again and again he had reminded himself to remain vigilant. Again and again he had understood with perfect clarity how dangerous Feng Xuanyi was. Yet he still could not understand him, could not guess what he meant, could not see through him. When had Nalan Xuan once again become a piece within the game without even realizing it?
A palace-wide banquet was something every residence took seriously. Each consort practically wanted to dress beautifully enough to steal souls, hoping His Majesty’s first glance would fall upon them—and ideally never leave again. Red and green garments, embroidered splendor, jewels and flowers: by shortly after noon, once the decree had spread to every corner of the imperial harem, the normally lifeless palace suddenly erupted into activity. Everywhere one looked, servants were hurrying about in nervous confusion. Bolts of fashionable and rarely seen fabric appeared from storage, along with all kinds of jeweled ornaments that ordinarily never saw daylight. Even Xiao Dezi threw himself enthusiastically into the excitement. Unfortunately, although Nalan Xuan cooperated when necessary, he showed very little interest himself, which had Xiao Dezi practically jumping in frustration.
“Master, what do you think for tonight? This sky-blue long robe with water-ripple patterns and the moon-white silk-patterned outer robe? Or this red robe with scattered black flowers, paired with the gold-threaded scarlet-patterned overcoat? And the waist sash—should it be the one edged in silver thread or the plain one with openwork embroidery? And the hairpin—”
Nalan Xuan felt as though one head had become two. He pointed at what he was already wearing. “I think this is perfectly fine.”
Xiao Dezi walked over wearing an expression of profound seriousness. Perhaps Nalan Xuan had indulged him too much and made him increasingly bold, or perhaps Xiao Dezi had simply figured out that Nalan Xuan was the sort of person who was all thunder and little rain—and sometimes too lazy even to thunder. In front of others, Xiao Dezi remained quick, diligent, and unfailingly respectful, but in private his words and behavior had clearly become much more “presumptuous.”
“Does Master want to hear the truth, or something pleasant?”
Nalan Xuan himself did not know how his relationship with Xiao Dezi had gone from guarded suspicion at the beginning to this kind of indulgence. He simply trusted, instinctively, that Xiao Dezi would not betray him. Anyone would have been frightened by how fragile and unsupported that instinctive trust really was. Nalan Xuan, however, seemed entirely certain of it—or perhaps he simply had nowhere else to turn.
“I don’t want to hear either. It’s only a meal. How is it any different from usual? There will be a few more people and we’ll eat somewhere else, that’s all. Just now I saw maids from Luoxiao Palace and Chunfu Palace collide with each other around the corner, and they’re still arguing about it. You’re not planning to join that battle too, are you? Or have you already fought your way through them and returned victorious?”
“Master has been in a poor mood lately. You haven’t missed a single dose of the medicine prescribed by the imperial physician, but your complexion still isn’t good. You’re terribly pale. There is nothing wrong with that moon-white robe you’re wearing—assuming Master were healthy. Right now, though, you look like a sheet of white paper.”
A faint sideways glance from Nalan Xuan immediately made Xiao Dezi close his mouth. Xiao Dezi might have concluded that his master was mostly thunder and little rain, but that did not mean Nalan Xuan lacked the authority to make the rain fall harder whenever he chose. A fallen phoenix might be worse off than a chicken, but even a starving camel was still larger than a horse.
Elio’s Notes: The paired sayings “a fallen phoenix is worse than a chicken” and “even a starving camel is larger than a horse” contrast humiliation after a fall from power with the fact that someone formerly powerful may still retain far more influence than an ordinary person.
“His Majesty hasn’t come to Moon-Embracing Palace for quite a few days now. Master doesn’t seem worried and never likes going out. If you don’t seize the opportunity tonight, who knows what things will look like later…”
Xiao Dezi did not dare openly nag him, so he began muttering to himself instead as he obediently returned all the clothing and jewelry he had pulled from boxes and cupboards back into storage.
For some inexplicable reason, the scene felt familiar. Once, long ago, someone else had nagged endlessly beside Nalan Xuan just like this. At the time, he had found it unbearably annoying. It was always the same few sentences repeated over and over—things he could neither understand nor make sense of. Yet whether he understood or not, the voice had persisted without end. He could not remember when that aggravating sound had finally disappeared. What followed was not relief, but loneliness, as though the entire world had fallen silent with it. No one followed him around nagging anymore. The world seemed to have turned gray, vast and desolate, leaving only the thin boundary where black met white—and himself standing alone upon that line.
He drifted into another daze, his thoughts slipping away. Such episodes had become increasingly frequent lately, as though something were about to leave while something else was trying to return, pulling back and forth, intertwining and tearing at him. Sometimes he felt like himself, and sometimes he did not. Nalan Xuan had once wondered whether his time here was finally ending, whether just as he had arrived for no apparent reason, he might someday return for no apparent reason as well. He had waited with anticipation for a long time. All that came were increasingly frequent and increasingly prolonged spells of blankness. Nothing else happened.
“Wait.”
Perhaps Xiao Dezi was not wrong. To be given something and then have it taken away again truly did hurt. Perhaps Feng Xuanyi was cruel, heartless, and cold. But in order to survive—in order to keep the child bound to him by blood alive…
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