Liu Yin kept his stomach full of questions to himself, because Feng Xuanyi, who had been silent until now, spoke first. “Have you ever regretted it?”
Liu Yin had not expected the first words out of his mouth to be such a melancholy lament. He nearly lost control and laughed.
“Your Majesty knows this subject’s background. In our line of work, if we had time to sit around regretting things, we would probably have lost our lives long ago.”
“Have you ever regretted it?” Feng Xuanyi ignored Liu Yin’s deft attempt to dodge the heart of the question and had no interest in probing why he was evading it or what he was concealing. He went straight to the point. Feng Xuanyi wanted only one answer. As an assassin who absolutely could not afford emotion, a cold-blooded killer, had Liu Yin ever found himself unable to control his feelings? Had he ever regretted anything? From a certain perspective, the two of them were alike. Perhaps only Liu Yin could give him the answer he wanted.
Liu Yin glanced at Feng Xuanyi, then unnaturally turned his head away and stared blankly at the teacup in his hands. Only after a long while did he answer in a voice barely above a whisper. “Yes.”
So even knowing it was wrong, even knowing exactly what he was doing, he had still stubbornly gone through with it. Feng Xuanyi let out a breath. He was like a child who had missed a perfect score because of one wrong answer, only to discover that everyone else had gotten the same question wrong. Suddenly the failure felt easier to bear, and he no longer agonized quite so much over how far he had fallen short of the standard he had set for himself.
Another long silence followed. This time, even Liu Yin was unwilling to speak first merely to ease the atmosphere.
“If…” Feng Xuanyi seemed to be weighing how to phrase the question. His brows drew together even more tightly, leaving three deep lines between them. “I mean if. If you killed your own biological son with your own hands, what would you do?”
At the very end, if one listened closely, the last note of his voice was trembling. That was why Feng Xuanyi did not want to confirm the truth, did not want to investigate whether it was or was not so. Either answer would hurt that person, and if it was true, Feng Xuanyi feared he would no longer be able to face even himself. It was only a hypothetical, only a possibility, yet already he was trembling before it.
“That would never happen. I will never have children.” The words came out of Liu Yin almost by reflex. He paused, his dark eyes shifting as he looked at Feng Xuanyi with uncertainty. “Your Majesty… are you talking about the empress’s child back then?”
“No!” The denial was immediate and ferocious, like a great lion whose tail had been stepped on, ready to perish together with anyone who dared take one more step forward.
Liu Yin had only tossed out the thought casually, yet Feng Xuanyi’s reaction did more to confess the truth than any admission could have. Liu Yin fought desperately to keep the corners of his mouth from rising. It had only been a suspicion, but he had not expected matters to truly develop to this point.
Back then, the man who was now Noble Lord Han had been nothing more than the low-ranking Jieyu Han, and he had lived in Yonghe Palace with Liu Yin. With Liu Yin’s skills, it had not been difficult to learn everything that happened that day in the western side hall. Or rather, he had heard every word of their conversation with perfect clarity.
In truth, one could hardly blame Han Ruifeng for becoming suspicious. Nalan Xuan had entered the palace as an insignificant figure of low status with no imperial favor, then risen almost overnight. He had been granted an extraordinarily illustrious family standing and showered with favor, and at the most crucial moment, he had ascended to the position of empress on the strength of his identity as a descendant of an ancient clan. With no one in the harem more favored than he was, countless eyes practically wanted to burn holes through him, and countless hands longed to drag him down at once. They had simply lacked a suitable excuse.
If a pregnancy could send him soaring to the top in a single step, then it could just as easily ruin his reputation and leave him cast aside like a worn-out shoe. His years of following Prince Yi before entering the palace therefore became the easiest point to exploit. What Nalan Xuan never expected, and what none of the many consorts expected, was that the person who guided the emperor’s suspicions in that direction and personally pushed him into an abyss from which there was no return was Jieyu Han, the very person who had always been closest to him.
Given the emperor’s temperament of preferring to kill three thousand by mistake rather than let a single suspect escape, Liu Yin knew the outcome had already been decided. So he stood outside the window and watched everything unfold with cold eyes. The stillness before that storm was unforgettable. In that one night, the joy and sorrow, love and hatred of countless people were set on their course; countless schemes were born, set into motion, and shattered. Liu Yin had known there was something suspicious about it, but he was only a bystander. He had no friendship or bond with Nalan Xuan, so why should he have spoken up to stop it? Why should he not have done someone a convenient favor? Why should he not simply have watched from the sidelines? Besides, at the time, he had motives of his own…
In any case, whether the scheme succeeded had never been Liu Yin’s decision alone. The child might have been the emperor’s biological child, but if the emperor himself made that decision after being told the circumstances, then anyone tactless enough to expose the truth would merely be courting death. The heart of a sovereign had always been impossible to fathom. Whether one acted or did not act, whether something was true or false, all of it was fate. What was yours to bear could not be escaped; what was not yours could not be forced upon you.
And so the situation today was both inevitable and accidental.
Seeing Liu Yin rendered completely silent, Feng Xuanyi seemed unable to endure it any longer. Desperate for an answer, he pressed, “What would you do?”
If one spoke only of ruthlessness, Nalan Xuan’s methods certainly could not be underestimated. What Liu Yin was about to say might not necessarily be the truth of Nalan Xuan’s heart, but it could at least offer one possible answer.
Hearing the question, Liu Yin rapidly replayed Feng Xuanyi’s words in his mind, then casually gave an answer that plunged Feng Xuanyi into an icy nightmare. “Even a vicious tiger will not eat its own cubs. If it were my child, then either I would never give anyone the opportunity to become pregnant with it in the first place, or, once the child had been conceived, I would ensure its safe birth no matter what it cost me. As for killing it with my own hands, how could I? If I could protect everyone, naturally I would. I would not let my child grow up without a father. And if I could not protect everyone, then I would make certain I died before my child did.”
There was no greater expression of a father’s heart, yet it was also simply human instinct. One could choose never to have a child, but one could not erase a life bound to oneself by blood.
So there was no question that Nalan Xuan would hate Feng Xuanyi. It did not matter whose child it had been; at the very least, it had unquestionably been Nalan Xuan’s. As long as the child was Nalan Xuan’s and Feng Xuanyi was the one who ordered it aborted, that alone was enough to give Nalan Xuan reason to torment him for a very long time. Liu Yin had watched Feng Xuanyi struggle through danger and hardship all these years and had risked his own life in Feng Xuanyi’s service, but even he had neither the right nor the standing to condemn a father who had lost his child, even if Liu Yin himself might have helped push matters in that direction.
“If…” Feng Xuanyi swallowed with difficulty. He no longer knew how to voice the next hypothetical, or whether it had any meaning left at all. “If you later had a child with the person whose unborn child you once killed, what would you do?”
As though he had heard the greatest joke in the world, Liu Yin burst into wild laughter. He had already heard the implication buried in Feng Xuanyi’s question, but that gave him no reason to change his answer. “Do you even need to ask?”
With only the two of them present, the distinction between sovereign and subject seemed to fade somewhat. Liu Yin leaned closer. What he said applied to himself, but it was also an oblique reference to Nalan Xuan. “Your Majesty, surely I do not need to dissect for you what kind of people you and I are?”
Better to betray everyone under heaven than allow even one person to betray oneself by so much as a fraction. It was an utterly unequal compact, yet that creed had long since fused into Feng Xuanyi’s flesh and blood. It was equally embedded in Nalan Xuan’s.
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