If a person had to pay for every mistake they made in this life, Feng Xuanyi was willing to pay at any time and in any way, but this was the one price he refused to pay!
Nalan Xuan, however, looked utterly unconcerned. He even added fuel to the fire with a soft laugh.
“Where is the imperial physician?!” Feng Xuanyi spun around and crossed the distance to the doors in several long strides. The fury and remorse he had been suppressing finally swelled beyond control and burst free. The finely carved redwood doors could not withstand the force raging through him and shattered beneath his foot.
The imperial physician had only just stepped onto the stone steps when a sharp crack exploded before him. He stared in horror as the door splintered into fragments, his legs trembling uncontrollably until they gave way beneath him. He collapsed onto the ground and found himself looking straight up at Feng Xuanyi, who stood at the threshold with a face so dark he resembled a wrathful spirit from hell. The physician opened his mouth, but not a sound came out. Etiquette, comprehension, greetings, all of it had gone straight to hell.
Mo Yan, following close behind, looked up at Feng Xuanyi and inwardly cried that this was bad. He had never seen His Majesty in such a towering rage. Even when Empress Yu had threatened death and left the palace, Feng Xuanyi’s anger had been mixed with far more regret, desolation, and crushing self-blame. It had never been like this, as though he wanted to destroy everything that entered his sight.
Mo Yan hurriedly hauled the weak-kneed physician upright and half dragged, half supported him toward the hall. Ji Yu stepped forward to lend a hand. He Xiang and Xiao Jiu, already terrified senseless, could only stand there helplessly and miss their chance to make themselves useful before the emperor.
Under Feng Xuanyi’s suffocating pressure, the physician had barely put one foot across the threshold while the other was still outside when Nalan Xuan’s voice drifted toward him. It was not loud, but both its tone and its words were icy. “Get out.”
If he had not been terrified that collapsing in disgrace before the imperial couple might bring disaster upon his family, the physician would have fainted on the spot without hesitation. Anything would have been better than being trapped between the emperor and empress, offending one no matter what he did.
“Take his pulse.” Feng Xuanyi had no intention of wasting words on Nalan Xuan’s obvious resistance. Any trace of sovereign dignity was gone. He seized the physician by the back of his collar, lifted him bodily from the ground, strode over to Nalan Xuan, and only then set him down.
Caught between Feng Xuanyi and Nalan Xuan, the physician sweated like rain. It was the middle of winter, yet damp patches were already spreading across the court robes worn over his winter clothing. He hesitantly extended a trembling hand, but before his fingers could reach Nalan Xuan’s wrist, Nalan Xuan slapped it aside with enough internal force to make the back of the physician’s hand swell instantly. Without looking away or yielding an inch, Nalan Xuan met Feng Xuanyi’s gaze. “Get out.”
The order was meant for the physician, and for Feng Xuanyi as well.
Feng Xuanyi was no less determined to have his own way. His voice squeezed through clenched teeth, cold enough to freeze the room. “If you cannot save the imperial child, I will have your entire family buried with him.”
The physician, whose face had already been twisted with misery, suddenly felt as though the sky itself had collapsed. If he tried to fulfill his duty, the empress refused him. If he obeyed the empress’s command, the emperor refused to accept it, and the matter concerned the imperial bloodline. But if the empress would not consent, what was a lowly physician supposed to do, force him? His head might still be attached to his neck for the moment, but it suddenly felt as though it could roll to the floor at any time.
The stalemate lasted for a moment. Nalan Xuan could afford to wait. Feng Xuanyi could afford to wait. Even the physician could afford to wait. The child could not. Every passing moment was time that might still be used to save a life, so Feng Xuanyi was the first to yield.
He let out a sigh. The hard shell he had forced around himself and the fury beneath it receded together, vanishing like smoke. What remained in his eyes was undisguised exhaustion and remorse, along with something almost humble in its pleading. He crouched down, lowered himself onto one knee, and clasped Nalan Xuan’s hands in both of his. Nalan Xuan did not pull away. When Feng Xuanyi spoke, even his voice had turned hoarse and bitter. “You’ve vented your anger. You’ve taken out your hatred. Let the physician examine you. There may still be hope, all right?”
Even in private, Feng Xuanyi had lowered himself more than once in order to ease the tension between them, win Nalan Xuan back, and please him. In front of others, however, Nalan Xuan had almost instinctively preserved Feng Xuanyi’s dignity. This was the first time he had ever left Feng Xuanyi with nowhere to retreat in public and forced him to plead so completely.
The physician knelt on the floor with his head hanging, shaking like a sieve. More than once, he cursed the heavens for making this his day on duty, and he wished desperately that he could simply slap himself unconscious. After witnessing the emperor humble himself before the empress to this extent, if His Majesty later felt humiliated and had him killed to preserve his dignity, the physician would not even have anywhere to cry injustice.
Yet Feng Xuanyi’s abasement, shocking everyone present, was worth nothing before Nalan Xuan. It could not buy even a trace of hesitation. “I told you long ago. This is my affair. What does it have to do with you? If your suspicions were enough to erase one life, why can’t my hatred do the same? I simply want to know what it feels like to cut down your own closest kin, what kind of pleasure it gives that you’ve grown so fond of it. First your brothers, then your own flesh and blood.”
With that, Nalan Xuan swiftly pulled his hands free from Feng Xuanyi’s grasp and sneered. “Enough. This round is already over. You can go back to Yuliu Palace and rule your realm. Thank you for bestowing this child on me and giving me the chance to enjoy the pleasure that once belonged to you alone.”
Seeing that Feng Xuanyi still did not move, the imperial physician finally got his wish and fainted on the spot. Then, almost as if possessed, Nalan Xuan did something so absurd that even afterward he could not understand why he had done it.
He pulled the candle from a candlestick, seized the base, and raised it. The sharp point pressed against the side of his neck, directly over the pulsing artery. He could clearly feel the cold metal and the faint sting of its tip against his skin. His expression did not change. “Get out! I don’t want to say it a fourth time.”
Nalan Xuan had always believed this sort of threat to die was something only people who spent all day crying “I love you” and “I can’t live without you” would do, no more sophisticated than crying, making a scene, and threatening to hang oneself. Only an idiot like Ning Xuan, who had fallen headfirst into the pit called love and believed there was nothing else in the world for him, could commit something so foolish. Yet now Nalan Xuan had reached for the same tactic without even thinking. For an instant, his mind went blank. It had been pure reflex. The game was over, the curtain had fallen, so everyone should go their separate ways instead of standing in front of him and making themselves unbearable, much less allowing things to happen that were never written into his script.
A variable was the thing a controller with absolute power hated most.
Feng Xuanyi stood there for a long time, his face deathly pale and not a word leaving his lips. He did not order the physician to take Nalan Xuan’s pulse again. He merely looked at him in silence, as though something deep in his eyes had shattered completely. After a very long while, he turned and left without a word. His back seemed to have aged twenty years in an instant, powerless and defeated, silent and alone, as though between heaven and earth he was the only person left.
Nalan Xuan saw none of it. The instant Feng Xuanyi turned away, Nalan Xuan turned as well and walked toward the inner bedchamber. The two of them moved in completely opposite directions.
Every servant and palace maid in Fengyi Palace knelt in deathly silence to see the emperor off. No one dared study the expressions of the emperor or empress. Only those attendants who had once served at Moon-Embracing Palace were already accustomed to clashes like this, and to the emperor’s endless indulgence of Nalan Xuan, even though Nalan Xuan himself had never cared about it and sometimes seemed openly disdainful.