#82: The Galaxy Overflows (Part 1)

As Ye Tingyan walked into the library, he ran into Zhang Suwu, who was holding two scrolls of books.

They exchanged a look and then ascended the wooden stairs one after the other.

Standing in front of the window, Zhang Suwu turned around and bowed. Ye Tingyan nodded slightly and asked, “Is the eunuch delivering these scrolls to someone?”

“They are Buddhist scriptures copied by Minister Xu Dan,” Zhang Suwu replied. “Minister Xu’s teacher died during the Remonstrance of Jinghe Autumn. With the Empress leaving the palace, Minister Xu has been depressed all day and has lost a lot of weight.”

Ye Tingyan was silent for a moment. “Please try to console him.”

“That is my duty,” Zhang Suwu said.

He paused for a moment and continued, “I’m sure you’ve heard from Young Master Pei that while you were not summoned for these past few days, His Majesty secretly met with another minister late at night.”

“Who was it?”

“The Scholar of Qiongtian, Minister Chang Pingnian, Minister Chang.”

Ye Tingyan raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Chang Zhao?”

He pondered for a moment and then said slowly, “No wonder. When he first emerged, he offered his loyalty to His Majesty, the Empress, and the Grand Tutor. It seemed like he was trying to serve many masters, but he had other intentions. At the time, I was in favor, so if he had tried to win favor away from me, I would have undoubtedly become wary of him. Now that the Grand Tutor and the Empress are gone, how could His Majesty allow me to be the only one to hold great power by his side? This gave him an opportunity to show off his abilities, after all...”

He gave a cunning smile. “If you can work for everyone, you belong to no one.”

Zhang Suwu nodded. “Minister Chang used to frequent the library. He is a man of few words and a solitary nature. Besides Minister Xu, he rarely speaks to others, so his thoughts are unclear. His Majesty’s promotion of him at this time is for the purpose of checking your power, and you should be careful.”

Ye Tingyan suddenly asked, “During these past few days, has Chang Zhao seen Minister Lu Hang?”

Zhang Suwu lowered his eyes and thought for a while before answering, “It seems... he has. A few days ago, Minister Lu Hang came to the library to find a student and happened to run into Scholar Chang. The two hit it off and even made plans to go on an outing outside the palace together.”

Ye Tingyan didn’t respond. Zhang Suwu, not understanding his meaning, lowered his head slightly and happened to see the medicine prescription in his hand. He couldn’t help but ask, “Did you just come from the Imperial Medical Office, Minister?”

Ye Tingyan raised his hand and waved the prescription. “After the court session, His Majesty called me to speak. Seeing me cough repeatedly, he graciously granted me permission to see a doctor at the Imperial Medical Office.”

“Please take care, Minister,” Zhang Suwu said.

“You too,” Ye Tingyan said.

He turned to leave, but after two steps, he heard Zhang Suwu call out to him again from behind.

Turning back, he saw the other man hesitate for a long time before finally asking, “I have a personal question for you, Minister. Was Young Master Pei... originally surnamed Song?”

When Ye Tingyan heard this, he looked up sharply and stared at him for a long time before he finally understood.

From the first time he saw Zhang Suwu in Luo Wei’s palace, he had thought the man looked familiar. Now that he thought about it, it was true—he and Pei Xi bore a slight resemblance!

Seeing his look of inquiry, Zhang Suwu’s lips trembled. He knew he had received an affirmative answer and was about to kneel when Ye Tingyan quickly held his shoulders. “You...”

Zhang Suwu said in a low voice, “Thank you, Your Highness.”

Ye Tingyan looked him over again and again, wanting to say something, but in the end, he didn’t. He only said solemnly, “Take good care of yourself.”

After leaving, Ye Tingyan slowly walked along the palace path in front of the library. It was a strange coincidence that he ran into Chang Zhao, who was just coming out of the front hall, before he returned to Qianfang Palace.

The two hadn’t seen each other for a long time and quickly bowed to each other. Chang Zhao, having shed his previous melancholic air, smiled and asked him, “Where have you come from, Minister Ye?”

“I just went to the Imperial Medical Office to get a prescription,” Ye Tingyan replied.

They walked side by side for a while. Chang Zhao looked up at the sky and sighed, “I don’t know why, but that song ‘False Dragon’s Roar’ has started circulating again on the streets of Bian Du. Are you in charge of investigating this, Minister? With the Grand Tutor dead and the Empress imprisoned, who could be so brazen, Minister Ye?”

Ye Tingyan just smiled and said nothing. After he finished speaking, he feigned a sigh and asked about another matter. “I heard that Scholar Chang and the late Censor-in-Chief Lu Hang hit it off and often made plans to meet. After Minister Lu’s passing, did you light a stick of incense for him?”

The smile on Chang Zhao’s lips froze, and then he and Ye Tingyan shared a knowing laugh.

Just before they parted, he suddenly spoke up. “A warrior dies in battle, a scholar dies in remonstrance. This should be a general’s and a minister’s belief. Does your question mean you feel injustice for the Censor-in-Chief, Minister Ye?”

Ye Tingyan seized the opportunity to ask, “Pingnian, what is your belief?”

Chang Zhao lowered his eyes and didn’t answer. When he looked up again, his eyes were full of smiles. “I am of humble origins. My lifelong wish is nothing but gold, silver, fame, and fortune. They are just common things, so how could I have any beliefs? I just... really envy people like Minister Lu Hang.”

From the moment Luo Wei woke up, her right eyelid wouldn’t stop twitching. In the afternoon, when Ye Tingyan returned from the palace, he saw that she had pasted a gauze butterfly on her right eye with gelatin. Because her eyelid was constantly twitching, the butterfly’s wings trembled as well, as if it was about to take flight.

Ye Tingyan found it amusing. As he got closer, he realized that she was still pondering the wording of a proclamation in her hand and hadn’t even noticed him enter. He couldn’t help but cough softly.

Luo Wei looked up and saw him, and she teased with some surprise, “How is it that you spend less and less time in the palace now that I’m not there? Back then, when you stayed the night, was it because you begged him to stay?”

Ye Tingyan replied with a mix of truth and fiction, “He promoted me precisely to check your power. After you left, how could he not promote others? In that case, I’ve lost the favor I once had, so naturally, I don’t need to stay in the palace for long.”

Luo Wei understood implicitly. “Who is it?”

“Chang Zhao,” Ye Tingyan replied.

“It’s him?” Luo Wei was a little surprised, but she quickly came back to her senses. Shaking her head, she sighed, “If all his maneuvering back then was in preparation for today, this person’s mind is unfathomable. We must be very cautious.”

“I felt the same way after talking with him today,” Ye Tingyan recalled. He agreed, “He used gold and silver as a pretext to hide his true intentions, and I couldn’t figure out what he really wants. Have you investigated this person?”

“I have,” Luo Wei said. “Young Yan was busy with military matters at the time and couldn’t spare the attention, so I left it to Xue Chu. But Xue Chu has been traveling around lately, and I don’t know where he’s gone or when he’ll be back... Speaking of which, how is Young Yan?”

“He avoided detection and withdrew from the hunting grounds completely, and he has temporarily retreated to the area around Luoyang,” Ye Tingyan replied. “What, do you want to see him?”

Luo Wei found this indirect jealousy both funny and annoying. “Just talk properly.”

“I was just teasing you,” Ye Tingyan said, reaching out to flick the butterfly at the corner of her eye. He then took her hand and let out a long sigh. “Come, I have something to tell you.”

Luo Wei was confused but let him lead her to knock on Bo Sen-sen’s door. Bo Sen-sen had a piece of colored glass on his left eye and seemed to be studying a medical text. His expression was not one of surprise; he seemed to have been expecting them. “Come in.”

His room had a strong medicinal scent that wasn’t unpleasant. Luo Wei found a soft cushion and sat down. She then heard Bo Sen-sen say bluntly, “Did you know that Song Lan poisoned you?”

Luo Wei was stunned and looked at Ye Tingyan beside her. Ye Tingyan caressed her wrist and spoke after a long pause. “A few days ago, when Ling Cheng took your pulse, he felt something was wrong, but he couldn’t be sure at the time. After he examined you again yesterday, he instructed me to get some of your usual incense from both the Imperial Medical Office and your palace. Wei Wei...”

He spoke with difficulty, and a faint blush appeared at the corners of his eyes. “In the incense you often burn, besides the musk that you had Minister Liao add for you, there is also a slight poison. This poison, when inhaled into your lungs, cannot be detected immediately, but it will harm your body over time.”

As soon as he finished, Bo Sen-sen chimed in, “But you don’t need to worry too much. Since Song Lan dared to poison your incense, there must be an antidote. After he... slept with you, he would definitely take the antidote to neutralize the poison. The Young Master brought me the incense, and I will study it and surely be able to create an antidote. If we can get rid of ‘Withered Orchid,’ this will be no problem.”

Bo Sen-sen was always a bit unreliable, with two and a half of his three sentences being jokes. His urgent reassurance now likely came from a lack of confidence.

Luo Wei squeezed Ye Tingyan’s palm and scoffed, “So he knew all along.”

She let out a breath and said calmly, “When Suiyun was pregnant, he repeatedly stressed to me that if I had gotten pregnant first, Yu Qiushi would have been removed sooner. It seems he was not unaware that I had tampered with the incense. Instead, he used my plan against me. This way, every time I burned that incense, I was burning my own life.”

She clapped her hands languidly. “What a clever plan, what a devious mind.”

After speaking, Luo Wei, with a normal expression, pulled Ye Tingyan out and wandered around the garden behind the study.

Ye Tingyan was pulled along by her sleeve, walking slowly along the edge of the bamboo grove. After a few steps, Luo Wei suddenly asked, “That day, when he found something was wrong, why didn’t you tell me?”

Ye Tingyan said gently, “It wasn’t that I was deliberately hiding it. I just had my doubts, and I needed to get the incense to be certain. There are no secrets between you and me.”

Luo Wei turned around and nodded, smiling. “You trust me so much now?”

Ye Tingyan looked at her quietly. “Before, I didn’t even dare to trust Chu Yin and Ling Cheng. I was almost lost in a maze of suspicion. But after I was honest with you that day, I started to think, if only I had trusted you sooner, none of the past would have happened... If you, if none of you could be trusted, what meaning would this world have for me?”

Luo Wei turned her head to look at the bamboo grove, and she was in a daze. “Yes, you know...”

“I didn’t understand this principle from the beginning, either. As I walked here just now, I suddenly remembered that after I found out Lu Heng had betrayed you, I deliberately held that begonia jade pendant and put on a show in front of Bu Jun... I cried bitterly in front of her, wanting to test whether she was an accomplice to Lu Heng. But she didn’t know anything. She left me a letter, used her own life to stage a murder in the West Garden, and died with Lu Heng.”

He hadn’t understood her purpose in bringing up this matter, but he now vaguely understood.

For a shattered bronze mirror that had been painstakingly pieced back together, not only was he constantly anxious, having to use jokes to cover his inner insecurity, but Luo Wei was the same.

Even if they could be certain that the other would not hesitate to sacrifice their life for them, they were still entangled in never-ending doubt and suspicion.

If even the most intimate lovers, who had never had any discord, were like this, how much more so for a reunion that had gone through so many trials and tribulations?

However, her willingness to talk to him today about her regret towards Zhang Bujun was also because his bluntness about the poisoning made her re-experience what it felt like to be fully trusted.

Luo Wei felt the hand that was holding hers tighten abruptly.

He repeated, “There are no secrets between you and me.”

“It’s settled, no secrets, no deception ever again.”

She said to herself in her heart, “Hold on a little tighter, then.”

Suddenly, footsteps interrupted the rare silence. Pei Xi vaulted over the railing from the corridor and jogged over.

Seeing him, Ye Tingyan suddenly remembered Zhang Suwu. He had just turned his head and was about to speak to Luo Wei when he heard Pei Xi arrive, panting. “The Ministry of Rites re-drafted the imperial edict today. He used the pretext of waiting for Imperial Concubine Yu to give birth to the eldest imperial son to celebrate together and postponed the date of Princess Shukang’s return to her fiefdom.”

After the Remonstrance of Jinghe Autumn, ‘False Dragon’s Roar’ was once again circulating in Bian Du. The three major events—the killing of the cicadas, the shattering of the jade, and the death-by-remonstrance—had thrown the court into chaos. Song Lan had likely guessed that this was her doing. Although he couldn’t directly act against Song Yaofeng, his postponement of the date was a subtle warning—he was going to use Song Yaofeng to force Luo Wei to show herself.

Luo Wei laughed softly in a mocking tone. “He pondered for ten days and only came up with such a foolish move.”