Chapter 22: Nuptial Covenants and the Viper's Stratagem
The pact congealed like venomous ambrosia: Great Yan pledged to underwrite Ye Changfeng's imperial ambitions with argent legions and shadowed cohorts, while he vowed to wed Murong Wan and enthrone her as empress upon his ascension. The clauses exuded serpentine exactitude—a decadal span of marital exclusivity, annulled only should Wan prove barren or fail to bear Shang progeny. Should heirs emerge, Yan's sanguine taint would eternally suffuse the Dragon Throne through ordained scions.
As crepuscular hues gilded the negotiation chamber with deceit, Changfeng artfully aggrandized his exploits—cataclysm-alleviating innovations, vitreous artistry, solanum cultivation, and even the piquant seduction of chilli-laced crustaceans—all rebranded as his solitary genius. "That Your Highness conceived such marvels yet remains fettered by bastard lineage!" Murong Wei feigned umbrage, his sigh a masterstroke of theatrical commiseration. Beneath ceremonial silks, anticipation thrummed; Yan's arachnids already spun filaments to manipulate Wan's unborn heirs against Shang's fracturing sovereignty.
"Alas, the despotism of hereditary legitimacy," Changfeng lamented, his visage chiselled into tragic relief by guttering tapers. "A crown prince's banality eclipses even celestial ingenuity."
Wei's brow corrugated on cue, though triumph coiled within. Let Shang's adders self-devour—Yan's horologe now cradled their disintegrating dynasty's sands. "Inconceivable that the Mid-Autumn verse symposium's grandeur falls to such an imbecilic son of the first wife," he condoled, already envisioning invasion pennants unfurling once Wan's womb secured conquest.
Changfeng's cognition spiralled into stygian realms—visions of Consort Fu Xianxian's throat beneath silken ligatures interlaced with Wan's rosaceous lips. "Might this unworthy prince enquire...does the Phoenix Princess genuinely acquiesce?" His timbre quivered with calibrated fragility.
Wei's chuckle resonated hollow as ritual carillons. "My sister reveres your likeness—extols your virility and... *aesthetic endowments*." The falsehood glided effortlessly over Wan's salivating fixation, her chambers strewn with contraband sketches of Changfeng's sculpted mandible.
As auroral rays gilded the Forbidden City's sinuous roofscapes, Changfeng genuflected before cinnabar portals—a petitioner hewn from ambition and perspiration. Humidity adhered to his brocade vestments like imperial distrust. Within the throne chamber's alabaster crucible, history's pendulum oscillated betwixt coronation and execution.
Murong Wei's egressing carriage dissolved into mieliferous luminescence, its wheels pulverizing discarded supplications bearing Fu Xianxian's despairing script. Within the demimonde's maze, Zhao Miao'er calibrated toxic coiffure pins, her nascent compact with Yan's intelligencers thrumming like a plucked zither string.
The jeu intensified. Silken conflagrations blazed sempiternal.
Scorching Diadems and the Serpent's Ploy
Perspiration-drenched linens coiled about Ye Changfeng's throat like asps, the zenithal sun blistering the cinnabar steps to the Imperial Sanctum. Through three infernal hours he had genuflected beneath celestial scrutiny, entreaties to glimpse the Divine Sovereign thwarted by eunuchs whose fealty had petrified into arctic apathy.
"Your Highness, this day honours the new moon's sanctity—no ministerial audience convenes," intoned the Master of the Inner Chambers, his cadence slick with counterfeit deference. The functionary's vermilion vestments, immaculate and untainted by brine, derided Changfeng's bedraggled state.
"Not this prince of the blood?" Changfeng croaked, swatting at saline rivulets cascading from his temples. His ceremonial guan tilted precariously, jade pendulums chattering like spectres' mirth. Beyond the jade-inlaid courtyard, silhouettes of courtesans fluttered behind rice-paper partitions—his own mother, Consort Chen, exiled from imperial grace for seventeen lunar cycles.
A eunuch's enamelled digit traced the fenghuang embroidery adorning his sleeve. "Statecraft resides within the purview of mandarins and Heaven's Scion. Should Your Highness bear urgent dispatches regarding Yan-Shang concord, the Ministry of Ceremonial Propriety anticipates your memorial."
Changfeng's phalanges blanched. The newly instated Minister of Rites, Fang Ning—a creature spawned from that parvenu Ye Ling—would rather administer hemlock than facilitate his nuptial compact with Princess Wan.
"May you sup on sulphur in Diyu's deepest pit, emasculated vermin!" He fulminated inwardly, yet moulded his timbre to fractured nobility: "When northern barbarians storm our palisades, recall whose timorousness barred this prince from cautioning the Dragon Seat!"
As though conjured by the imprecation, a zephyr stirred the scarlet colonnades. Ye Ling materialized from an ice-cooled palanquin, his gossamer summer robes undulating like lunar ectoplasm. A rime of permafrost clung to his smirk.
"Eldest Imperial Brother, what karmic synchronicity!" Ling's diction oozed candied hoarfrost. In his wake, servitors wafted blocks of glacial nephrite, their frigidity rippling through the miasmal air.
In that suspended moment, Changfeng tasted destiny's dregs—Ling's ascendancy etched in the eunuchs' abrupt kowtows, his own briny effluvia crystallizing into a cerement of obsolescence. The game's tableau shifted. Let silken conflagrations burn sempiternal.
Silken Contempt and the Serpent's Reckoning
"How peculiar that the Sixth Prince idles through palace corridors rather than overseeing the Mid-Autumn revelries," Ye Changfeng sneered, envy curdling his tone as he noted the glacial aura enveloping Ye Ling. "Your tawdry 'intimate apparel spectacle' defiles scholarly decorum and stains our dynasty's honour—the Emperor's fury blazes like a forge! He'll grant no audience to such infamy!"
"Indeed?" Ye Ling grinned, accepting a celadon bowl of chilled mung essence from a prostrate eunuch. The crystalline sweetness of the iced broth perfumed the air, its condensation taunting Changfeng's sodden collar. "How protracted has Eldest Brother's vigil been? Such stoic devotion!"
"Sacrifices for the realm are never measured in hours," Changfeng spat. "You, however, will only stoke His Majesty's ire to inferno!"
As if summoned by the affront, the emperor's chamberlain emerged, kowtowing before Ling. "The Son of Heaven commands Your Highness's immediate attendance in the Celestial Study."
Ling affected contrition. "Ah, duty summons! Pray continue your noble vigil, Brother—I shall convey your... *fervent* loyalty to the Divine Sovereign." The gibe, sheathed in silk, drew sanguine ire.
"Bask in transient glory, Ye Ling!" Changfeng hissed, watching his sibling dissolve into the sanctum's vermilion maw. "Your hubris shall be your pyre!"
A trembling acolyte eunuch materialized. "Your Highness, Princess Murong Wan awaits in the Hall of Blossoming Harmony. Consort Chen entreats your presence."
Changfeng's gaze lingered on the lacquered portals. Denied imperial benediction, the Yan princess became his sole stratagem. "Proceed," he growled, the syllables dripping venom.
Within the Celestial Study, pandemonium reigned.
"Impudent scion! The censorate's memorials scorch these jade tiles!" Emperor Shang hurled scrolls like bladed winds. "Must I eternally cleanse the filth of your scandals?!"
Ling sidestepped a missile emblazoned *ethical transgression: profane attire. "Unconventional, perhaps—yet lucrative! The pleasure quarter revenues alone surpass ten million taels! Do golden streams not mute moralizing cicadas?"
The Emperor was arrested mid-cast, a ledger of tribute suspended. "Ten million?"
"Veritas!" Ling flourished silk scrolls inked with numerals gleaming like war trophies. "The masses crave novelty—why not harvest silver from their hungers while Yan's adders coil?"
Beyond latticework windows, cicadas chanted elegiac verses. In the Hall of Blossoming Harmony, Murong Wan adjusted pheromonic silks, oblivious that her nuptials teetered on ledgers of lucre and intrigue.
Silken Coffers and the Serpent's Atonement
"Must you cloak yourself in this venal merchant's affectation like threadbare silks?" Emperor Shang's rebuke reverberated through sandalwood-scented chambers, his jade-encrusted hand gesturing disdain. "You're imperial nephrite, not gutter-tarnished pyrite—grovelling for obols while censors bark of impropriety! Our dynasty's coffers teem—must you debase us for dregs?"
Ye Ling lounged indolently against cinnabar pilasters, his tousled hair and utilitarian robes scoffing at courtly grandeur. "If our vaults ran over, why did Chen Huai's stewardship leave but cobwebs and whispers?" His eyes, twin poisoned quill points, pierced imperial pretence. "We share truth's bitter vintage, Father—you endured their rapacity while their fangs still served."
The Emperor's dragon-carved sceptre quivered. Ling drew nearer, wintergreen and ambition perfuming his rebuttal. "Profit disdains mock modesty, Father—it speaks in numerals and harvests. The Mid-Autumn theatre demands a deluge of silver—shall we flay paupers or let gilded peacocks preen their vanity into prosperity?"
A silken parchment unfurled like dragonhide, brothel revenues gleaming like naga scales. "Let censors prate of morality—their scrolls of virtue procure neither rice nor levees!"
Silence crystallized between them, fracturing with unvoiced truths. The Emperor knew intimately how Ling's lucre replenished granaries and fortified riverbanks—tarnished silver alchemized into public boon. Where Changfeng deemed souls as livestock, Ling engaged them as lifeboat comrades.
"Your tactics stink of the dockyard slums," the emperor thundered, though his gaze shimmered with begrudging awe.
"Yet sluice gates feed celestial ponds, do they not?" Ling's smirk danced with foxfire. "When symposium dilettantes parade their plumage, their decadence shall pave roads and dam floods. Is that not philosophy's apotheosis?"
The Emperor's laughter boomed like celestial war drums, rattling elephantine incense tripods. "Impudent basilisk! You'd make Laozi himself renounce his sutras!"
Beyond scarlet latticework, cicadas chanted vespers. In the Hall of Unfurling Blossoms, Murong Wan traced pheromonic fractals upon feather fans, oblivious her nuptials pivoted on abacus beads of sin and salvation.
The balance trembled. Silken wars raged eternal.
Silken Dominion and the Serpent's Gambit
The Emperor's fingers quivered as he tendered Dayu's edict—a chrysocolla-encrusted scroll exuding unbridled effrontery. Ye Ling unfurled the parchment, his lips twisting at the meticulous clerical script articulating rapacious ultimatums: *Full disclosure of the Yijing's arcana. Salt refinement methodologies. Annual tributes of millet and gossamer—all proffered without recompense.
"They denominate this *statecraft*," the Emperor sneered, his visage weathering a decade's erosion in one exhalation. "Once, our dominion commanded veneration. Now carrion kites pick at our sinews while courtiers squabble over chaff."
Ye Ling traced Dayu's crimson sigil—an ophidian entwining argent-laden peaks. "Let them unsheathe venom, Father. We shall transmute their avarice into our crucible." His ocular flames intensified. "Dayu hoards bullion lodes? We'll exsanguinate their vaults through mercantile stratagems so serpentine, they'll *remunerate* us for exploitation's privilege."
The Emperor's mirth rasped like siroccos across desiccated plains. "Lucre! Perpetually in love with thee! Must imperium reek of haggling stalls?"
"Imperium *is* the haggling stall," Ling retorted, producing mildewed ledgers stinking of decaying ambition. "Behold Chen Huai's fiscal legerdemain—his clan's peculations could arm triune insurrections. Yet we tolerate their putrescence, for extirpation would collapse our edifice."
The Emperor's jade-adorned digits hovered above evidence of Chen's transgressions: adulterated tax rolls, purloined antiquities, and codices chronicling payola to northern satraps. "They've rooted themselves like millennium cedars," he whispered, defeat's patina clouding his timbre.
Ling inclined forward, gaze incandescent. "Then conflagration shall cleanse the grove. Let Dayu's argent fuel the pyre." He percussed the foreign scroll. "Accede to their 'petitions'—in exchange for mineral monopolies, trade hegemonies, and tithes from each mined drachm. We'll honeycomb their mountains as they applaud hollow triumph."
Quietude congealed between them, viscous with dynastic jeopardy. Beyond pierced fenestration, cranes ascended from palace moats—their silhouettes disintegrating against hematite sunsets.
"You summon cataclysm," the Emperor finally exhaled.
"Cataclysm already pounds our gates," Ling riposted, smirking vulpine before the dovecote. "Shall we bar portals or brew some chrysanthemum tea?"
In the Pavilion of Cosmic Accord, Murong Wan inscribed diplomatic characters with Dayu emissaries, oblivious that her nuptial brushwork inked protocols of her homeland's fiscal capitulation.
The die plunged irrevocably. Silken wars raged eternally.
Silken Legacies and the Serpent's Ascendancy
"These seasons of temperance have forged you in virtue's crucible," Emperor Shang intoned, his aged hands cradling a vermilion casket adorned with gilt fenghuang. "Receive this recompense for your forbearance."
Ye Ling inclined his head, veiling a sardonic quirk of lips. *Forbearance?* He'd eviscerated adversaries with alacrity—what need for restraint? Yet his mien assumed grave humility as the casket yawned to reveal its treasure: a phoenix coiffure pin scintillating with halcyon plumes and asteriated chrysolites, its arabesque tail feathers frozen in argent fluidity.
"Your august mother's most treasured parure," the emperor murmured, tracing the heirloom's sinuous contours. "Destined for your chosen consort. The nuptial yoke shall not constrain your selection—court intrigues hold no dominion here."
Ling's fingers closed about the relic, blind to its sub rosa significance—the fenghuang emblem being the sole province of empresses. To the emperor, this bequest transcended ornamentation, whispering tacit investiture.
——
Within the Gilded Pavilion of Chunhua Palace, Murong Wan grimaced at her porcelain chalice. "This 'Jade Summit Mist' resembles ditchwater strained through stable straw!" She thrust the celadon vessel aside, its crystalline chime scattering Consort Chen's sycophants like startled sparrows.
Chen Yun, the disgraced minister's foster daughter, sneered through carmined lips. "Savages nurse on fermented mare's blood, do they not? How... *pastoral."
"Yun'er!" Ye Changfeng's censure rang hollow, his gaze lingering on Wan's tempest-flushed countenance. "Her Highness merely articulates northern... *candour."
"Candour?" Chen Yun's jadeite hairpin trembled with suppressed ire. "She's a coarse ogress grasping at diadems beyond her ken!"
Wan's digits brushed the serpentine dagger concealed in her sash—a Yan-crafted envenomed fang. Let these silken court-maggots prattle; she'd carve her ascension through Shang's putrescent hierarchy.
In shadowed vestibules, Zhao Miao'er adjusted her pheromonic veils, the phoenix relic's existence igniting espionage networks like wildfire. Within armoury vaults, Lü Wu inventoried crates of bullion earmarked for "sartorial exports"—bankrolling insurrection stitch by silken stitch.
The final gambit loomed. Silken conflagrations blazed eternal.
Silken Insolence and the Serpent's Retribution
"Princess, my sister has been overindulged by Her Ladyship—her impertinence springs from affection, not malice," Ye Changfeng demurred with saccharine diplomacy, his jade-adorned coiffure and iridescent robes radiating cultivated refinement. Had Murong Wan not previously beheld Ye Ling's arresting visage amidst Yan's uncouth wilderness, this veneer of courtly grace might have beguiled her.
"Why should malice require leniency?" Wan's mirth chimed like fractured celadon. "Your brew resembles swill drained from stable troughs; your vassal's by-blow presumes to admonish royalty – is this Shang's fabled magnanimity?"
The pavilion petrified. Consort Chen's vermilion-lacquered talons carved lunar crescents into her palms, while Changfeng's cordial mien fissured like parched loess. Chen Yun, countenance mottled carmine, spat through trembling lips: "In Yan's pestilential hinterlands, such effrontery might merit flaying—but here, you address an imperial scion!"
Crack!
Wan's open palm collided with Chen Yun's cheekbone in unbridled retribution. "Here, a sovereign princess chastises chattel!" Five rubescent blossoms bloomed across the maiden's visage as she crumpled, ululations echoing.
Consort Chen's dulcet tones vibrated with venomous restraint: "Should our culinary arts displease, we shall command new delicacies—"
"Preserve your mummery." Wan flicked nonexistent motes from her Yan-styled doeskin jerkin. "Your culinarians could no more capture Yan's essence than your rhymesters comprehend valour."
As Consort Chen unveiled compensatory gemstones—pearls luminous as selenic tears and rubies incarnadine as arterial founts—Wan affected a languid yawn. "How provincial, these baubles for tribal concubines. In Yan, we bedizen ourselves with lupine canines and vanquished foes' scalps."
Behind his progenitor's quivering coiffure, Changfeng's ocular flames smouldered—carnal hunger for Wan's feral allure contending with umbrage at her disdain. Unseen in colonnaded penumbrae, Zhao Miao'er etched each syllable into memory, her latest pheromonic distillate already permeating the ventilation ducts.
Silken Indignity and the Serpent's Rebellion
The scintillating cache of gemstones taunted Murong Wan's trembling digits—pearl torques coiling like leucistic adders, jadeite crests wrought as fenghuang pinions. In Yan's lupine-hide pavilions, warriors plaited talismans from vanquished foes' dentition, not these gilded manacles of mineral vanity.
"Does Her Highness scorn our trinkets?" Chen Yun jibed through tumefied lips, her verbal barbs striking true. "Or do such adornments confound barbarous optics?"
Wan's mandible trembled, her erstwhile audacity deflating like a ruptured wineskin. "I… favour austerity," she breathed, phalanges twisting the argent wolf pendant at her clavicle—her solitary memento from northern wilds.
Consort Chen's porcelain chalice chimed against its saucer, a crystalline adjudication. "Austerity befits feral palates. Yet in polished courts, a princess's mettle is assayed by her gemological panoply."
Ye Changfeng elevated a phoenix cauda hairpin oozing amethystine droplets. "Permit this unworthy prince to—"
**Clangour!
Wan recoiled as the ornament clattered against marble, its bejewelled orbs leering upward like captive wraiths. The sycophants' inhalations crystallised her epiphany—this aureate prison sought to enchain her through humiliation's silken cords.
"In Yan," she seethed, timbre reforged in steel, "we assay valour by sanguinary sacrifice for kith, not mineral hoards pilfered like corvid plunder!"
Chen Yun's cachinnation shrieked vulturine. "Thus speaks true gutter sovereignty! Your ilk parades penury as probity while coveting Shang's—"
Thunk.
A lupine dagger quivered in the sandalwood table betwixt Chen Yun's splayed digits. "This 'gutter' stiletto pierced Dayu's warlord's myocardium last harvest moon," Wan murmured, observing carmine pearls bloom on the vibrating hilt. "Shall I illustrate its predilection for carrion-feathered vermin?"
The ensuing hush curdled with atavistic dread. Even Changfeng's prurient gaze faltered before Wan's gelid rictus.
"Apprise my brother," she declared, sweeping past petrified attendants, "that Yan's dire wolves stalk open tundras, not perfumed menageries."
As nocturne's pall descended, Zhao Miao'er retrieved the abandoned stiletto, its serrated edge already anointed with novel neurotoxins. In the arsenal, Lü Wu catalogued crates of "discarded gems" destined for insurrectionary coffers.
Silken Stratagems and the Serpent's Delusion
"Her barbarous lineage commands 200,000 Yan cavalry," Consort Chen hissed, her gaze narrowing toward Chen Yun like a frost-tempered stiletto. "Would your sire's depleted coffers muster even a regiment of mendicants?"
The disfigured girl cowered beneath her aunt's scrutiny. "But Aunt—"
"*But* naught!" The consort's jadeite hairpin glinted perilously near Chen Yun's throbbing cheek. "Affect the meek hound until the phoenix diadem crowns your vacuous cranium. Or would you rather it adorn a Yan standard as a grisly trophy?"
——
Within a moon-drenched pavilion, Ye Changfeng caressed a serpentine jadeite pin. "The Yan savage wilts before gilded temptations and dulcet flattery. We'll ensnare her with splendour ere autumn's foliage descends."
His certitude soured as a eunuch murmured fresh intelligence: Prince Ling had been observed escorting Murong Wan through night markets aglow with lanterns, her mirth resonating across spice emporiums and silk ateliers.
——
Beneath a pendulous willow, Murong Wan's tears cascaded like midwinter sleet. "Vile gem-enslaved harpies!" She hurled a pebble into the koi pond, fracturing her mirrored visage.
"Does milady lament Selene's waning beauty?"
She pivoted to behold Ye Ling reclining against alabaster balustrades, twin skewers of candied hawthorn gleaming in his grasp. "Or perhaps commiserate with these piscine captives of gilded confinement?"
"*You!*" Recognition ignited—the "merchant" from Yan's frontier bazaars, now draped in obsidian brocade that deepened his ocular voids to starless abysses. "The princely peddler!"
Ling's laughter suffused the chrysanthemum-perfumed air. "Self-indicted. Yet tonight, I vend unguents for wounded honour." He proffered a hawthorn skewer glazed with molten aurum. "Five-spice sedition and crystallized retribution—compliments of the house."
As Wan's teeth pierced the incendiary confection, Ling's digits brushed the lupine fang pendant concealed beneath his sash—its twin to the relic at her throat.
——
In the arsenal's stygian recesses, Zhao Miao'er decrypted a smuggled cypher: *Yan's cavalry converges upon Dayu mines. Assault imminent.* Her pheromonic ink blurred as she appended, *The ophidian stirs. Silken reaping commences.
Silken Allure and the Serpent's Wooing
"A paltry assemblage of textiles and trinkets," Ye Ling demurred, unveiling the cinnabar casket bestowed by the Celestial Sovereign. Lunar luminescence caressed the phoenix coiffure pin's halcyon plumes, their opalescence vying with the Via Lactea's splendour. "Yet witnessing celestial visage marred by crystalline sorrow? Insufferable."
Murong Wan's respiration faltered. The parure's artistry surpassed mortal artifice—each cabochon a constellated captive, each filigree convolution a paramour's murmured vow. In Yan's gelid tundras, such marvels dwelled solely in animistic delirium.
"This...for my keeping?" Her digits suspended, rent betwixt craving and hauteur.
Ling's mirth suffused the chrysanthemum-perfumed zephyr. "What purpose has a prince for phoenix roosts? Save..." His phalanges grazed her temporal region as he affixed the ornament, their caloric resonance lingering. "...to embellish the singular aurora worthy of veneration."
He steered her toward a selene-illumined mere, where their semblances undulated in cosmic choreography. The pin's geminae fractured light into chromatic serpents undulating through Wan's onyxine tresses.
"Yet the Divine Sovereign—"
"—shall extol my perspicacity." Ling's pollex traced her arterial rhythm. "Unless Her Highness dreads eclipsing Shang's pavonine courtiers?"
Wan's rebuttal perished as Ling manifested twin nephrite tokens. "My concubine Lü Wu thirsts for dauntless camaraderie. Conjoined, you might...*rectify* the capital's sartorial aberrations." His simper pledged unuttered escapades.
——
In the armamentarium's stygian catacombs, Lü Wu inventoried another consignment of "discarded" gemmae, her gracile form aquiver. The antecedent night's "fulminous devotions" from Ling had left her scarcely ambulant, yet she smiled—each contusion a sigil of his predilection.
Chen Yun's intelligencers relayed the phoenix pin's transference with escalating trepidation. In the Pavilion of Cosmic Accord, Zhao Miao'er consecrated novel pheromonic coiffure pins, their toxicants synchronized with the Mid-Autumn convocation.
Silken Delicacies and the Serpent's Snare
"Such assertions reek of rank absurdity," Lü Wu later inscribed in her clandestine journal, her brushstrokes quivering from lingering enervation. Though schooled in enduring regal "fervour", even her disciplined constitution now faltered beneath Ling's inexhaustible ardour.
——
"How could one refuse such magnanimity?" Murong Wan's mirth chimed like temple bells as she received the gilded crustacean-shaped summons. "Your consort must possess encyclopaedic knowledge of the capital's spice emporiums and silken treasuries!"
The phoenix ornament glimmered ominously in her tresses—an inadvertent nuptial pledge.
Ling steered her along moon-dappled gravel pathways, their silhouettes interlacing. "The arthropod's transmutation from scourge to delicacy mirrors statecraft—alchemize adversity into prosperity." His digits grazed hers while expounding on carapace-shedding cycles.
Wan's ocular spheres dilated with neoteric wonder. "Yet shall we consume them unto oblivion?"
"Nay, we nurture them in nephrite aquacultures," Ling breathed, encroaching beyond decorum's bounds. "Their multitudes burgeon with each hunter's moon."
When Wan inadvertently referenced Yan's gu husbandry, Ling simulated artless inquisitiveness. "These...*companions*...you cultivate—do they snap?"
"Solely when aggrieved!" Wan parried hastily, oblivious to Ling's espionage network having already catalogued her venomous zoological collection.
——
Within the armamentarium, Zhao Miao'er deciphered a communiqué concealed within crustacean ova consignments: *Yan's gu adepts penetrate Dayu excavations. Initiate counterstrokes.* Her novel pheromonic elixir emitted a faint bioluminescence—a neurotoxic mimesis of decapodal enzymes.
——
As Wan tripped back to her quarters trilling pastoral airs, Murong Wei observed her incarnadined cheeks with sepulchral gratification. "The lure is swallowed," he informed his umbral assassins. "Prime the matrimonial venoms."
Silken Ascendancy and the Serpent's Miscalculation
"What has kindled this unprecedented radiance within your soul?" Murong Wei murmured, his gaze dissecting his sister's unearthly glow. Had her sojourn to Chunhua Palace—ostensibly to parley with Consort Chen—culminated in some unforeseen concord with Prince Ye Changfeng?
——
"Must you materialize like a wraith?" Murong Wan chided, her delicate fingers fluttering to her breast in feigned dismay. His abrupt apparition had shattered a reverie steeped in moonlit gardens and serpentine jade.
Murong Wei's smile sharpened into a vulpine grin. "Your ethereal gait betrays you, little nymph. Has Prince Changfeng's vaunted charm finally ensnared our wayward swan?"
"Must you persist in invoking that *creature*?" Wan averted her gaze, nostrils flaring with barely veiled revulsion. The mere recollection of Ye Changfeng's lascivious leer threatened to empty her stomach.
A glimmer arrested Murong Wei's scrutiny—the fenghuang coiffure pin nestled amid her obsidian tresses, its iridescent plumes and ruby cabochon eyes shimmering with imperial opulence. No provincial artisan could fashion such a masterpiece; this was a relic plucked from Shang's most hallowed vaults.
"A sovereign's tribute, I perceive," he quipped, attributing the ornament to Changfeng's coffers. "How magnanimous of our hosts to bestow trinkets worth half a Yan marquisate."
Wan's countenance flushed peony-pink. "Since when has Third Brother assumed the role of inquisitor?"
"Come—this bauble reeks of draconic excess." His voice dropped to a conspiratorial murmur. "None but crown-affiliated nobility would dare present fenghuang iconography... unless harbouring regicidal ambitions?"
"Cease this drivel!" Wan wrenched the pin free, its prongs tangling in a raven lock. "Your jests curdle into venom!"
——
As she fled, Murong Wei's warning sliced through the twilight: "That avian sigil transcends mere adornment, Little Swan! Guard it from vulgar eyes." Unspoken lingered his suspicion: the coiffure's craftsmanship mirrored Shang's queenly regalia—a detail lost on Consort Chen's concubine status.
——
In the forecourt, a eunuch's reedy proclamation shattered the tension: "Prince Ji's cortege bears celestial tributes from the Jade Ateliers!"
Murong Wei's smile froze. The timing was too precise, the spectacle too lavish. Somewhere within Shang's gilded labyrinth, silken threads tightened—not spun by Changfeng's clumsy machinations, but by a more serpentine intellect.
Silken Toxins and the Serpent's Machinations
The afternoon's compensatory offerings from Chunhua Palace glimmered with perilous extravagance—mother-of-pearl coiffure pins, jade serpents entwining celestial spheres, and a fenghuang-incensed burner exuding soporific vapours. Murong Wei surveyed the hoard with fatuous contentment, blind to the viper's kiss concealed within Consort Chen's "contrition".
"Her Celestial Ladyship laments today's...*unfortunate divergence*," the chief eunuch simpered, perspiration seeping through ceremonial silks. "These trifling amends entreat the princess's celestial forbearance."
Murong Wei guffawed, flinging the eunuch a sycee ingot. "Maidens' humours shift like monsoon winds! We're humbled by Her Ladyship's matronly benevolence." His fancy already enrobed Wan in Shang's imperial vestments, her Yan hussars cementing his dynastic ambitions.
——
In her sanctum, Murong Wan demolished crab roe delicacies with untamed relish, serenely oblivious to fraternal folly. "The gilded crustacean purveyor *does* honour pledges!" she garbled through masticated morsels, the phoenix hairpin abandoned amid chilli-besmirched linens.
——
Chunhua Palace exuded conspiratorial miasmas.
"The Yan savage feigns prudery?" Consort Chen's reptilian countenance blossomed with venomous delight, her talons caressing a porcelain phial of limpid bane. "Her brother's obsequiousness betrays their voracity. Once wedded to our design, she'll flow like quicksilver to our mould."
Ye Changfeng traced the phial's ophidian glyphs. "And the Xianxian complication?"
"Let the jade-pure fool expire clasping her sanctimony," the consort hissed, her mirth coiling through narcotic fumes. "Seven dawns of this ambrosia in her tisane, and the mortal coil slips unseen—a 'frail heart' mourned by weeping physicians. Apt requiem for dethroned virtue."
Her onyx-tipped claws pierced Changfeng's forearm. "When the senescent badger 'succumbs' to sudden infirmity, your ascension becomes heaven's decree. The Chen lineage shall outshine imperial forebears!"
Changfeng's pupils dilated with tyrannical fervour. "And Ling? That gutter-rat pretender…"
"—shall prostrate before your coronation palanquin," the Consort crooned. "Or fertilize crows with his plebeian progenitrix's marrow."
——
Amidst moonlit topiaries, Zhao Miao'er encrypted each venomous syllable. The fenghuang censer's smog embraced her like a funereal pall as she appended: *Ophidian strike imminent. Antivenin synthesis is critical.
Silken Mazes and the Serpent's Enigma
Nocturne's vapours enshrouded the imperial precinct's angular firmament and serpentine byways. Within cinnabar ramparts, globular lanterns swayed like cardinal astral bodies, their incarnadine luminescence transmuting palace passageways into astral bazaars. Eunuch processions bearing alabaster luminaries moved with mortuary precision—synchronized genuflections and homogenized vestments rendering them indistinguishable from funerary marionettes.
Fu Xianxian intercepted the toxic stratagem's revelation as Ye Changfeng quit Chunhua Palace's shadowed portals. Since their previous venomous altercation, she'd implanted operatives within the Consort's demesne through Herculean exertions. "You court obliteration, Ophidian Prince? Let us waltz upon razored edges!" Her psyche seethed with toxic resolve.
"To the Pavilion of Vernal Ecstasies!"
This edict served bifurcated intent—accessing Ye Ling's tactical acumen while revelling in the establishment's celebrated paramours, whose obsequious devotions and Dionysian artistry proffered asylum from regnal treacheries.
——
The pavilion flourished as the metropolis' paramount haven of silken debauchery, now augmented to host theatric homicidal conundrums and lycanthropic masquerades. Patricians queued for solar cycles to secure engagements, their equipages congesting adjacent wynds.
Zhao Miao'er greeted Fu with glacial professionalism, her onyxine oculars lingering imperceptibly overlong upon Ye Ling. Their prior contretemps' mortification yet suppurated—a splinter in her cultivated façade. Rehearsals suffered distracted aberrations, her zither strings fracturing mid-cadence as wraithlike recollections of Ling's dismissive rictus intruded.
"The Mid-Autumn ceremonial libretti await your imprimatur," she intoned affectlessly, withdrawing ere her equanimity fissured.
Ling inclined his cranium, mien unaltered from perusing agrarian ledgers. This impassivity eroded Miao'er's sangfroid—how dared he emerge unscathed from their clash while her artistry languished tainted?
——
Within opulent chambers reeking of musk and fermented litchi nectar, Fu Xianxian presided over coteries of simpering catamites. "The Chen asp imagines toxifying me?" Her laughter cascaded, carmine-lacquered digits pulverizing a mielée walnut. "Let her distill venoms—we'll decant them in spiced hippocras!"
Her counterplot unfolded betwixt a Nubian masseur's Chironian ministrations and a troubadour's recitation of seditious ballads. Ere night's demise, enciphered directives would permeate her faction—counter-regicides to surveil the consort's toxicologists, adulterated mithridatums for palace aesculapians, whispers of Ye Changfeng's virility's demise primed for tavern dissemination.
——
Beyond pierced fenestration, Miao'er observed Ling auditing accounts with cenobitic concentration. Her jadeite coiffure pin vibrated with repressed impetus to catapult calculi at his imperturbable visage. Let fiscal records combust—let him *perceive* her transcendence beyond mercantile exchanges!
Silken Dissimulations and the Serpent's Stratagem
Enrobed in rumpled silks cascading like argent rivulets, Fu Xianxian stretched with felinine indolence, her satiated countenance gilded by the Pavilion of Vernal Raptures' aureate luminaires. "How magnanimous of Your Eminent Highness to deign visitation upon this *withered peony*," she intoned, grimacing as she recalibrated her posture against damask bolsters. The catamites' Cypridine exertions had left her sinews aquiver—a testament to their concupiscent artistry.
Ye Ling's scrutiny snared upon the carmine stigmata constellating her clavicular expanse. "Had my advent preceded these...*cosmic explorations*, interference might've ensued," he riposted, nares flaring at the olfactory symphony of litchi vinousity and spent concupiscence. Despite her cicatrix-mottled visage—now mollified by hermetic unguents—Xianxian's corporal topography exuded perilous magnetism, refined through nocturnes of Aphroditean tributes.
"Shall virile prerogatives monopolize polygamous raptures?" She elevated a sardonic brow, cachinnation laced with toxic dulcitude. "Your seraglio of obsequious nymphs—Fú Yuányuán's alabaster pulchritude, Lǜ Wǔ's ophidian elegance—exhales patriarchal hubris. Yet when a daughter of Lilith claims sovereignty…"
Ling's phalanges blanched to funereal alabaster. "Preserve me from your pseudo-Amazonian declamations. You exude not emancipation but trepidation's musk."
Xianxian's derision curdled. "Your cherished Mùróng Wǎn now skitters through Chén Guìfēi's arachnidian snare. Today's regal farce—gifts bartered, troths unvowed—rivets her nuptial shackles to Chángfēng. A pawn immolated ere chessmen stir."
This disclosure pierced like an envenomed stiletto. Ling's psyche conjured Wǎn's phoenix coiffure pin—discarded amidst Chunhua Palace's tenebrous recesses, perhaps? "And your summons?" he hissed. "Design you me as confederate or *headsman?"
"Vitality exacts mutuality." She insinuated a jade tessera across the couch—a Fu clan sigil. "Chángfēng's sicarii whet their falchions. Should Wǎn's hymeneal rites proceed, your 'paramour' transmutes to poniard at *my* jugular."
Beyond filigreed partitions, Zhào Miào'ěr surveilled their silhouettes, her koto's fractured cords coiled like hibernal serpents. The consort's toxifers mobilized with dawn's first gilding.
Silken Negotiations and the Serpent's Scheme
"Had you not bungled securing Murong Wan's fealty, this quagmire would never have arisen!" Fu Xianxian snapped, her bravado fraying like moth-eaten brocade. Beneath her defiant veneer, the confession of Ye Changfeng's venomous machinations spilled forth—a tremor in her voice betraying mortal dread.
Ye Ling reclined against lacquered screens embossed with phoenix motifs, his fingers tracing the sinuous carvings of an onyx armrest. "A stratagem of reciprocal retribution presents itself," he purred, his smile a blade sheathed in velvet. "Yet benevolence withers in palace gardens. What recompense might justify such... *magnanimity?"
Xianxian's arms coiled protectively across her dishevelled silks. "Name your terms, serpent."
"Fifteen thousand silver taels shall suffice to... *modify* Her Highness's dietary regimen." Ling's tone dripped with feigned indifference, masking calculating acuity. The Emperor's recent gift of the Obsidian Guard's command now served dual purposes—a revenue conduit veiling an espionage colossus.
"You'd monetize my ruin to fund your mercenary theatrics?" Her laughter cracked like winter ice over a poisoned well.
Ling's gaze drifted to moonlit courtyards where his reformed assassins drilled—their movements a lethal gavotte. "Consider it an investment in mutual survival. Blades crave gold, as thrones thirst for loyal steel."
Xianxian's jewelled nails pierced silk cushions as realization dawned. "This is no sanctuary—it's a coup swathed in mercenary gauze!"
"Astute as ever, wilting peony." Ling rose, his shadow elongating like a serpent rousing from celestial slumber. "Yet the imperial garden chokes on invasive weeds. Shall your coin purchase a gardener's shears, or shall I plant your corpse as fertilizer?"
In Chunhua Palace, dawn's first light gilded phoenix-shaped censers, oblivious to the earthy tang of betrayal soon to taint their sacred fumes.
The Venomous Bargain
All courtiers understood the mortal enmity between Ye Ling and Empress Dowager Ye Changfeng. His proposition exuded meticulously orchestrated machinations, a crystalline ploy to manipulate pawns in his sanguinary chessboard. "Verily," Ye Ling conceded with languid poise, his countenance half-shrouded beneath a swaying lantern whose amber glow carved chiaroscuro contours across his visage, amplifying his mercurial mystique. "Yet time remains my indulgent ally. Whereas you... must unsheathe your dagger ere twilight falls, lest mortality claim you."
Fu Xianxian's jade-like incisors sank into her lower lip. This man embodied anything but the dissipated wastrel rumours proclaimed—how had the imperial cabal remained blind to his serpentine guile? "Fifteen thousand taels," she hissed through clenched teeth. Scion of the illustrious Fu lineage and erstwhile consort to the fallen Crown Prince Xu, her bridal coffers still overflowed despite the Empress's predations. Survival justified such extravagance.
"Ah, serendipitous you mention venoms," Ye Ling purred, leaning forward with vulpine cunning. "My acquaintance includes an apothecary of exquisite lethality—twelve thousand taels daily, a paltry sum for perpetual vigilance." This "apothecary" belonged to the Xuan Yi Guard's shadow cadre, versed in crafting imperceptible toxins and neutralizing their antidotes. *Let fools cling to impoverished virtue.
"Consider this," he murmured, his voice honeyed with conspiratorial intimacy, "Her Majesty's culinary arts could transform any delicacy into your epitaph. My artisan shall assume your handmaiden's semblance—disguise tariff: six thousand taels diurnal."
Fu Xianxian scrutinized this princely huckster. His proposal, though steeped in avarice, shimmered with diabolical pragmatism. The treacherous maid Hongzhuang's visage materialized in her mind—a vacated chrysalis awaiting this venomous metamorphosis.
"Concluded!" Her palm struck rosewood with finality, drowning his subsequent enticements: "Customized philters? Three thousand per phial! Proprietary formulae? Ten thousand per parchment!"
"Ye Ling!" Her indignation flared, yet beneath simmered begrudging admiration for his entrepreneurial audacity.
"Merely expanding your arsenal," he demurred, discoursing on regicide with the nonchalance of a tea merchant praising oolong leaves. "Endorsements earn commission—royal patronage ever welcomed."
Their covenant solidified, predator and prey departed sated—Ye Ling mentally tallying silver streams, Fu Xianxian cradling newfound instruments of subterfuge.
Later, ensconced within Chunfeng Pavilion's gilded observatory, Ye Ling observed silk-clad muses undulating to his compositions, their undulant silhouettes weaving serpentine allure through the spellbound audience. A symphony of profit and peril, harmoniously concluded.
To be continuous…