Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I had also secretly looked into the old archives of the Imperial Medical Bureau and discovered that the records of Yin Xianshan’s arrow wound from years ago had been tampered with.

The original entry read “puncture wound to the back of the right shoulder,” but the transcript had been changed to “abrasion on the front of the left shoulder.”

The difference was significant enough to completely rewrite the physical trajectory of his “savior.”

I stared at the two sets of records on my desk for half the night.

At that moment, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t that no one knew the truth; it was that someone was forbidding it from being known.

The first time Ning Zhiheng came to see me was during a spring banquet at the Regent’s Prince’s Mansion.

She wore a moon-white gauze dress, and a red string was tied around her wrist.

It was identical to the one I had given Yin Xianshan all those years ago.

She held a wine cup and smiled at me, her eyes looking as if they were dipped in honey.

“Junzhu, I have heard much of you. Xianshan mentions you often, saying you are the person he trusts most.”

I looked at the string on her wrist and said flatly, “Is that so? He even gave you an old trinket like that; it seems he truly does trust you.”

Ning Zhiheng raised her hand to gently stroke the red string, her tone as soft as the back of a blade.

“He tied this on me himself the year I saved him. Speaking of which, I must thank you, Junzhu, for looking after him in the palace back then.”

The wine in my cup wobbled slightly.

I stared at her. “You saved him?”

“Did the Junzhu not know?” She appeared slightly surprised. “The 13th Year of Showa, a side hall of the Cold Palace, a snowy night, an arrow wound to the left shoulder.”

She described it flawlessly.

Even the detail about the green cloth I had used to bandage Yin Xianshan was mentioned by her with casual ease.

After returning to my manor that night, I locked myself in my study for the entire night.

By dawn, I had reached a conclusion:

Either Ning Zhiheng was lying,

Or Yin Xianshan was playing dumb.

Whichever it was, it was enough to make me feel sick for half a year.

I began to investigate.

I looked into the eunuchs on night duty that year, the patrol rotations of the Cold Palace, and the Ning Family’s connections and movements during the 13th Year of Showa.

On the third day of my investigation, the trail went cold with an old clerk from the Imperial Household Department.

He had died in an “accidental” fall into a well.

It was too convenient a death.

That night, I was ambushed outside the offices of the Ministry of Revenue.

Three assassins-they weren’t after money, and they intended to leave no survivors.

When I snapped an umbrella rib and drove it into one of their throats, the blood that splashed onto my face was warm.

By the time Yin Xianshan arrived, I was stepping on an assassin’s wrist, interrogating him for the identity of his master.

His face was ashen as he pulled me into his arms with enough force to crush me.

“Are you mad? Do you know how dangerous that was?”

I looked up at him and caught the scent of agarwood on his lapel.

It was so familiar it made me want to vomit.

“Your Highness the Regent,” I said, raising my hand to push him away. “I will not pry into your fiancée’s past. As for my life, stay out of it.”

His knuckles tightened inch by inch.

“Zhiwei, stop making a scene.”

“A scene?” I laughed. “Yin Xianshan, have you forgotten? The only reason you can stand here today and tell me to ‘stop making a scene’ is because of who dragged you out of that pile of corpses in the Cold Palace all those years ago?”

His pupils contracted sharply.

It was as if he had been pierced by something.

But a second later, he still said in a heavy voice, “The person who saved me that night… was Zhiheng.”

I nodded.

“Fine.”

“Very well.”

That night, I returned home and burned the thirty-seven letters he had written to me.

The firelight illuminated the paper ash as it curled upward, like a funeral held seven years too late.