Just a Wet Nurse, Just a Plaything? Everyone Wept After My Death - Chapter 62
Chapter 62
At the banquet, wine cups passed back and forth as the festivities reached their height.
Huo Xiao watched Huzi finish more than half a bowl of steamed egg custard in his arms. He wiped his son’s little mouth with satisfaction and laughed. “That’s my boy. A good appetite is a blessing! It seems the ginseng really is nourishing him.”
Holding the empty bowl, Shen Yingyue was just about to let go of her lingering anxiety.
Suddenly-
“Waaah!”
Huzi, who had been perfectly quiet, let out a shrill, piercing wail without warning. It sounded nothing like his usual fussy cries. It was the scream of a child in terrible pain, chilling everyone who heard it to the bone.
“What’s wrong?” Huo Xiao’s smile froze as he hurriedly looked down.
Huzi’s face had turned a dark, alarming red. His tiny body convulsed violently inside his swaddling clothes, his back arching as both hands clawed desperately at the air.
Then something horrifying happened.
“Blech-”
Huzi’s mouth flew open, and a gush of vomit mixed with bits of egg custard and bright red streaks of blood sprayed out. It splattered across half of Huo Xiao’s body and the hem of Shen Yingyue’s skirt.
The vivid red looked especially gruesome beneath the brilliant lamplight.
“Blood… That’s blood!”
A maid shrieked in terror.
After vomiting, Huzi seemed to have exhausted the last of his strength. His eyes rolled back, and his little head fell limply to one side. He went completely still.
“Huzi! Huzi!”
All the blood in Huo Xiao’s body seemed to turn to ice. He shook his son frantically, but the little body in his arms remained limp and unresponsive.
“The manor physician! Where the hell is he? Get him in here!”
Huo Xiao’s roar shook the entire Tingfeng Courtyard like the bellow of a wounded beast.
The lively banquet descended into chaos. The guests stared at one another, completely at a loss.
The manor physician stumbled inside with his medicine case in hand. Without even stopping to pay his respects, he seized Huzi’s wrist and checked his pulse. Then he glanced at the vomit on the floor, and his face instantly turned as white as a sheet.
“G-General…”
The physician dropped to his knees, trembling so badly that even his voice quavered.
“The Young Master has been poisoned!
“There is a scent of safflower in his vomit. He must have ingested an extremely cold substance that stimulates blood circulation. It has damaged his internal organs, causing him to vomit blood and lose consciousness! If he isn’t treated immediately, I’m afraid…”
“Safflower?!”
The word sent an uproar through the room.
Huo Xiao’s head snapped up. His bloodshot eyes locked onto the porcelain bowl that had yet to be cleared from the table.
“Cousin, it wasn’t me!”
Liu Ruyan had already collapsed to the floor in “fright,” tears streaming down her delicate face.
“I may have brought the egg custard, but how could I ever harm my little nephew? I truly adore him! Someone… Someone must have tampered with it while he was being fed!”
Old Madam Huo was trembling with distress. She pointed her cane at Shen Yingyue and barked, “You wretched servant!
“The custard was perfectly fine when Ruyan brought it over. You were the one holding the child the entire time, and you fed him with your own hands!
“You must resent our Ruyan, or perhaps you wanted my precious grandson dead. That’s why you poisoned him!”
“I didn’t! I truly didn’t!”
Shen Yingyue was panicking now as well. Paying no attention to the filth on her clothes, she dropped to her knees beside Huo Xiao and reached for the hem of his robe.
“General, I helped raise Huzi. I love him as if he were my own. How could I possibly feed him safflower? Taking his life would be the same as taking mine!”
“We’ll know whether it was you once we’ve searched everyone!”
As Liu Ruyan wiped away her tears, a vicious gleam flashed through her eyes. She struggled to her feet, assuming an air of righteous resolve as though determined to prove her innocence.
“Cousin, to uncover the true culprit, I am willing to be searched first!
“No one in this room who came into contact with the child can be spared!”
Huo Xiao was frantic with worry and could think of nothing but saving his son. He had no patience left to distinguish right from wrong.
“Search them! Search everyone!” he snarled through clenched teeth.
Several burly old maidservants immediately stepped forward.
Liu Ruyan voluntarily spread her arms and let them search her. Naturally, they found nothing.
Then all attention turned to Shen Yingyue.
“What are you doing? Don’t touch my daughter!”
Shen Yingyue saw the maidservants rush toward Nuannuan’s cradle nearby and tried to stop them in terror.
“Get out of the way!”
One of the women shoved her hard, knocking her to the floor.
The woman then roughly tore away Nuannuan’s little blanket and rummaged through the thick cotton swaddling clothes.
“I found something!”
That excited shout made Shen Yingyue’s heart sink into the abyss.
The woman pulled a neatly folded oil-paper packet from between the layers of Nuannuan’s swaddling clothes. She hurried over to Huo Xiao and unfolded it before him.
In full view of everyone present, traces of pale red powder could clearly be seen inside.
The manor physician leaned closer and sniffed it before confirming with a tremor, “General… It is safflower powder! It smells exactly the same as the safflower in the egg custard!”
The revelation struck like a thunderclap.
The entire room fell deathly silent.
Every gaze fixed on Shen Yingyue. Some looked shocked, others contemptuous, but most stared at her as if she were a monster.
“Good heavens! A woman’s heart can be more poisonous than anything!”
“She always seemed so meek and delicate. Who would have thought she could be this vicious? She wouldn’t even spare a four-month-old baby!”
“You can know a person’s face but never their heart!”
The guests’ whispers surged around Shen Yingyue like a tide, threatening to drown her.
As she stared at the oil-paper packet, the image of Liu Ruyan’s maid, Cui’er, adjusting Nuannuan’s swaddling clothes earlier flashed through her mind.
In that instant, she understood.
It was a trap.
A flawless trap designed to condemn her to death!
“It wasn’t me… I’ve been framed…”
Shen Yingyue looked desperately at Huo Xiao, tears streaming silently down her cheeks.
“General, Cui’er put that packet there… I truly didn’t do it…”
But Huo Xiao answered her with a gaze as cold as ice, as though he were already looking at a dead woman.
He held his unconscious son in one arm and clutched the packet of “evidence” in his other hand. The murderous aura radiating from him seemed to plunge the entire room into a bitter freeze.
“Shen Yingyue.”
He spoke her name, forcing each word through clenched teeth.
“You have some nerve.”
