I Work as an Entrusted Teacher in the Harem - Chapter 3

Chapter 5

My eldest sister had one of her palace maids bring me an outrageously expensive quilt.

Along with it came a message.

“With no one by my little sister’s side, I suppose she can only huddle together with the Noble Consort for warmth. How pitiful.”

Pitiful little me, dressed in men’s clothing, carried the quilt into the room.

“Noble Consort, can we begin?”

She shot to her feet.

“Y-you mean… begin where?”

I briskly made the bed.

“Don’t misunderstand. This is a legitimate business arrangement.”

With a perfectly righteous expression, I emphasized, “Payment is required.”

Over in the small kitchen, the head matron was chopping duck heads, preparing a nourishing tonic stew for her Noble Consort.

“These days,” she muttered, cleaver flashing, “even ducks have gotten stubborn bones.”

Back here, the Noble Consort rummaged through everything she owned and dumped it all onto the table. “Is this enough?”

“Too much.”

I only took one string of cash.

Beneath the moon and blossoms, that duck was set to stew.

The Noble Consort said that in truth, she had asked me to come only because she wanted to comb my hair.

Tonight, I was the white moonlight of her heart-the Young General once famous throughout the capital.

“He died.”

The Noble Consort saw the confusion in my eyes.

The general had been a prodigy in his youth, with illustrious military achievements to his name. All he had ever asked for was one thing.

“He wanted to marry me.”

“He knew I was a concubine-born daughter and that life at home was difficult for me.”

“That was also the condition under which he helped Li Zun become Crown Prince.”

The Noble Consort spoke very slowly.

“But once Li Zun secured the throne, he brought me into the palace instead.”

“Li Zun had long feared the hundred thousand elite soldiers under his command, yet he was afraid of damaging his reputation as a wise and virtuous ruler. So he wanted to use me to drive him to his death.”

“Whenever he favored me, he made him listen.”

The Noble Consort rolled up her sleeve. Old whip scars spread across her arm.

“He could not bear to hear me being abused. On a rainy night, he took his own life. His death was horrific.”

“Li Zun forced me to go see him.”

“The palace maids and eunuchs beside me all vomited.”

“Li Zun pressed my head down and asked me, ‘Disgusting, isn’t it? He stopped looking like that spirited young man from back then long ago.'”

“It was filthy, truly. I didn’t know where I was supposed to look, so I just stared at his tangled hair.”

“When he was alive, he loved cleanliness most.”

“At the time, I thought to myself, I had observed a woman’s propriety since childhood. Yet even after he died, I had never so much as touched a single strand of his hair.”

As the Noble Consort spoke, she gently gathered up my hair.

The wooden comb was tender, running all the way to the ends.

At a wedding, people would say that with one stroke of the comb, husband and wife would love each other until their hair turned white.

“I was nothing but a concubine-born daughter,” she said, her voice drifting far away. “To be granted the title of Noble Consort was something bought with his life.”

“Someone as dazzling and unrestrained as him died in the end without making a sound.”

“I was the one who harmed him.”

“How much better it would have been if he had never met me. Before he died, he must have regretted it too.”

After she finished combing my hair, she said no more.

I stayed with her night after night.

She clutched my hand tightly.

The matron hid away to wipe her tears. She said her mistress had not slept this peacefully in a very long time.

Until a few days later, when Li Zun went to Yeting Palace to look for me and found nothing.

I was seized and brought to him.

“Are you done making trouble?”

He sat high above.

He punished me by making me kneel.

“No matter how you try to win over the people of this harem, with me backing your eldest sister, no one can make things difficult for her.”

“As for you, all this flailing about will only make me despise you more.”

In his eyes, I had always been docile and obedient. Even when I was driven to Yeting Palace, I had not dared to utter a word.

“If you know you were wrong, then from now on, you will not go to-”

I lifted my face.

I looked into those bottomless peach-blossom eyes of his.

“After I finish kneeling,” I asked him, “can I go find the Noble Consort?”

His expression darkened at once.

“Yueyue, have you considered the consequences of defying me?”

When I said nothing, his gaze became unbearably oppressive, hostility surging from him.

“Then I will grant your wish.”

“Kneel from the east gate to the west gate, and I will allow you to go keep her company.”

He was certain I was timid and afraid of trouble.

Besides, I had an old injury in my knees, left behind that spring when I saved him.

Thunder cracked outside.

I lowered my head.

“Good. As long as you know you were wrong-”

He was just about to take my hand.

But he caught only empty air.

All he saw was me turning around and kneeling straight into the rain.

I never looked back.

One kneel after another.

I forced out a path of blood, washed thin by the rain.

He watched.

The smile at the corner of his lips froze, his eyes turning cold and severe.

I knelt the entire night.

From the east gate to the west gate. By the time the sky turned gray with dawn, the rain still had not stopped.

In the end, I could not even stand.

The chief eunuch held an umbrella over me. Looking at my calm face, he asked,

“Why go this far? Are you truly not afraid of dying?”

Back then, he was the one who sent “me” into Yeting Palace.

He said that His Majesty’s word, once given, could not be taken back.

That consort’s position had belonged to my eldest sister in the first place. I was the one who should not have coveted what belonged to another.

Yes. Li Zun kept his word.

So now that I had finished kneeling, I naturally deserved my reward.

I lifted my head toward the daylight and said loudly, word by word,

“I want to sleep beside her.”

“In life and in death, I will never regret it.”

These words-

the Noble Consort could not say them.

The Young General could not say them.

So I would say them for them.