Legendary Imperial Consort Li Tiezhu - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

My grandfather was Blacksmith Li, and as the name suggests, he was a blacksmith.

My family was a famous line of smiths in Yongcheng. For eight generations back, every one of us had been a blacksmith. You could say our family learning ran deep and stretched far into the past.

When my grandfather lay on his deathbed, my mother was in the middle of giving birth to me. Other babies came out headfirst. I came out feetfirst.

My grandfather clung to his final breath, hoping to see his grandson just once. In the end, he still didn’t manage to last until I arrived.

Full of unwillingness, he summoned my father to his bedside and gave the grandson he would never meet a name: a simple name, but one carrying great expectations.

Tiezhu.

The pillar of Li’s Blacksmith Shop.

The moment my grandfather breathed his last, I came wailing into the world.

Holding the newborn me in his arms, my father knelt before my grandfather’s bed and sobbed at the top of his lungs.

“Father! Open your eyes and look! The child is born!”

“Father! Tiezhu… she’s a girl!”

After enduring the tremendous grief of losing his father, my father soon fell into a dilemma.

Tiezhu obviously could not, at the very least should not, be a girl’s name.

But it was his late father’s final instruction. His father had only just passed, and if he immediately went against that final wish, it would clearly be terribly unfilial.

My father struggled bitterly between being a dutiful son and a loving father.

In the end, he decided to be a dutiful son.

And so my childhood name became Li Tiezhu.

After my grandfather passed away, my father inherited his blacksmith shop.

But people did not call him Blacksmith Li. Instead, with a certain degree of reverence, they called him Master Li.

Because he had been educated.

Behind every glorious family stands a descendant who strays from tradition.

For Li’s Blacksmith Shop, that rebellious descendant was my father, Li Kang.

From a young age, my father revealed his ambition to abandon iron for literature.

When he was only seven or eight, every day after pulling the bellows and tending the fire for my grandfather, he would walk three streets over to Renqing Lane, climb onto the wall of a private school, and listen to the old Confucian scholar inside lecture on the Book of Songs.

After he did this for two years, rain or shine, my grandmother could not bear it anymore. She squeezed tuition money out of our meager household expenses and formally sent him to school.

Our family’s status as registered craftsmen meant my father was destined to spend this life as a blacksmith.

Although he could not change his fate through the imperial examinations, my father remained diligent and studious. He even secretly settled on a dream of his own: to become a poet.

The poet he admired most was Qu Yuan. Although many of the characters in Qu Yuan’s works repeatedly left him deadlocked in the course of his studies, he still worked hard, in both thought and action, to draw closer to this idol from another age.

Not only would he occasionally drape himself in flowers and grasses and stand in the blacksmith shop lost in contemplation, he also imitated the style and meaning of Li Sao and quietly began composing his own work, Lao Sao.

The reason dreams are precious is that the road to realizing them is bound to bring crushing blows.

The crushing blow my father encountered came from my grandfather, Blacksmith Li.

When my father was sixteen, my grandfather finally reached the end of his patience. He stopped paying for my father’s private schooling and threw the Lao Sao my father had poured his heart and soul into straight into the furnace, ordering him to settle down and be a proper blacksmith.

My father had no choice but to give up his literary dream.

At least on the surface.

After taking over as blacksmith, my father always maintained the lofty integrity of a scholar and the noble, aloof bearing of a poet.

The sound of hammering iron made him think of armored steeds and clashing blades.

The sparks scattering before his eyes let him see a river of stars across the sky.

He was quiet and reserved, rarely smiled or joked, and gave off the air of a reclusive master above worldly affairs.

As a result, our family business was especially good.

Fine steeds are common; those who can recognize them are rare.

When my father was twenty-two, Yongcheng welcomed an honored guest, and my father welcomed the man who would recognize his worth.

This honored guest and discerning patron was the father of the current Crown Princess: Pengcheng Earl.

The emperor of this dynasty had risen from humble origins and married Empress Lady Niu when they were both still insignificant. After he founded Great Zhao and became emperor, he felt deep gratitude for the hardships he and his wife had endured together in poverty. At the same time, considering the disasters caused throughout history by women in the inner palace and the monopolizing of power by imperial in-laws, he thought of a solution that would settle the matter once and for all.

He would choose consorts from among the common people.

Pengcheng Earl’s ancestors had made their living by farming. In his youth, he had worked hard to govern himself and pursue advancement, and then happened to encounter the storms of a chaotic age. From an ordinary farmer, he crossed class boundaries and became a salaried official.

After the emperor founded the dynasty, Pengcheng Earl’s daughter was selected to enter the palace thanks to her reputation for virtue and beauty, as well as her plain and ordinary family background. She smoothly became the Crown Princess.

Pengcheng Earl also transformed from an obscure seventh-rank petty official into a lofty imperial relative.

Yongcheng was Pengcheng Earl’s ancestral home. After becoming an imperial relative, Pengcheng Earl did not forget the elders and villagers of his hometown. Every few years, he would return to visit and pay respects to his ancestors.

During this return trip, his luxurious carriage passed the mouth of the alley where my family lived.

From inside the carriage, amid the clamor of the crowd, Pengcheng Earl suddenly heard the clear, ringing sound of iron being forged.

Accompanying the hammer blows was a long, powerful chant:

“Sun and moon suddenly do not tarry,

Spring and autumn follow in their turn.

Only when grasses and trees wither and fall,

Do I fear the beauty will fade with age.”

This was my father’s habit, and also the reason people came to gaze upon him with admiration:

When he forged iron, he chanted Li Sao.

If other people were drawn to my father mostly because they wanted to see something strange, then Pengcheng Earl being drawn to him could truly be called a meeting of kindred spirits.

Deeply captivated by the sound of hammering and chanting, Pengcheng Earl stepped down from his carriage and followed the sound to our family’s blacksmith shop.

Then he saw a young man eight chi tall, with a wasp waist and long, simian arms, stripped to the waist and hammering iron in a downpour of sweat-while chanting Li Sao.

He was thunderstruck.

He stood beneath the locust tree outside my family’s blacksmith shop and quietly gazed at the young man at the forge.

My father, too, displayed extraordinary composure. Faced with the attention of a nobleman in splendid robes, he showed not the slightest sign of being flattered or overwhelmed. He simply ignored him and kept hammering away as usual.

Pengcheng Earl was deeply stirred.

Because he thought of someone.

An ancient gentleman who seemed to carry the solemn wind through pines about him.

Ji Kang.

At last, after my father finished forging a kitchen knife, splashed it with cold water, and lifted it to examine the edge as though admiring a treasured sword, Pengcheng Earl took the initiative to step forward and greet him.

“May I ask how I should address you, sir?”

My father set down the kitchen knife and returned the courtesy with calm indifference. “Thank you for asking, elder. This humble one is Li Kang.”

Pengcheng Earl clenched his fists.

Ji Kang.

Li Kang.

Ji Kang forged iron.

Li Kang also forged iron!

What an astonishing coincidence.

Pengcheng Earl decided he had to befriend my father.

He invited my father to share a meal.

Because this dynasty suppressed the power of imperial in-laws, Pengcheng Earl, the Crown Prince’s father-in-law, possessed nothing but wealth and rank. His life could truly be described as lonely as snow.

On the night he met my father, the two of them drank cup after cup, sympathizing with each other’s unrecognized talent and thwarted ambitions. Pengcheng Earl’s form of address for my father also shifted from Master Li to Little Brother Li.

Pengcheng Earl and Little Brother Li talked from gold, silver, copper, and iron all the way to the philosophy of life. They regretted meeting so late, lamented that a thousand cups were still too few, and before long the table was a wreck of dishes and wine. Together, they used the wine shop as their bed and pillows, unaware that the east had already begun to pale.

The next day, because my father was drunk, he had no choice but to close the shop for the day. And because he had stayed out all night, my mother punished him by making him kneel on the washboard.

As he knelt there in proud solitude before the setting sun, he had not yet realized that his fate had already begun to change in silence.

Not long after, he became an official.

After Pengcheng Earl left Yongcheng and returned to the capital, he could not bear to see Little Brother Li wasting away among the common streets. So he recommended Little Brother Li for an official post-

Yongcheng County Recorder.

A recorder was not exactly a proper official; at most, it was a clerkly post. But from then on, my father ate the government’s rice and became an “official lord” in the eyes of ordinary folk. One might say he had soared to the heavens in a single leap.

My father did not disappoint Pengcheng Earl’s high regard.

During his ten years as recorder, he rose before dawn and slept late at night, fulfilling his duties with utmost loyalty. He won the esteem of his superior, the county magistrate, and earned the wholehearted support of the local people.

Nor was my family’s blacksmith shop torn down. In his spare time outside official duties, Father often helped people forge things for free.

Beneath the weight of his great reputation, our family’s standard of living declined day by day. We became very hard up.

Ten years passed like this. Then our benefactor, Pengcheng Earl, came to Yongcheng once again, and once again brought a change in fate.

But this time, the one whose fate changed was not my father.

It was me.

Over the past ten years, my father and Pengcheng Earl had never lost contact. Letters flew back and forth between them like migrating geese. They could be said to be bosom friends of the deepest soul.

When Pengcheng Earl came to Yongcheng and saw Little Brother Li, whose poverty had only grown more pronounced and whose integrity seemed all the loftier for it, he was overjoyed. He decided to stay the night in our humble home.

It was on this very day.

He saw, in the courtyard, a fourteen-year-old Li Tiezhu standing graceful and tall, chopping firewood with one hand.

That was me.

First, he congratulated Little Brother Li. He congratulated him on having such a beautiful and promising daughter.

Then he looked at me for a long while and said with a sigh, “She greatly resembles my daughter!”

“My daughter” referred to none other than the current Crown Princess.

This was practically the highest praise a girl could receive.

Immediately after, Pengcheng Earl brought us a piece of inside information.

The Crown Grandson-that is, his own biological grandson-had come of age, and His Majesty the Emperor was about to choose a consort for him.

And I, Li Tiezhu, fourteen years old, graceful and tall, and greatly resembling the Crown Princess, was simply too suitable.

My father, who had always carried himself like a lofty recluse, was instantly so frightened that he waved his hands again and again in refusal.

But Pengcheng Earl was dazzled by his own idea. He looked at me again and again, almost ready to make me call him Grandfather on the spot.

Very soon, however, Pengcheng Earl sank into melancholy. As an imperial in-law, even though he was the Crown Grandson’s own maternal grandfather, he had not the slightest say or decision-making power in the matter of choosing the Crown Grandson’s consort. In fact, it was best if he did not even dream of having any say or decision-making power at all.

Thus, after he left, the three of us dared not truly take this distant, unreachable opportunity to heart.

But just a few months later, the county magistrate came to find my father, his face full of excitement.

He told him that on the prefecture’s selection register, the name Li Tiezhu had appeared in bold relief.

Our whole family was stunned.

The entire county was stunned too.

Although the Crown Princess’s ancestral home was Yongcheng, she herself had never lived in Yongcheng. Although countless legends about phoenixes surrounded her ancestral residence, not a single person in the entire county had ever seen that phoenix with their own eyes.

I was different.

From the time I was still in my mother’s belly, back when my father was only a blacksmith, at least half the city had seen me with their own eyes.

So everyone was especially excited.

On the day I left Yongcheng for the capital, there were so many people gathered to watch that I nearly couldn’t make it out through the city gate.

In echo of that, when I officially arrived at the capital, I also nearly couldn’t make it in through the city gate.

Because I was struck by lightning.