Chapter 1

“Ah!!!” Wei Tong jolted awake from another nightmare, tumbling off the bed as he gasped for air. Grabbing the water kettle on the battered old table, he gulped down bellyful after bellyful of cold water.

Outside, moonlight spilled across the ground, cold and hushed, seeping through the slightly broken window to light up Wei Tong’s tiny corner of the room. Within, there was nothing but the ragged snoring of the other men rising and falling. It was the dead of winter, yet Wei Tong’s forehead was thickly beaded with sweat. A strange sight, truly.

“Wei Tong, you brat, what are you doing sitting up in the middle of the night!” It wasn’t until Chen Dali got up to relieve himself that he noticed a figure sitting in the middle of the room. Had he been anyone else, he’d have been scared out of his wits.

“I’m fine. Had a nightmare. Just need a moment.” Wei Tong started as if only now waking at the sound of Chen Dali’s voice, and murmured an apology. Only after Chen Dali grumbled his way out of the room, muttering about the cold, did Wei Tong climb back into bed.

But sleep was the last thing on his mind. His eyes stayed open, staring up at the pitch-black roof.

Wei Tong was a junior sweeping eunuch of Qingning Palace. Qingning Palace had originally been called the Hall of Preserving Harmony, and it was only because the Emperor had taken up residence there that it was specially renamed.

To serve in the Emperor’s presence, even as a lowly sweeping eunuch, seemed a far better lot than most other postings. But Wei Tong didn’t see it that way. If he could have his way, he wanted to be as far from the Emperor as humanly possible.

The others weren’t worried, because their consciences were clean. He, on the other hand, was no loyal stock at all. He was Oboi’s mole! Ever since he had entered Qingning Palace, Wei Tong had not known a single day of ease. No, if he was being honest, he hadn’t had a good day since the day he transmigrated.

In the sixth year of Kangxi, Sonin died. Before his death, he had submitted a memorial urging Kangxi to assume personal rule at fourteen, following the precedent set by Shunzhi.

That same year, in the sixth month, Sonin passed away. In the seventh month, Kangxi took up the reins of government.

And it was in the fourth month of that very year that Wei Tong had been selected into Qingning Palace.

Whenever Wei Tong thought about that gap in timing, he couldn’t help a bitter smile. If he hadn’t been chosen that day, he wouldn’t be facing this dilemma now.

Wei Tong had transmigrated in as an infant, then grown up an orphan, losing his parents to disaster and left with nothing but a younger sister to drift through the world with him. Then men from Oboi’s faction had picked the two of them out, and after brainwashing and conditioning, he was sent into the palace to be made a eunuch, while his sister became a palace maid.

Wei Tong felt little for those parents. He had arrived in this world already a university student, and most of his energy had gone into protecting his sister. That pair had never been good people to begin with; if they hadn’t died in the disaster, it wouldn’t have been long before his sister was sold off to a brothel. The people who saved them were no saints either, but for his sister’s sake, Wei Tong had swallowed it all and endured.

Trembling, he reached down and touched the place below his waist. It was smooth and bare; a little further down, his fingers found a small ridge of scar. The one who had wielded the knife had been perfectly calm, and perfectly merciless. Fitting, really. Like master, like dog. How else could Oboi have become the foremost man to overshadow the Emperor?

Every time this thought surfaced, Wei Tong could not contain the fury that boiled up inside him. He rolled over to face the window. As the newcomer, he had been given the coldest spot in the room, right beside the window in winter, but there was nothing worth complaining about. He had never cared much for such things.

If he failed to produce any useful intelligence, who knew how Wei Ning, stuck in the Laundry Bureau, would get by. He could only count himself lucky that Qingning Palace held no small number of Oboi’s spies; a mere junior sweeping eunuch like himself drew very little scrutiny.

So last month, he had passed along only the most casually obtainable bits of information, perfectly befitting a junior eunuch’s reach. He hoped he could go on living like this, but no matter how he looked at it, his prospects seemed grim.

After all, Oboi, for all his apparent swagger and abandon, was already treading on thin ice.

Just as his gaze on the roof was beginning to blur with drowsiness, he felt something streak across his eyes, and in that instant, searing agony erupted. The pain drove him to clutch his face and roll across the bed, howling and screaming, yet strangely, none of the others seemed to notice at all. No one could hear him, as if some inexplicable force had sealed off the space around him.

Wei Tong felt his left eye was about to burst. The thing that had struck him seemed almost alive, burrowing relentlessly inward. The pain nearly made him bite through his own tongue; his mouth was now flooded with the taste of blood, and his left eye kept streaming with it.

He didn’t want to die!

The thick reek of blood, the wetness on his hand, made Wei Tong feel his life draining away. Inside his covered left eyeball, some nameless presence flickered with a faint light and, in a flash, rapidly dissolved. In that very instant, somewhere far away, a man bolted upright in bed, clutching at a head that had suddenly begun to throb with pain.

The moment it crossed some unseen threshold, all the pain vanished, and Wei Tong collapsed, boneless. But the sensation had been too terrifying; his whole body was drained, and he couldn’t move a muscle.

Only after he had finally recovered his strength did he pull up his sleeve and wipe haphazardly at the blood on his face, his left hand trembling over his left eye. After a long while, when the pain had faded completely, he tried blinking a few times, then let his hand drop.

He turned to look to the right and nudged the window open a crack; the world outside was perfectly clear, moonlight lying cool in the courtyard, wind and snow whirling, so cold it made him shudder. He turned back to check on the room; Chen Dali, who had gotten up in the night, was already sleeping like a pig.

Just as Wei Tong was deep in bewilderment, a gentle consciousness brushed against his, and in an instant, he blacked out. He did not come to again until the time it takes an incense stick to burn had passed.

The thing that had struck him was a bead, one that carried a small consciousness of its own, though that consciousness could not articulate much. All Wei Tong knew was that during the forced fusion, his body had been on the verge of giving out, and the bead had gone to find him another person, drawing on the lives of two to see him through.

And yet, though the bead had put him through agony, though it seemed like some inexplicable ghost-thing, Wei Tong couldn’t bring himself to hate it. The bead clung to him too affectionately, tender as a small child, nestling against him as if resting in the arms of the person it treasured most. It was only the matter of those “two lives” that left him baffled. Could it be that he had nearly died, so the bead had taken a person’s life to save him? But how? Had it truly snuffed out a living person for his sake?

At that thought, Wei Tong frowned.

He couldn’t work it out, but when he looked down at himself, at the blood spattered across his body and the bed, he could only thank his stars that he’d kicked the quilt off at the very start, and was wearing nothing over his inner garment. If the bloodstains weren’t dealt with quickly, come tomorrow he might well find himself dragged off to the Shangfang Court, which would one day become the Office of Punishment.

“Wei Tong! Wei Tong, why aren’t you up yet?” After toiling through half the night, Wei Tong had barely closed his eyes before Chen Dali’s voice dragged him up again. Of the eight men in the room, everyone except Chen Dali had already left.

Chen Dali was as big and tall as his name implied. Though his face was all gruff flesh, he had the kindest heart of anyone in this room; without him, Wei Tong’s situation would surely have been far worse.

Wei Tong answered, scrambled up, dressed and capped, gave himself a hasty wash with melted snow, wiped his face, and headed out.

Breakfast was crude to the point of misery, and by the time Wei Tong and Chen Dali arrived, the pots were nearly scraped clean. Chen Dali used his build to snatch a few cornmeal buns, and the two of them ate standing up.

After eating, the junior cleaning attendants dispersed to their tasks.

Even sweeping had its hierarchy. Though they were all unranked sweeping eunuchs, each was assigned a different territory. The ones walking ahead of Wei Tong were responsible for cleaning inside the palace halls, including the dusting of porcelains, bookshelves, and the like. This work demanded not only delicacy but also the personal vetting of the Emperor’s own eunuch before one could even set foot in the great hall. The Emperor’s sleeping quarters, of course, were beyond their reach entirely.

Next came Wei Tong and Chen Dali’s tier, responsible for scrubbing the corridors and windows. Hard and thankless as it was, it still beat sweeping the courtyards. Now that winter had come, there were no fallen leaves to worry about, but the snow had to be cleared constantly, and that was the most grueling work of all.

As for this new ability of his, Wei Tong couldn’t see any benefit in it yet. But there was Little Ke, the bead. Wei Tong had given it a name.

Dipping his hand into the water bucket, Wei Tong shivered violently and couldn’t help gritting his teeth as his palm went scarlet in an instant. The winter water was cold clear through; his hands were already covered in chilblains, aching and itching at once.

“Wei Tong, what’s wrong with you today?” Though Chen Dali had his back to him, scrubbing a pillar on the other side, the question came suddenly. Chen Dali might have looked like a man blind to the ways of the world, but Wei Tong knew he was, in fact, the most sensitive of them all to other people’s moods.

“I haven’t seen my sister in ages. I’ve been feeling restless.” Wei Tong straightened up and kneaded the back of his neck. He fell silent a moment before saying it. It wasn’t the main reason, but it was one of them.

Wei Tong was in Qingning Palace; Wei Ning was in the Laundry Bureau. Even meeting once was a struggle. Wei Tong had it a little easier, but Wei Ning could hardly leave her quarters at all. If not for the fact that her brother served in Qingning Palace, her days would be harder still.

“It’s only a few more days until your day off. Go see her then. What can you expect? We’re lowly attendants, that’s all we are.” Chen Dali dipped his cloth, still faintly smudged with grime, into the water, scrubbed it hard several times, and wrung it out.

Wei Tong said nothing, but his chest felt tight. His hands, however, never slowed. They had to finish all of this before the Emperor rose for the day.

Sometimes, when he thought about the mess his life had become, he wanted to cry, okay?! In all his life plans, “eunuch” had never been one of the options!