Chapter 3

Creak… The door of the east side chamber opened, and Liang Jiugong, standing guard outside, watched Wei Tong limp out, his right foot still throbbing dully from the kicks Kangxi had landed on it.

Liang Jiugong gave him a glance, flicked his horsetail whisk, and went back inside, emerging a moment later to look coolly at the men waiting by the door. “You may all return.” Liu Jinzhong exchanged a look with him, then led the party away. Chen Dali and Zhang Jiu deliberately lingered at the very back, watching Wei Tong with worry.

Zhang Jiu’s worry came of gratitude; Chen Dali’s was genuine. Wei Tong waved them both off, signaling he was fine, then clenched his back teeth and kept walking. After a while, the pain numbed into habit.

Back at the courtyard, Zhang Jiu was caned ten strokes before the assembled company. At the sound of each blow landing on flesh, the entire courtyard fell silent. Once inside the palace, every attendant got a few rounds of killing the chicken to warn the monkey. Anyone who made it into Qingning Palace had witnessed this spectacle before. But every time, every single time, such a thing only impressed upon Wei Tong more clearly what it meant to live under a hierarchy of iron.

When he got back to his own room, none of the usual occupants spoke a word. Only Liu Yuancheng, sitting at the back, called out, “I hear you all were sent to fetch the meal service. Why was Zhang Jiu beaten?” Everyone knew “breach of decorum before the Emperor” was nothing but boilerplate.

Though this time, Zhang Jiu really had committed a breach of decorum.

Wei Tong only shook his head and said nothing, and seeing his silence, Chen Dali held his tongue as well. Liu Yuancheng, rebuffed, clicked his tongue and turned away. Wei Tong laboriously hauled himself onto his bed, ready to lie down for a while. He hadn’t expended that much energy in a very long time.

As for today, Wei Tong didn’t believe Kangxi had truly taken any real fancy to him. The Emperor had simply wanted someone to vent on after Oboi’s provocation. He could only hope that Kangxi would forget his existence by tomorrow. Besides, if today’s affair spread, it would hardly burnish the young Emperor’s reputation.

Dead tired, Wei Tong sank into sleep almost the moment his head touched the pillow.

Half-asleep and half-awake, he seemed to find himself in an antique chamber, furnished with quiet elegance. Wei Tong could even see a daybed and its appointments, and in the middle stood a grand, imposing folding screen. At first glance he’d taken it for real, so lifelike was the painting. Just as Wei Tong was wondering whether his waking thoughts had conjured this dream, a pleasant male voice came from the far side of the screen. “Who are you?”

Wei Tong was silent for a few seconds, then pinched his own hand. No pain?

Wei Tong remembered that he had been on the verge of sleep. When he walked up to the screen intending to go around it, he found he couldn’t, and finally contented himself with pulling out a chair, sitting down, and saying, “And who might you be?”

The other party fell silent. Wei Tong paid it no mind; in dreams, anything was possible. He turned to examine his surroundings carefully. Come to think of it, the furnishings were barely distinguishable from real ones. When he turned back, the voice spoke again. “I am called, by the single character, Xuan. Where exactly is this place?”

Xuan’s phrasing was slightly stiff, as if he rarely spoke this way.

Wei Tong tilted his head, looking toward whoever might be hidden behind the screen, and said softly, “Presumably, we are in a dream.”

“A dream?” The voice lifted faintly at the end.

Wei Tong rubbed the space between his brows. Truthfully, he had no idea why he would suddenly dream like this, much less conjure such a scene.

“I, for one, do not believe I am dreaming,” Xuan said flatly.

Wei Tong didn’t press the point and tried to go back to sleep, but it seemed one couldn’t sleep inside a dream. With nothing to do and no way out, Wei Tong settled into conversation with the other man. It was only a dream, after all, and Wei Tong found himself relaxing as he spoke with Xuan. Ever since entering the palace, the string in Wei Tong’s chest had been wound far too tight. Xuan spoke little, but he always responded.

When the two of them finally lapsed into silence, Wei Tong seemed to hear someone calling by his ear. “Wei Tong, Wei Tong, wake up, it’s evening and you’re still sleeping?” And just like that, he was yanked out of the dreamscape.

He rubbed his head, replaying what had just happened. The dream had been crystal clear, vivid as lived experience.

It really was rare to dream so lucidly, though the moment he woke, the name of that voice called Xuan slipped from his mind. Wei Tong rose and changed his clothes, rubbing at his injuries as unobtrusively as he could. It would take a good while for them to heal, it seemed.

But Wei Tong had guessed one thing wrong.

Before the day was even out, rumors were already flying that Kangxi was ill-tempered and unreasonable, blind to right and wrong, and cruel to his palace staff. Wei Tong nearly jumped when he heard it while sweeping. Who on earth had spread this?

And that afternoon, Zhang Jiu came looking for him himself. Ever since Wei Tong had saved him that day, Zhang Jiu had grown markedly warmer toward him, hurrying over the moment he spotted Wei Tong. But Wei Tong didn’t want the bother; Zhang Jiu’s attentions would only stir resentment among their roommates.

“Wei Tong, don’t walk off! I know you’re angry, but you stuck your neck out for me all the same, and I’ve already quietly asked my Master about it.” Anyone who’d survived long in this palace was a shrewd old fox, and Zhang Jiu hastily called out to stop him.

Sure enough, Wei Tong’s strides halted.

Zhang Jiu pulled him off to a secluded spot, swept their surroundings up and down several times over, and only then said, “Master would only tell me one thing. The rumors came out of Qingning Palace.” His voice was low, low as it could go, terrified of being overheard. Wei Tong had known the rumors were running wild through the palace, but not that they had originated inside Qingning itself. Could someone be deliberately smearing the Emperor? Listening to the way Zhang Jiu now spoke to him, something stirred in Wei Tong’s heart. But if it truly was that side’s doing, Wei Tong had no room to resist whatsoever.

No, more than that. Whoever it was, a junior eunuch like Wei Tong could be crushed dead between one finger and the next.

Set that conversation aside. A few nights later, at the drop point where Wei Tong made his once-monthly intelligence handoff, just as he was sliding the paper slip into the hole, a figure cornered him.

Once he saw who it was, Wei Tong sighed inwardly. The stir caused by his sparring match with Kangxi was clearly not going to be waved away so easily. The man fished the slip back out of the hole Wei Tong had just fed it into, glanced over it a few times, and sneered, “You little whelp. Have you forgotten something?”

“Eunuch Liu. This servant would not dare.” Wei Tong spoke softly.

The man before him was the second in command of Qingning Palace, after Liang Jiugong. On the surface, he was a man sent by the Empress Dowager; in truth, he labored for Oboi. Qingning Palace was riddled with eyes and ears belonging to every faction under heaven, and no one could say whether the man calling you brother one second would slip a knife between your ribs the next.

Liu Cheng looked Wei Tong up and down, pulled back his hood, and waved the slip of white paper between his fingers, speaking with leisurely menace. “So what’s the story with the rumors going around the palace these past few days? And how exactly did you get tangled up with the Emperor?”

At Liu Cheng’s words, Wei Tong felt a flicker of genuine surprise. So this wasn’t Oboi’s doing? Could Kangxi be blackening his own name? Impossible… wait. A thought flashed through Wei Tong’s mind, but before he could seize it, it was gone.

“This servant truly knows nothing. That day, after His Excellency departed, His Majesty lost his temper. This servant was dragged along by Zhang Jiu, Eunuch Liu’s apprentice, to fetch the meal service. Zhang Jiu’s hands shook, and this servant steadied the box for him. But then His Majesty insisted this servant stay behind to spar with him. This servant still carries a good number of injuries from it.” As he finished, Wei Tong even made a show of it, rolling up his sleeve in the dead of winter to give Liu Cheng a look.

Liu Cheng scanned the marks. They were unmistakably the marks of a beating, delivered by a strong hand. A junior eunuch like this wouldn’t dare lie to him. Hmph. The Emperor? Nothing but a whelp barely weaned, and so capricious besides…

“If that’s how it is, then go on back. But if This Servant finds out you’ve said one word too many, or one word too few, you know what your end will be. And your sister’s fate will be ten times worse than yours!” Only after wielding this threat over Wei Tong with relish did Liu Cheng turn and leave.

By rights, a man of Liu Cheng’s rank should never have crossed paths with an insignificant pawn like Wei Tong, yet he seemed to know Wei Tong’s circumstances perfectly. The truth was that Liu Cheng was a vicious man with cruel methods, and a strange quirk besides: perhaps the memory of having that part of himself cut away was too deeply seared in him, but for several years, Liu Cheng had actually served in posts much like an executioner’s. Though Wei Tong had never passed through his hands, he had been chosen by them. Liu Cheng was a strange case all around: once one of the Empress Dowager’s people, his savage temperament made him disliked, and he was demoted again and again, which was how those years came about. And so he came to nurse a grudge against the Empress Dowager herself, defecting resolutely to Oboi’s side, where he was held in considerable regard.

Wei Tong didn’t know all of this, but his wariness of Liu Cheng only deepened. He watched the man’s retreating back, then made his own way back and lay staring at the black ceiling, sleepless.

He knew his history. Anyone tied to Oboi’s faction was, sooner or later, a dead man walking. But given his current identity, switching sides was next to impossible. Kangxi had been suppressed by Oboi for so many years that he would never readily trust anyone, least of all a powerless, rootless, unsexed creature like Wei Tong. At bottom, eunuchs and maids were nothing but implements to those above, kept while convenient and discarded when not. What was more, the Kangxi of history had never trusted the eunuchs. Liang Jiugong hadn’t held his favor to the end, either. In the Emperor’s late years, it was Wei Zhu who rose, though none of them ever matched the eunuchs of the previous dynasty. All of it was side testimony to how seriously Kangxi had taken the lessons of the Ming Dynasty.

But reality no longer left room for Wei Tong’s hesitation. Until Kangxi truly held power, there were a mere two years remaining.

On the sixteenth day of the fifth month of the eighth year of Kangxi, Kangxi would outwit and seize Oboi, reclaiming the power of the court, and the opening chapter of the Kang-Qian Golden Age would truly begin.