Chapter 5

There was only one explanation:

“You kept my secret for me, and I’ll ensure your next life is one of wealth and glory.”

Whoever made that promise had to possess the power to meddle with the cause and effect of future lives. No mortal could do that.

I stood and walked to the window. The cold moonlight was like a blade.

The Consort was dead. Had the trail gone cold?

No.

A faint smile touched my lips.

I was the Nine Netherworlds Ghost King. The dead before me had always been more cooperative than the living.

“Prepare the palanquin. I’m going to the Cold Palace to retrieve Consort Wei’s body myself…”

Late at night.

The side hall holding Consort Wei’s corpse stood in the northwest corner of the imperial city, among the ruins of the old Cold Palace. The soldiers guarding it had all been withdrawn. The woman was dead—what was there left to guard?

I pushed open the door.

The Consort’s body lay on a wooden plank, a deep groove around her neck, arranged to look as if she had hanged herself. The work was neat and clean.

I raised my hand, and yin energy streamed from my fingertips.

“Come out.”

Black mist churned. A phantom was yanked out of the corpse.

Consort Wei’s ghost.

Her face still faintly carried the charm she had possessed in life, but her gaze was strangely calm. The moment I dragged her out, she even… smiled.

“Your Majesty the Empress Dowager came in person?” Her voice drifted like smoke. “How unfortunate. I’m already dead. The dead cannot be interrogated—that’s the rule.”

I looked at her.

She wasn’t afraid. A newly dead ghost stood before the one who had summoned her without the slightest trepidation.

“Did someone promise you something?”

Consort Wei covered her mouth and giggled. “That’s right. Someone promised me wealth and glory in my next life, for three lifetimes without end. My soul is under his protection. No matter what you want to do to me, Empress Dowager, this is as far as you can go.”

She even dipped into a shallow curtsy, her tone dripping with mockery. “So—please go home, Your Majesty.”

Silence held for exactly three breaths.

Then I laughed.

That laugh did not belong to the Empress Dowager. It did not belong to any woman of the mortal realm.

It came from the depths of the Nine Netherworlds, carrying the shrieking echoes of ten thousand ghosts.

“Who do you think is standing before you?”

I loosened the seal. Just a little.

The Ghost King’s pressure crashed down like a tangible tidal wave, crushing heaven and earth. Every candle in the side hall shattered at once. Black mist seeped from the cracks between the bricks, and the stone floor split with a series of sharp snaps.

Consort Wei’s ghost went rigid.

Her smile froze, then gradually broke apart, like cracks spreading across porcelain.

“No… Impossible…”

She began to tremble. The edges of her soul collapsed—the instinctive disintegration of a ghost terrified beyond measure.

“You say someone is protecting you?” I looked down at her. “Before me, there is no such thing as protection. If I want to scatter your soul, it takes only a thought. If I want to cast you into the Avīci Hell for all eternity—”

I paused.

“That, too, takes only a thought.”

Consort Wei’s ghost fell face-first to the ground with a thud, trembling violently.

“Spare… spare me…”

“Speak.”

And so she confessed everything.

It was the Emperor. Xiao Changge.

He had given her the dark-sorcery artifact. He had ordered her to act on the night the Empress gave birth to a princess. They switched out the real princess, hid her inside the late emperor’s coffin, and used a secret ritual to turn it into a vessel for fortune—absorbing the princess’s phoenix fate to sustain the Emperor himself.

“He said… the phoenix fate could make up for what was missing from his own fate…” Consort Wei’s voice faltered. “His fate was incomplete. Without that phoenix blessing to prolong it, he couldn’t hold on to the throne, and he wouldn’t live long…”

I fell silent.

“And… that day at the Imperial Ancestral Temple…” She raised her head, despair filling her eyes. “He deliberately backed you when you asked to open the coffin… because he was certain no one could tell from the outside that anything was wrong. He wanted to humiliate you in public so he could depose you… He never expected you to really split it open…”

Enough.

My killing intent was a freezing tide from the Nine Netherworlds, chilling heaven and earth.

“One last question. Where did the artifact come from?”

Consort Wei shook her head desperately. “I don’t know… He just handed it to me. He never told me where it came from… I truly don’t know…”

Ghosts could not lie. Before the Ghost King, no secret could remain hidden.

She truly did not know.

“Go.”

I raised my hand.

Chains of yin energy bound her soul and dragged it into the tear opening beneath our feet—a rift connected to the true Avīci Hell.

“No! Don’t! Please—”

Her dreadful scream was swallowed by darkness. The rift closed. Silence returned to the side hall.

I turned and pushed open the door.

The night wind struck my face, cold to the bone.

You’re next.

Xiao Changge.

By dawn, a commotion had already risen outside Cining Palace.

The Emperor had arrived, bringing a large retinue of civil and military officials.