The moment Xianzong stepped through the door, he saw his own daughter haul his beloved consort up off the couch and, like tossing out a dead dog, hurl her out the window. Emperor Xianzong simply went blank. Would someone please explain to him what on earth was going on?
Consort Zhao flew through midair, watched two sparrows zip past her, and without a sound, rolled her eyes back and fainted.
The sound of something heavy hitting water drifted up into the large room on the third floor shortly after.
After a stretch of silence inside and outside the building, panicked cries rose from below.
"Ah! Consort Zhao has fallen into the water!"
"Ahh! Save her, quick!"
"Ahhh! Consort Zhao has sunk to the bottom of the pond!"
...
Xianzong came back to his senses and rushed to the window in three leaps, looked down at the pond below, and suddenly began to tremble. What had he just witnessed?
Yu Xiaoxiao frowned in annoyance. A slip-up. When she'd grabbed Consort Zhao, she'd forgotten there was a pond outside the window.
"Quick," Xianzong shouted to those around him from the window. "Follow Us downstairs!"
"You're going downstairs?" Before the imperial guards, palace maids, and eunuchs could even react, Yu Xiaoxiao was already at Xianzong's side, asking.
Xianzong said, "We must go down to see Our beloved consort!"
"Fine, I'll take you down." Yu Xiaoxiao grabbed Xianzong by the collar and, carrying this lifetime's imperial father, leapt out of the half-open latticed window.
The crowd inside the room...
...
By the time Xianzong's feet touched the ground, several eunuchs had already fished Consort Zhao out of the pond. With his mind entirely on Consort Zhao, Xianzong spared no thought for himself and shouted at the eunuchs first: "How is she?!"
Before the eunuchs could open their mouths, Yu Xiaoxiao said, "Not dead."
"Then why is she foaming at the mouth?" Xianzong asked.
A warrior who had lived through the apocalypse was an expert at treating external wounds—after all, not every doctor could become a warrior, but a warrior learning medicine was entirely feasible. Looking at the foam-flecked Consort Zhao, Yu Xiaoxiao hesitated. External wounds were no problem for her, but this one seemed to be an internal ailment. After a moment's thought, Her Highness the Princess gave an uncertain answer: "Epilepsy?"
The several eunuchs supporting Consort Zhao desperately wanted to scream at this imperial father and daughter: She's been frightened out of her wits! Can't you see how she's shaking? What kind of father and daughter are you? You nearly threw her to her death, and now that the poor victim is foaming at the mouth from shock, you two still have the mood to stand around chatting? Is it really that hard to fetch an imperial physician?
"Your—Your Majesty," Grand Eunuch Jing Zhong swooped down from the third floor, rushed to Xianzong's side, and asked with a face drained of all color, "Are you all right?"
Xianzong snapped, "What could possibly happen to Us? It's Consort Zhao who's in trouble!"
Grand Eunuch Jing looked up at the small building behind him.
Xianzong froze, followed Jing Zhong's gaze to the building, and suddenly said, "Huh? How did We get down here?"
Jing Zhong carefully pointed a finger at Yu Xiaoxiao.
Xianzong's brain, usually reserved for eating, drinking, and pleasure, finally remembered: his own daughter had grabbed him and jumped off a building! "This is impossible," Xianzong muttered. He must simply have gotten out of bed the wrong way this morning.
For a hundred li around the Lanshu Pavilion, not a human sound could be heard. Everyone stared at Princess Linglong with wooden faces and stiff bodies. Taking the Emperor on a leap off a building for fun? Just how much nerve did this woman have?
"Does the Princess have a death wish?" a shadow guard whispered to his companion in the dark.
His companion, steady by nature and skilled at grasping the main issue, said only this: "When did she learn martial arts?" Even they, the shadow guards, hadn't had time to move and stop it. Had Her Highness the Princess become a peerless master overnight?
"I heard the Princess fell ill after Empress Dowager's death," came the reply.
Fall ill once and turn into a peerless master? The shadow guard stared expressionlessly at his idiot companion. If that were true, they should all just go fall ill—why bother training so arduously, paying for their martial arts with their very lives?
"You grabbed Us and jumped?" In the dead silence, Xianzong asked his daughter.
Yu Xiaoxiao nodded.
"What were you trying to do?" Xianzong asked.
Yu Xiaoxiao said, "It's faster to get downstairs this way."
"Nonsense!"
"I never lie." That was the truth—Yu Xiaoxiao wasn't deceiving anyone. Creatures like zombies couldn't even speak human language, so who would she tell lies to? Her human companions? Get real. With their race nearly extinct, what idiot would bother playing at backstabbing each other?
At the thought that he might have just died, Xianzong broke out in a cold sweat. Pointing a finger at Yu Linglong, he said, "Guards!"
Everyone held their breath at once. His Majesty was about to execute his own daughter.
Oblivious to the tense atmosphere, Yu Xiaoxiao pointed at Consort Zhao and asked Xianzong, "What are you going to do about your little wife?"
Little wife? The hand Xianzong had pointed at Yu Xiaoxiao began to tremble. "Little wife? You say she is Our little wife?"
"Then what is she?"
"She is Our beloved consort!"
"Isn't a consort just a little wife?" Yu Xiaoxiao was getting a bit angry. Were they bullying her, an apocalypse survivor, for being uneducated?
"Seize her!" Xianzong hopped up and down and shouted.
Yu Linglong sighed to herself. If a father had even a shred of intelligence and ambition, his daughter wouldn't turn out warped. Which was to say, the life tragedy of the tyrannical Empress was all thanks to having such a useless father.
A note to readers: For this new novel, there will be two updates at nine in the morning and two at ten each day.