Mother’s Last Lesson

After that, Mother once conceived another child.

The emperor forced himself on her when he could no longer endure rejection.

When Mother learned the child existed, she brewed a bowl of bloodfall draught herself.

Then drank it clean in front of me.

I had never seen her so relaxed.

That bowl did not seem like poison.

It looked like a cure she had waited for.

“Jiao,” she asked, “do you remember what I taught you?”

“I remember.”

“Before victory is certain, if the enemy does not move, I do not move.”

Mother touched my head.

“Good.”

Then I watched blood bloom between her legs like flowers.

She refused to let anyone call the physician.

Only when she became faint as breath did she summon them.

That night in Hehuan Palace, the imperial physician knelt and told the emperor:

“Your Majesty, Noble Consort may… may never conceive again.”

A tear fell from the emperor’s eye.

His fists clenched.

Later, the physician’s corpse was carried out of Hehuan Palace.

“So you still hate me this much?” the emperor asked.

“If you had borne me a prince, I would have made him heir. I would have given him this empire.”

Mother’s voice was cold.

“You said the same thing once before.”

I hid behind the screen and covered my mouth.

I had thought Mother only ever had Father.

I had not known she and the emperor had once been each other’s closest companions.

As children, they had known each other.

One was an unfavored prince.

The other, a youngest daughter considered unlucky at birth, sent into the palace to become his servant.

They had once relied on each other.

But to help him seize power, his mother chose a noble family’s illegitimate daughter for alliance.

Mother became the abandoned one.

For power, the emperor personally drove her out of the empire.

My father saved her.

Father gave her a second life.

Different from a life of being arranged, gifted, or discarded, the steppe allowed Mother to become herself.

A bright, fierce woman like a hawk in flight.

The emperor won.

He still remembered the young Mother.

Remembered how she shielded his back when fists fell upon him.

He said he would compensate her for the past.

But late affection and guilt are cheaper than grass.

He sat on the throne.

Yet he could not possess Mother.

A woman who had seen the blazing world would never willingly fall back into mud.

Mother did not want his compensation.

He insisted on giving it.

Only to complete the image of deep love in his own heart.

When Mother refused him coldly, he used the lives of the steppe people as bargaining chips.

He forced her to become proof of his “devotion.”

The historians added a line:

Emperor Zhong of Great Sheng was a man of deep feeling.

How laughable.

He had only made Mother a tool to polish his reputation.

On the day Mother died, I finally understood.

Jiao was her name.

And I was the substitute he had raised in her image.