BBTTD Chapter 3.1

Switch out the Prince’s Consort?

What did that mean?

There were rumors among the common folk that young ladies preferred healthy, strong husbands.

Xie Yan was silent for a moment.

“It’s because the wound went too long without medicine.

I didn’t faint because your sword came flying at me.”

He seemed to emphasize the second half of the sentence, and after saying it, he glanced over at Su Jiao. When their eyes met, Xie Yan coughed once and looked away.

“I know that.”

Su Jiao looked at him with a strange expression.

“His Highness is perfectly healthy — how could he possibly faint just from being lightly knocked by a sword?”

Her words weren’t false. In her previous life, the first time she had seen Xie Yan ill was on their wedding night, and the second time was when that tyrant was lying on the bed just before she died.

In the three years since his enthronement, he had fought campaigns to the south and north. On the battlefield, he had crawled out of a pile of corpses with three sword wounds in his body and still slain the enemy nation’s general. Su Jiao had never once seen him show weakness.

Unexpectedly, after hearing her words, Xie Yan’s expression seemed to grow even colder. He was silent for a moment, then asked again.

“Then why did you say—”

“Your Highness!”

The voice of a guard outside the door cut Xie Yan off, and both of them stopped speaking.

“Her Majesty the Empress summons all palace attendants of Yongning Hall to Fengyi Palace for questioning.”

Knowing that the Empress would not easily let the matter rest, Su Jiao immediately looked toward Xie Yan.

Xie Yan’s expression remained utterly unmoved. He gave a slight nod, and at once the handful of servants in Yongning Hall filed out.

The vast palace hall fell empty.

Yongning Hall sat beside the Cold Palace — it would not be an exaggeration to call it a second Cold Palace.

Three years before this, Xie Yan had been Emperor Jia’s most favored son. Then, one day three years ago, the First Prince’s rebellion failed, and Emperor Jia had sent him to the chopping block. Of all the officials at court, only Xie Yan had personally knelt before the throne to plead for mercy — he had even nearly cut down the Minister of Justice in his attempt to save his elder brother, crying out his innocence again and again.

He knelt for two days. Emperor Jia agreed to see him, but no one knew what the two had argued about behind closed doors. Emperor Jia was so enraged that he vomited blood and fell unconscious, and when he awoke, he grew cold toward Xie Yan.

He ordered Xie Yan to move out of his former palace chambers and into Yongning Hall. From that day on, father and son never met again.

Even when Xie Yan married, Emperor Jia did not attend. All the arrangements, front to back, had been handled by the Empress Dowager and the Empress.

Everyone said that the Third Prince had offended the Emperor this time and would likely die of old age in Yongning Hall — his new bride had even been chosen from the daughter of a minor fourth-rank official. But Su Jiao always remembered the day Xie Yan rebelled: the Emperor, his breath barely a thread, was slumped beside the bed, and in those ashen, defeated eyes there had been a flicker of something like relief.

A decree to enthrone him as Emperor had even been placed nearby in advance.

If the Emperor truly despised him, how could that have been his reaction?

And if he did not despise him, then why make him spend years in the Cold Palace?

The closest and yet the most estranged of all — husband and wife. Even at the very end of her previous life, Xie Yan had never told her any of this. Su Jiao had known nothing of it before, but now…

She only wanted to leave Yongning Hall as soon as possible. She had not the slightest interest left in the entanglements between that imperial father and son.

Su Jiao sat before the dressing table and caught sight of her own reflection in the bronze mirror.

She was dressed in a great red wedding gown, her features lovely and faintly youthful. On her wedding day she was in full splendor, her eyes curved with a smile — she was unmistakably herself from five years ago.

A flash of daze passed through her eyes. She couldn’t help but pinch herself; pain shot through her, and only then did she realize she was not dreaming.

She had indeed returned to five years ago.

But of all days, it had to be on the wedding day. Why not sooner…

Hiss, hiss —

Thud —

Su Jiao was suddenly shoved off her chair. Her body slammed into the edge of the table, and she sucked in a sharp breath from the pain. She spun around and glared at Xie Yan.

Could it be that before the wedding her father had secretly altered her birth characters and submitted them to the Imperial Observatory so that they would divine this as a heaven-made match? Why else did nothing good ever happen whenever she ran into this tyrant?

“You—”

Hiss, hiss —

A long, slender, coiling shadow was flicked off Xie Yan’s short blade and flung to the ground. The vividly patterned venomous snake writhed a few times, then died at Su Jiao’s feet, its forked tongue still flickering. At the sight of it, every hair on her body stood on end.

“Xie Yan!”

“Come away from there.”

Xie Yan stumbled and dropped into the chair, cold sweat already beading on his forehead.

He bent down and lifted his robe. Beneath his inner garment, on the lower left leg, was a small, fine gash, from which blood was flowing freely.

Su Jiao snapped to attention at once.

“It bit you?”

That snake was venomous.

She immediately strode over, crouched down to examine the wound, and was about to lean in for a closer look.

But just as she bowed her head, she lifted it again and stared blankly up at Xie Yan.

“The snake is poisonous — I won’t die, will I?”

She had only just been reborn, after all.

For a moment Su Jiao forgot that her own medical skills were also first-rate, and that this particular venom was far from fatal. Xie Yan saw the look of utter disdain on her face, and his expression darkened without him even realizing it.

With one hand he pushed Su Jiao aside, bent down, and squeezed some of the blood out himself.

“Find medicine,” he said, his voice cold.

Su Jiao turned and headed toward the table.

Yongning Hall lacked so much that it had almost nothing — medicine included. Su Jiao rummaged for quite a while before she finally turned up a tiny porcelain vial no bigger than her thumb.

The medicine was for neutralizing poison, but when Su Jiao opened it, only half a dose remained inside.

She rose and fetched a basin of clean water from outside. Xie Yan sat before the table, his complexion — already pale — looking even more drawn than before. He watched as Su Jiao cleaned the wound again and sprinkled the medicine over it.

The slight movement stirred the pain, and Xie Yan clenched his large hand tight, forcing back the cry of pain that had risen to his lips.

Su Jiao crouched before him, and as he dropped his head, his gaze naturally fell upon her lovely face and those earnest, focused eyes.

This new wife of his seemed to know a great deal. She had revived him by pressing his philtrum before the Empress arrived, and she had then moved through his palace searching for medicine with practiced ease. Now she applied the treatment and cleaned the wound without any sign of unfamiliarity. Could such a young woman truly possess such considerable medical skill?

Su Jiao kept her head down, busy applying the medicine, and after a long while without any movement from Xie Yan, she couldn’t help but look up.

Their eyes met.

The room was quiet. Su Jiao looked at his features and at the gaze that had settled on her, and for a moment she felt adrift.

Those memories of the Cold Palace were already three years in the past; Xie Yan after his enthronement and Xie Yan as a prince were vastly different men. The distance between them as husband and wife had grown and grown, and Su Jiao could no longer remember the last time they had sat together as calmly as this.

Thinking of the three unhappy years that had followed in her previous life, Su Jiao closed her eyes briefly and, without thinking, tightened her grip on his arm.

She could not be trapped in this palace again in this life.

“Mm…”

Xie Yan finally couldn’t hold back a soft sound.

Su Jiao came back to herself and noticed how much paler his face had grown. She glanced toward where the venomous snake had been flung, and recalled the way Xie Yan had shoved her. It wasn’t hard to guess — the snake had been hidden behind the dressing table and had been meant to bite her.

Remembering how the Empress had called away all the palace servants just before she left, Su Jiao frowned.

So her attempt to kill Xie Yan had failed, and now she was taking it out on her?

“That snake was meant to bite me?”

“Mm.”

“Why did you block it?”

Xie Yan pressed his lips together and averted his gaze.

She had just looked at him with disdain for supposedly fainting from such a light blow from a sword, and had opened her mouth to talk about separation. Now, with a snake, if he stood by and let his wife be bitten, wouldn’t she look down on him again?

In all of history, divorce on the very first day of marriage was hardly common. Among princes, he absolutely could not be the first.

He said nothing for a long while, and Su Jiao did not press him. She finally let go and made to stand up.

But Xie Yan misread the motion. Without thinking, he grabbed Su Jiao’s sleeve and spoke in a rush.

“I am not that frail — blocking a snake won’t kill me from the poison!”

He had grabbed too hard. Su Jiao had been crouching for quite a while and was already feeling lightheaded; this time, his pull sent her tumbling straight into him.

The two of them collided fully.

A soft, slender body was pulled into his arms, and a delicate fragrance crept into his breath from every direction. Xie Yan’s back went rigid at once, and the tips of his ears flushed red.

He instinctively looked away, feeling in one moment as though he held a hot potato in his arms — at a loss whether to let go or to hold on.

Su Jiao stood up, rubbing the tip of her nose, which had gone red from knocking against his firm chest.

“If you grab me like that one more time, I won’t die from the snake’s venom — I’ll die from being knocked about by you.”

Xie Yan was at a loss.

“I… I’m sorry.”