Refusing to Serve Me? Then Off With Your Head!

Chapter 50 Yan Ping's Special (2)

3 years passed and I would occasionally reminisce the scene in Jin Xiu Pavilion. The fire raged on for three days and three nights. After the fire was extinguished, the Crown Prince gritted his teeth before ordering his people to scour through the ashes. His eyes were red like vermilion.

After they cleaned up quite a bit of the ashes there, no traces of human remain could be found.

At that moment, the Crown Prince pointed at the base of the scorched Jin Xiu Pavilion, "Dig it up to 3 feet deep. This prince does not believe she could fly."

He was just like me, unable to rest for the past three days.

The Great Qi's emperor was in the Great Qi's palace. He did not come with the Crown Prince in this campaign. That was why the Crown Prince was able to ignore everything else and concentrates on the site of fire for so long.

When the secret passage was discovered, my heart was filled with hope. The Crown Prince patted me on the shoulder. He ordered me to lead people to search for her.

Within the next three years, my Father died. Then, the Great Qi's late emperor passed away. The Crown Prince inherited the throne and ruled over the land.

There were many women shoved to him by the late emperor and the empress dowager, but he never graced any of them. Rumors were running rampant that His Majesty had a 'hidden disease'.

Only I knew the truth. His Majesty did not have a hidden disease, he was just attracted to people of the same gender.

When I was in a remote village, I encountered a fight between the villagers. I released an arrow to warn them. When I got nearer, I was shocked to discover how thin and unkempt she had become. Memories flashed in my head as I stared at her in disbelief.

She was raised with care; gold and silver were like dirt to her. She was dandy and frivolous and had lived in privilege without a care for the world. I stared dazedly at the shabby hut that she and Qin Hui had been living in. Inside, there were two pairs of chopsticks and a bowl on top of a broken table. There was half a plate of stir-fried vegetables and a bowl of rice.

I never thought she would ever live such a hard life. Never in my life would I imagine seeing her looking at me in embarrassment like that.

Never.

I picked up a piece of the charred vegetable and placed it in my mouth. The bitterness pierced through my heart.

There were a couple of guards behind me. They were His Majesty's personal guards. He ordered them to scourge through the lands with me in search for her.

When she was put in jail, she smiled beautifully at me and said, "An Yi is originally a girl, of course I would like men."

That confession was like a thunder blaring through a sunny sky. In that instant, everything that happened in the past became a joke.

Everything seemed so dark and my heart felt so tight. The memory of her chasing me while calling me 'daughter-in-law' suddenly seemed so sweet that I became light-headed.

For the past 3 years, His Majesty ordered people to search for her all over the place. Perhaps, something bad had happened during the half a year in which he took her captive....

I thought she would be upset that Qin Hui was taken away....

But in the end, I was wrong. We had known each other since we were small. I watched with my own eyes, how I extinguished every last bit of liveliness out of her. As I closed my eyes while sharing a carriage with her, regret rose within me, little by little. Never before had I regretted my youthful haughtiness until that very moment.