His own teacher, Li Rong, could already be considered breathtakingly beautiful, but compared to the woman before him, she clearly lacked a measure of bewitching charm and possessed an extra edge of hardness.
Biting the tip of his tongue fiercely, Wei He forcibly snapped awake. He tore his gaze away from the woman before him and looked toward the only ornamental rockery in the courtyard.
"What admirable self-control." The woman praised him softly. "That being the case, I can rest assured about entrusting Hanquan to him."
"!?!?"
Wei He froze, then swiftly realized who this woman before him might be.
Could she be...?
Li Rong, his master standing beside him, saw through Wei He's guess and smiled as she revealed the answer.
"Just as you thought, the one standing before you is Her Majesty the current Empress of Great Yue. Ling Chongyan, the legendary foremost beauty of Great Yue."
Wei He could not help shifting his gaze back to the woman once more.
Only then did he notice that although she wore nothing more than a simple white outfit, the hem of her long dress bore delicate and exquisite royal phoenix patterns.
She also wore beautiful, dainty dark-gold earrings on her earlobes.
Yet no matter how he looked at her, Wei He could not imagine that this young, alluring girl who appeared to be no more than nineteen or twenty was actually Ling Chongyan, the foremost beauty under heaven from decades ago.
Very few people knew that Hanquan's birth mother was not actually the Empress.
However, though she was not the mother of every prince, as the Empress and mother of the realm, all princes and princesses had to greet her as Imperial Mother.
Thus, what Empress Ling had said earlier was not wrong.
She indeed had the right to