For the next several days, Sun Shaozong remained in a daze, torn by anxious hopes and fears.
One moment, he suspected that everything that had happened that day had been nothing but his own hallucination—that there was no Prince Yizhong at all, much less any means of Attaining Immortality.
The next, he regretted setting the age limit so high—few men lived to seventy in ancient times, much less eighty.
What if he dropped dead in his sixties or seventies? Wouldn't that be a loss enough to make him cough blood?
Every so often, he would have a nightmare. In it, an ethereal yet grim and terrifying voice always screamed at him: "Do Not Ascend! Do Not Ascend!"
With his heart constantly lurching and clawed at all day long, he had no mind for official business, and even his usual marital pleasures had lost seventy percent of their vigor.
Others might not have noticed, but You Sanjie, knowing nothing of the truth, assumed that after Ningguo Mansion, her maternal family's patron, had fallen, she had lost Second Master's favor.
She panicked at once, scrambling all over the courtyard to seek help and curry favor. She even gritted her teeth and gave away quite a bit of the real gold and silver she had strung around her ribs.
To preserve his affection, she even invited an aged courtesan from a family of prostitutes stretching back generations to her home and ruthlessly learned several of her most closely guarded tricks.
There was no need to mention how she put what she learned into practice.
That afternoon, Sun Shaozong again dismissed the office early as usual. He was half-listening as Xing Xiuyan and Ping Er tallied the various expenses before the new year when a summons from the Crown Prince suddenly arrived.
With Succession