Xuanyuan Hill, Imperial Palace...
As Zhang Tie and Bian Heng looked down at the scenery beneath them from the skies above Ping Province, Fang Qingming was sitting quietly with two elegantly dressed women wearing phoenix crowns in a pavilion within the Eastern Palace of the Imperial Palace.
As the strategist once at Crown Prince Changying's side, more than twenty years of passing time, coupled with the setbacks and blows brought by Crown Prince Changying's assassination, had dusted Fang Qingming's temples with frost and added several wrinkles to his brow. Yet his eyes remained as still and clear as water. Though his bearing had lost some of the high-spirited grandeur with which he had once pointed at the realm, it had gained the deep solidity of one who grew stronger with age.
Though Crown Prince Changying was gone, Fang Qingming had become even more valued by those around the crown prince.
Of those closest to the crown prince, the two most important were his birth mother, Empress Shaoyi, and his crown princess, Lady Xiao.
When the Emperor Xuanyuan had still been on the throne, there had also been an Empress Wen in the Imperial Palace, who governed the imperial harem and served as mother to the realm. However, Empress Wen had not been a Knight, so she had lived only a little over two hundred years before passing away. After Empress Wen, the Emperor Xuanyuan never again established an empress in the Imperial Palace. At most, he appointed ceremonial empresses. A ceremonial empress ranked above all consorts and concubines, with status equivalent to an empress, but she was not a true empress. The birth mothers of the various imperial princes in the Imperial Palace were all ceremonial empresses. There were seventeen ceremonial empresses in the entire Imperial Palace, while the Emperor