Lianshan Xin was just about to speak when the Heavenly Physician beat him to it. "I sought only to preserve my life in troubled times, not fame among the feudal lords. My lady, I was but a commoner, tilling the fields in Nanyang. Why must you say these things in front of me?"
An old fellow like the Heavenly Physician understood perfectly well that curiosity killed.
He was even beginning to regret taking the Heavenly Queen's pulse.
In the end, the bonds of comradeship had clouded his judgment.
The Heavenly Queen glared at him in exasperation. "Old Jiang, at a time like this, you're still giving me that? Do you think A-Xin and I are playing house? This is a life-or-death struggle."
The Heavenly Physician froze. "Aren't you holding all the winning cards?"
The Heavenly Queen laughed in anger. "I'm pregnant, and you think I'm holding all the winning cards? Do you think I put myself on the board as bait?"
The Heavenly Physician said, "... Didn't you?"
He really had thought the Heavenly Queen had deliberately set a trap for the Empress.
But judging by her tone, he seemed to have guessed wrong.
His expression grew grave too. "My lady, someone really got you pregnant?"
"Obviously."
"And it wasn't His Majesty?"
"Obviously. If His Majesty could get me pregnant, would I have waited until this year to have a swollen belly?"
The Heavenly Physician: "..."
Crude words, sound reasoning.
"So the child you're carrying isn't His Majesty's?"
"Of course it's His Majesty's. No one else has ever touched me."
"Then what is going on?" The Heavenly Physician was bewildered.
Even as Great Yu's foremost practitioner of medicine, he could not unravel this tangled web of cause and effect.
She couldn't conceive His Majesty's child, yet only His Majesty had