Have You Found Him?

After drinking bitter medicine for nearly a month and recuperating for a long time at the detached palace, Xie Huizhou had only half recovered.

To stop Zhang Lanhe from tracing things back to him, he had his few trusted confidants spread all sorts of bizarre rumors to muddy the waters.

Afterward, Xie Huizhou continued to hide in his room and paint, using his recovery as an excuse.

When Xie Huizhou was quiet, he usually looked quite presentable, enough to make people steal a few extra glances.

The servants stole looks at Xie Huizhou as he painted, blushing as they whispered about his impossibly good looks.

His Highness was truly beautiful. Few people under heaven could match even a fraction of Xie Huizhou's grace.

They could not imagine how outstanding his future consort would have to be to avoid paling beside Xie Huizhou's beauty.

Xie Huizhou's mother had been a rare beauty in her day, one who had utterly captivated the late emperor. Had she not died in childbirth, Xie Huizhou would not have borne the brunt of his anger and been sent away from the palace.

Xie Huizhou's eyes and brows closely resembled his mother's, making him an elegant beauty. His features were refined and handsome, with an ethereal air of serene elegance. When quiet, he was like a landscape painting.

Because he was often unwell, he could not let himself get too worked up, and the cool detachment in his eyes made him difficult to approach.

Sometimes, he gave people the impression that he did not belong in this world.

People often said he seemed less like a prince than a scholar roaming the mountains and rivers, with an integrity all his own.

Li Xu sighed that if Xie Huizhou had not been born into the imperial family and drawn into the struggle for the throne, living out his days safely as a wealthy young gentleman would have been quite nice.

Then he could have lived as he pleased, going around with Li Xu, watching cockfights and chasing dogs, and being his good buddy.

Unfortunately, one's fate was not one's own to decide.

"Zhouzhou, you're so good-looking. No wonder so many girls are crying and clamoring to marry you." Li Xu looked at Xie Huizhou's exceptional face with a hint of envy, and even the pastries in his mouth tasted especially sweet. "If I looked that good, who knows how many girls I'd charm senseless!"

"You're not bad yourself."

Xie Huizhou set down his painting, suddenly curious about what Zhang Lanhe had been doing over the past month.

"Ah Xu, do you know whether there's been any major activity on the Imperial Preceptor's side lately?"

He regretted it the moment he asked.

How was he any different from a culprit returning to the scene of the crime?

At the mention of his mysterious Imperial Preceptor cousin, Li Xu could not help trembling. He looked around, and only after making sure no one was nearby and deliberating for a good while did he say conspiratorially, "Zhouzhou, the Imperial Preceptor has been looking for a man lately. Apparently, the man offended him, and he wants to drag him out. It's caused such an uproar throughout the capital that everyone knows about it."

Everyone knew about this, but no one dared gossip carelessly, afraid that Zhang Lanhe's omnipresent spies would overhear and they would lose their lives.

But there was no need to worry about that at the detached palace. No one cared whether an insignificant nobody like Xie Huizhou lived or died.

At this, Xie Huizhou's brush paused, and ink nearly dripped onto the painting. He was astonished that Zhang Lanhe had actually spent a month looking for him, and alarm bells immediately rang in his head.

"What does he want with that man? What grudge could he have against him?"

I'm done for!

He had said Zhang Lanhe was bad in bed, and now the man held a grudge. If he was found, even if he survived, he would suffer terribly.

Why had he insisted on running his mouth before leaving?

When it came to gossip in Capital City, Li Xu grew so excited that he wanted to tell Xie Huizhou, who rarely went out, everything he knew.

Word had it that the Imperial Preceptor, Zhang Lanhe, had encountered an elegant young gentleman at a restaurant. After stealing his heart, the young man had vanished, even complaining as he left that the Imperial Preceptor had a sexual dysfunction.

What man could stomach such a humiliating insult?

The Imperial Preceptor had made a great show of searching Capital City, wanting to find the young man from that night of passion and teach him a proper lesson.

His actions made everyone realize how important that young man was to him. They thought that the Imperial Preceptor, who had always remained untouched by worldly affairs, had actually taken an interest in a beauty.

And a man, at that. How strange.

While wondering just who could be so skilled as to make the Imperial Preceptor unable to forget him, they scoured everywhere for handsome men to send to the National Preceptor's Residence.

In the end, a thunderous-faced Zhang Lanhe had them all beaten and thrown out, their screams ringing on and on.

Those who had intended to curry favor with Zhang Lanhe offended him instead, gaining nothing for their trouble.

Seeing that offering beauties would not win him over, people in Capital City began quietly discussing the young man's identity.

Yet a month passed, and the man never appeared again, as though he had vanished off the face of the earth.

The Imperial Preceptor, Zhang Lanhe, had been used and dumped!

Apparently, the reason the Imperial Preceptor, Zhang Lanhe, had remained abstinent for so many years was that he had a sexual dysfunction. Dissatisfied and finding him inadequate, the other man had put on his clothes and left that very day, and had not spared him another glance since.

Everyone discussed the matter in secret with immense excitement.

Whether the Imperial Preceptor, Zhang Lanhe, really had a sexual dysfunction became a topic of private discussion.

Xie Huizhou had not expected Zhang Lanhe to still be looking for him. A thin sheen of cold sweat broke out on his back.

He had told his subordinates to help cover his tracks, and the rumors they spread to muddy the waters were each more outrageous than the last.

Among them was the claim that Zhang Lanhe had a sexual dysfunction.

"Maybe he has no such intentions at all. I think the Imperial Preceptor might just be using an excuse to find him and silence him for good. After all, he went around saying the Imperial Preceptor couldn't perform."

I don't want to!

Who wants to be Zhang Lanhe's wife?

I'm a grown man. Why should I be someone else's wife?

How could there be anything so upside down in this world? Whatever happens, I'd be the one taking a wife.

Li Xu considered Zhang Lanhe's usual conduct and felt that this really was possible. Successfully led astray by Xie Huizhou, he joined him in bitterly condemning Zhang Lanhe for his cold heartlessness, putting his trousers on and pretending not to know the person he had slept with.

Xie Huizhou handed his newly finished painting to Li Xu, who had been waiting for a long time. "I'm finished. This is my latest work. Help me sell it."

The Great Xia Dynasty's papermaking and printing industries were highly developed. Storybooks and illustrated serial stories were extremely popular, and since the court never regulated them, works on every kind of subject abounded.

Scholars pursuing official careers disdained them on the surface, but that did not mean none of them secretly wrote or drew them.

Li Xu had no interest in the imperial examinations and flouted convention. He had secretly taken over a bookshop and run it, and actually made a thriving business of it. More than half the bookshops in the Great Xia Dynasty were now under his operation.

His father saw that he had made a good deal of silver over the year. Since the family already had several officials, he let him be.

Xie Huizhou merely drew whatever came to mind, but because his stories were engaging and his artwork exquisite, quite a few people kept his drawings in their homes.

Li Xu was very interested in his latest work, but the moment he opened it, he turned into a monk devoid of worldly desires.

"Zhouzhou, I think this person looks a little like you-know-who. How about we don't court death like this?"

Unless he was blind, this was all making things up about Zhang Lanhe, even if he was not named.

But he was not blind.

Pairing the Imperial Preceptor, Zhang Lanhe, with such an erotic subject was genuinely a little too much for him to accept.

"Then give it back."

Xie Huizhou had been put through so much that he could not resist drawing things to mock him.

Had he been in the modern world, he would have drawn Zhang Lanhe being used as a sex toy at least once a day to vent his anger.

"No way." Li Xu immediately hid the drawings behind his back. "Fortune favors the bold! As long as we refuse to admit it's the Prince Regent, who would dare say it's him? A busy man like him wouldn't read pictures like ours! Besides, he's my distant cousin. What could he do to me?"

The Li family had once claimed kinship with the Imperial Preceptor. For some unknown reason, they had actually succeeded, though they ordinarily had little contact.

Li Xu could tell this would certainly make a fortune, so he steeled himself and decided to take the gamble.

At worst, once the matter came to light, he would ask his father and older brothers to protect him and personally go beg forgiveness.

As long as he did not say Xie Huizhou had done it, no one would know.

While the two of them were making things up about Zhang Lanhe, the man himself was searching for someone. He stared at the spy gathering information with a faint, ambiguous smile.

"Have you found him?"