Chapter 44

Meng Zhou could not help interrupting her. "Forgive my bluntness, but His Majesty currently has no intention of taking your household's daughter as a consort."

With her bluff exposed so bluntly, the matchmaker's face alternated between green and red. "Y-you presume to interpret His Majesty's wishes! When has His Majesty ever said that?"

Meng Zhou calmly drank his tea. Your emperor said he would back me even if I forged an imperial edict.

"My beloved subject is quite right." Chu Huaiyin suddenly appeared, affirming Meng Zhou's words the moment he spoke. He glanced at the matchmaker, who was trembling like a leaf, and sneered. "Why don't you deliver a message to the old duke for me?"

Chu Huaiyin took the seat of honor, his gaze cutting across the matchmakers one by one. Had every matchmaker in the capital come? He secretly gritted his teeth. "I will decide Official Guan's marriage. Please leave."

Seeing Meng Zhou staring at the portraits, he snapped, "Take all of those away!"

Old Madam Guan was rather puzzled. Could His Majesty have taken a liking to Meng Zhou and wanted him as a princess's husband?

Chu Huaiyin had several younger half-sisters. They were unremarkable, but he had not treated them poorly.

Meng Zhou followed Chu Huaiyin outside. Neither spoke much along the way. When they reached a magnificent residence, Chu Huaiyin pushed open the door. "Come in."

This was the residence Chu Huaiyin had bestowed upon Meng Zhou after his disappearance, to house his coffin. Meng Zhou had never been here before.

With its small pavilions and flowing water, the courtyard was elegant and tranquil. Meng Zhou wandered around, thinking that this was genuine real estate, registered in his name.

Unfortunately, he could not live here.

"Living at the Guan Residence is inconvenient for you. Why not move out?" Chu Huaiyin suggested. He found it troublesome to invent an excuse to get past Old Madam Guan every time he wanted to see Meng Zhou openly. It would be better to establish another household. Better still if it could be inside the imperial palace. He could set aside an extra plot for Meng Zhou. Or somewhere already available would do.

Meng Zhou knew perfectly well what Chu Huaiyin intended. If he really lived alone, wouldn't he have to endure Chu Huaiyin's harassment every day?

Besides everything else, the emperor was safest staying in the palace.

Seeing that he disagreed, Chu Huaiyin did not insist and led Meng Zhou to the main room.

The main room was spacious and bright, its tables and chairs neatly arranged. Meng Zhou immediately spotted the brand-new quilt embroidered with mandarin ducks, dragons, and phoenixes in the bedroom, and suddenly felt that Chu Huaiyin was up to no good.

"I have no say over Guan Jiasheng, but Meng Zhou, if you dare arrange a marriage, I'll dare steal you from it." Chu Huaiyin tapped the bed rail, delivering his threat word by word.

"Rest assured, Your Majesty. I will never remarry in this lifetime," Meng Zhou readily promised.

Although he had received a promise, something still felt strange.

Seeing him insist on treating himself as Guan Jiasheng even when they were alone, Chu Huaiyin nearly laughed in anger. He really would not shed a tear until he saw the coffin.

"It's just the two of us. Can you use a different identity?"

Meng Zhou looked at the sky, then at the ground. With two men alone together, it was safer to keep a transparent alternate identity between them.

"All right, then." Chu Huaiyin was even more decisive.

Meng Zhou had a bad feeling.

Then he heard Chu Huaiyin continue, "Aren't you impotent, my beloved subject? I recently learned some massage techniques from the imperial physician. They work wonders for this condition."

Meng Zhou clutched a mandarin duck pillow tightly over his lower abdomen and everything below it.

Chu Huaiyin mercilessly pulled the pillow away. "The imperial physician said this technique treats the symptoms rather than the cause. It must be used daily, without skipping a single day."

"Nonsense!" Meng Zhou was filled with indignation. What imperial physician could be so improper?

"Why would I talk nonsense? Didn't you experience it yourself last night?"

At the mention of last night, the extraordinarily thick-skinned Meng Zhou inexplicably blushed. Who could have imagined that one day Chu Huaiyin would jerk him off on the dragon throne?

In that moment of distraction, Chu Huaiyin ambushed him. A low chuckle sounded beside his ear. "It really does work."

Meng Zhou closed his eyes. Since when had a single touch from Chu Huaiyin been enough to make him react???

He had not learned this from an imperial physician, but from erotic paintings, had he? At that thought, Meng Zhou's mind wandered again. Had His Majesty's practical skills improved too?

A nosy, inquisitive gleam flashed through Meng Zhou's eyes.

Briefly bewildered by his gaze, Chu Huaiyin followed it downward, and his pupils constricted. "Want to try?"

Meng Zhou rolled across the wedding-red bed and huddled to one side, his hair disheveled, waving his hands repeatedly. "No! I was just looking."

Just looking? Chu Huaiyin caught Meng Zhou's hand. "You owe me once. I won't quibble. Let's call it three times."

It had tripled in a single night. Imperial loan-sharking was not to be trifled with.

Meng Zhou squeezed hard in retaliation. Chu Huaiyin gave a muffled groan. "Four times."

"..."

When it was over, Meng Zhou lay sprawled on the bed, his fingers trembling. I won't be able to hold a brush tomorrow.

He had to both light the fire and put it out, going through four rounds of rising and falling. The former took a single glance; the latter was comparable to copying the Records of the Grand Historian by hand.

The room was filled with a certain indescribable smell.

"I'm hungry," Meng Zhou said.

Chu Huaiyin had dragged him into doing that before he had eaten lunch. If he had not filled up on pigeon soup at Shen Baiqing's house, Meng Zhou could have treated Chu Huaiyin to a bout of psychological domestic violence-no, a one-sided beating.

Meng Zhou leaned against a cushion, enjoying an imperial-standard feeding service.

The dishes were very considerate: all were ones he had seen at the Ji Residence today.

Afu was a competent spy.

"What did Your Majesty discuss with the Feng Kingdom this morning?" Meng Zhou asked indistinctly around a mouthful of pork liver.

"They want to trade with Great Wei and jointly excavate a canal." The section within the Feng Kingdom was already half-dug. As long as Chu Huaiyin agreed, digging a stretch through the Shu Region to connect with the Feng Kingdom would provide direct access to Great Wei's heartland.

"Do you agree?" Though waterworks brought benefits for generations, this waterway seemed to benefit the Feng Kingdom more no matter how he looked at it. First, it would exhaust the people and treasury; second, an unresolved rebellion case still hung over the country. Meng Zhou thought it would be better to discuss this once the situation was more stable.

"The Shu Region suffered severe disasters last year. Building a canal to improve the waterways could prevent flooding, but that would inevitably require conscripting labor from the Shu Region. My view is to let the people rest and recover."

Chu Huaiyin was more pleasing to the eye when discussing serious business. Meng Zhou yawned, feeling like an afternoon nap. "Waterways are indeed important to the land of abundance, but they don't necessarily need to connect to the Feng Kingdom. The Feng Kingdom lacks grain. They must want to transport grain from the Shu Region. I think this can wait until Hanlin Academician Ji returns."

Meng Zhou entertained a conspiracy theory. Perhaps the stolen grain supplies had something to do with the Feng Kingdom? The Feng Kingdom bordered the Shu Region, and a disaster harmed both. It was not entirely impossible that they had directly robbed Great Wei's relief grain.

Seeing Meng Zhou about to lie down and sleep as soon as he was full, Chu Huaiyin hauled him upright. "Sit for a little longer."

Meng Zhou yawned repeatedly, moisture gathering at the corners of his eyes. He even deliberately leaned closer to Chu Huaiyin. See? Sleepy.

Softened by this series of gestures, Chu Huaiyin rubbed Meng Zhou's head and compromised. "Then lie down. I'll rub your belly."

Meng Zhou woke up instantly, declaring that a hundred steps after a meal would let one live to ninety-nine, and that they should go for a walk in the courtyard to aid digestion and live to a hundred together.

Acting the moment the idea struck, Meng Zhou sprang up and opened the window to air the room. The smell inside was complicated and strange. "The air's good outside."

Before long, Meng Zhou was walking blindly with a hand on Chu Huaiyin's arm, his head nodding. Stepping on a pebble woke him briefly, his eyelids fighting each other.

"I appreciate your determination to live to a hundred with me, my beloved subject. I'll carry you inside to sleep."

Meng Zhou had plenty of demands. "On your back."

"..." Resigned, Chu Huaiyin crouched down. Meng Zhou carefully climbed onto his back, cunningly placing one hand between his lower abdomen and His Majesty's back.

"Hold on to me with both hands."

"I'm cold. Your Majesty won't let me fall anyway." Meng Zhou spouted nonsense with his eyes closed.

Chu Huaiyin squeezed his bottom. "Is that so?"

Unable to free a hand to rescue himself, Meng Zhou could only angrily rub his head against the back of His Majesty's head, turning both their heads of hair into bird's nests.

Tomorrow was Jiang Yao's death anniversary. Meng Zhou prepared incense, candles, paper money, and offerings in advance. At dinner, Old Madam Guan called him over and gave him a stack of hand-copied scriptures, hoping he would burn them for Jiang Yao on her behalf.

Meng Zhou sat in front of the chair and sighed. Revealing the truth would mean that leaving the capital would be difficult. Unless Chu Huaiyin and Jiang Yi both rejected him as a foreign soul and simply refused to acknowledge him anymore.

That possibility would be fine too.

Then no one would discover that he was pregnant.

Tomorrow, he would find out how much of Chu Huaiyin's kindness toward him came from the identity of Meng Zhou.

Meng Zhou felt rather down, as though a stone pressed on his heart. He put on his shoes and got out of bed. Shoes that usually caused only slight discomfort seemed determined to oppose him today: the moment he walked, his calves ached and swelled, and the soles of his feet grew sore.

Guan Jiasheng was taller than him, and the raised shoes were difficult to walk in. As his upper body grew heavier, it would become increasingly strenuous.

Meng Zhou simply kicked off his boots, burrowed beneath the quilt, and covered his head to play dead.

Meng Zhou rose early the next day, hoping to pay his respects to Jiang Yao before his uncle arrived. If his uncle considered him an impostor, he might never have another chance.

Jiang Yao had been reburied in the Jiang Clan's ancestral graveyard with her parents. Her tombstone was not particularly grand, but it gave one a sense of peace.

He felt both gratitude and guilt toward Jiang Yao.

The guilt came from her dying injunction not to marry into a powerful household. Lately, he had repeatedly skirted the edge of violating it. Reflecting on himself three times a day, he discovered, to his dismay, that he seemed to have no intention of repenting.

The gratitude came from the martial skills that let him protect himself, painstakingly acquired by the original owner of this body under Jiang Yao's tears and whip.

The original Meng Zhou had disliked practicing martial arts, preferring poetry and literary exchanges, much like Meng Fushan. Jiang Yao seemed convinced that he would be bullied in the future unless he learned to fight, and forced her son to study martial arts. Occasionally, her son would defy her, stiffening his neck and saying he did not like it. Jiang Yao would raise her whip as if to strike, but her tears fell faster than the whip. Pale and frail, she held her back rigidly straight, looking as though a gust of wind could carry her away.

The original Meng Zhou had both respected and loved Jiang Yao. Seeing his mother like that, he would obediently grit his teeth and hold his horse stance. Yet learning martial arts had not changed his personality. Time after time, Meng Huaihan bullied him, and he never protected himself as Jiang Yao had hoped. Or perhaps, in the man-eating Meng Residence, this had been the way to survive.

The more Meng Zhou thought, the more certain he became that he had to tell Jiang Yi everything. Not to complain, but because he could not murder the original owner's existence.

"What brings you here, Official Guan?" Jiang Yi had arrived earlier than expected. Looking at the offerings before the tombstone, he frowned, and a sudden suspicion arose in his heart.

A little farther away, on a path among the pines, Chu Huaiyin galloped on a swift horse. He had originally scheduled discussions with the six ministries that morning, but after tossing and turning all night, he had finally decided to cancel them and go to the Guan Residence to fetch Meng Zhou first.

Who knew Meng Zhou would rise so early?

Meng Zhou had jokingly told him about eavesdropping, and how his uncle had said his nephew was too mischievous and would behave after a few smacks. Though Chu Huaiyin knew perfectly well how protective Jiang Yi was, those words still left him frightened.

What if he really hit him?

After all, he had firsthand experience of Meng Zhou's talent for infuriating people.

Even he had not laid a hand on him. How could his uncle?