Chapter 759: Forbidden City Journal (5)

In Qing’s homeland, there had once been a stupid little meme that went around:

You know why wars happen? SMACK. Because you let your guard down.

Exactly. Once you let your guard down, no matter how solid your defenses or how many contingency plans you’ve got, they all fade like cheap paint. No matter how sharp a person is, if their mind is elsewhere, they can’t help it—they just get hit.

Qing had let her guard down.

She was in the middle of focusing with all her might on Gabiya’s performance—I will now demonstrate, the wondrous Kamaaa-sutra, live demo, right before her eyes and ears—gulping down her own saliva as she enjoyed the show.

Only when the door opened did she go—oh, shit.

However, unlike Qing, who had been watching half-lounged in comfortable repose, Gabiya was in no such comfortable state.

Sex, originally, was one of the more violent forms of exercise. A human body was designed so that, fueled by a wildfire-like blaze of lust, it would squeeze out every last drop of strength up to the limits of its capacity.

And because she was “only” imitating a sexual position, that didn’t mean it took less effort; if anything, she was putting up with a level of exertion beyond the real thing, because she was doing an intense two-person (or more) synchronized exercise all by herself, concentrating on the demo.

So whether the door opened or not...

She was busy.

Busy with the truly impressive hip work of grinding that rolled-up quilt beneath her up and down, front and back, moving her pelvis somewhere between violent and smooth, or perhaps both at once.

Her mouth, of course, was not resting either.

“Haah, hah, hff, aah...”

Against this audio backdrop, Qing locked eyes with an unfamiliar woman.

“......”

“......”

“Y-Your... Ladyship, haah, I-I, ahh, above, haaah! Ngh, kkhh...”

Gabiya’s body trembled.

She had just hit the climax of her performance—the very peak of the peak.

Then, as if to ask well, how was that, she checked her Ladyship’s reaction, only to find Qing staring off somewhere else with a horrified expression, sweat beading and running down.

Having worked so hard, her audience wasn’t even looking at her.

Gabiya’s head turned to follow Qing’s gaze—

“Kyah! L-Lady Deokseong...!”

Thanks to that, Qing learned the woman’s name.

Lady Deokseong, huh.

Is she someone who needs an actual definite article? “The Lady Deokseong”?

Lady Deokseong’s eyes were icy cold.

She looked at Gabiya and delivered one stern word.

“Leave.”

“Y-Yes, ma’am...!”

Gabiya bolted.

Her face was scarlet, and she was so shaken she ran off still hugging the quilt, which—hey—wasn’t that what Qing was supposed to sleep under...?

And if you’re going to run away, take me with you. How could she ditch her alone in this mortifying scene with no solidarity at all?

Take me too, for god’s sake.

But Gabiya was already gone.

And where would Qing go now, even if she tried to flee?

So, what else could she do?

Qing looked at Lady Deokseong.

The Lady was radiating some kind of billowing, pitch-black aura, and Qing swallowed hard.

She forced a smile.

“Hehe... uh... hello.”

Lady Deokseong simply looked at her in silence.

The silence was endlessly awkward.

“Um, so, ah... maybe you could say something...”

*****

People liked to say that no parent ever failed to recognize their own child.

That this was the instinct of a parent—that by some deep bond of souls, it was only natural for you to recognize the child whose flesh and blood you had shaped.

They called it a miracle wrought by the boundless love of a parent.

But... was that really true?

When people recognized other people, it was never just a matter of the face alone, of features on a skull.

A smiling face. The angle of the eyes when they crinkled in laughter, the pattern traced by the fine lines at the corners of their eyes and along their cheeks, the timbre shaped by the resonance inside their chest, whether their sniffling sounded more like they were slurping snot back into their nose, whether the laughter out of their mouth was flimsy and trivial or booming and hearty.

What they looked like when they were flustered; what their expression was like when they were happy to see someone. How they looked when sad, when listless. When they were angry.

Of course, no one clearly remembered every one of these details.

But all those details, together, made up the overall impression.

This was how a person was formed. To recognize someone meant sensing this whole bundle of details.

So the claim that a parent recognizing their child was a miracle or a psychic power wrought by boundless love wasn’t exactly wrong.

How many people other than a parent could hold someone else so completely, so clearly, in their heart?

And then Lady Deokseong stepped into the room.

Truth be told, the fact that some witch from India was doing something outrageous on the bed barely even registered.

What her eyes focused on was the face she had seen when she came in.

The way those eyes had gone wide in surprise, the way that mouth had fallen open stupidly.

The short, sharp intake of breath—huhk—and then the way that gaze had immediately slid away in embarrassment.

The way those lips twitched restlessly, not knowing what to do.

Here, one mother looked upon her child.

Not a child she had given birth to herself, but one she had nursed and raised at her breast and held and raised as if she were her own.

Lady Deokseong’s pupils trembled.

A child she hadn’t even known she’d lost was here before her. All this time—what in heaven’s name...

Her heart felt as if it were being torn into a thousand, ten thousand shreds.

And then it happened.

On that familiar face, which was still watching her warily, some strange expression flickered, and Lady Deokseong flinched.

It was not the unfamiliar wariness and guarded look you showed to a stranger.

“Princess Yeonsul?”

“Ah. Did Her Ladyship the Empress send you? Um...”

The expressions that followed were relief, then embarrassment, then back to that tentative, gauging look.

“Uh, c-could we just pretend you didn’t see what you just saw? It wasn’t, like, anything weird, I swear—she said she’d show me the Classic of Love, and I was just curious... purely scientific curiosity, you know? Honestly, how do you not look? So if you could keep it secret, hehe...”

At that shameless, giggly, mortified laugh, it felt like a bolt of lightning slammed into Lady Deokseong’s skull.

It really is the Princess!

Who else but Yeonsul, in the very heart of the Forbidden City, would behave with such spectacle?

The Classic of Love, she said? How on earth would Yeonsul possibly restrain herself from that? Lady Deokseong could all but see the girl’s eyes sparkling as she begged to be shown, clinging and pestering until they gave in.

At last, tears spilled from the Lady’s eyes.

Qing panicked.

Wait, is this really something to cry about?

I mean, before we get to that, what did I even do? I was just... watching something a bit embarrassing, that’s all.

Lady Deokseong wept.

And Qing, for her part, ended up confessing.

“Uh, so. I’m Ximen Qing, and I really don’t know this Yeonsul person, but... do I really look that much like her? I wasn’t trying to trick Her Ladyship the Empress or anything, it’s just... even when I said it wasn’t true she wouldn’t listen, and she was so sad that...”

It wasn’t that she looked like Yeonsul. To Lady Deokseong’s eye, it was the Princess herself.

And besides—

“Let’s put things in order. You’re saying you have no memories of your childhood, that six years ago you came to your senses in a cave near Geonpyeong—this is correct, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And then you begged... ah, heavens, you begged to survive on the roads, and the priestess order took you in, and that’s how you came to be here today...”

“Yes. I did know martial arts even before that, though.”

“Would it be all right if I sent people to investigate?”

“Ah. Back then, I didn’t have this face, so if you ask the Geonpyeong brats—no, the people of Geonpyeong—about a beggar they called the ‘Bedsore-Face Plague-Demon Girl’...”

Lady Deokseong swayed.

Bedsore-face was a face covered in bedsores; plague demon was a demon that spread sickness. You could picture well enough what a “Bedsore-Face Plague-Demon Girl” would have looked like.

Qing was insisting she might not be that person.

But the more Lady Deokseong heard, the more neatly everything clicked into place.

And on top of that, this face, this powerful build, this voice—how could she possibly fail to know them?

Only now did she realize how she could ever have let herself be fooled by the false Yeonsul in the palace.

Right. From the beginning, she had thought it suspicious.

Supposedly the girl’s face was scarred, yet it was a different face entirely; supposedly the voice had changed as a sequela of the fever, yet that too was different.

The only thing that felt remotely similar had been that one body, that lewd, vulgar body.

And how could a person’s personality change so completely?

On the spot, Lady Deokseong erased from her mind the thoughts she had sighed over as she came into Hilbang Hall just a short while ago.

“Princess, heavens, Princess. Ahh...”

“...? Didn’t I just tell you—”

“How much hardship you must have suffered. Your complexion is so pale; and your hands, how are they this cold? Heavens, they’re like blocks of ice.”

“Excuse me?”

“But at least you’ve come back. That is what matters.”

Lady Deokseong suddenly broke off.

It was good that the Princess had come back, but... where exactly had she come back to?

Hilbang Hall. The Crown Prince’s bedchamber.

Suddenly, the image of Beauty Seo and the other female officials kneeling in a row in the front courtyard flashed through her mind.

Why had they come? Her Ladyship the Empress must have sent them.

Why had she sent them? To stop the marriage.

Why had she stopped it?

Lady Deokseong’s face went stark white.

“H-heavens. How could this...!”

“Lady? Are you even listening to me?”

“I cannot be sitting here like this!”

With her face gone pale as a sheet, Lady Deokseong shot to her feet and hurriedly, frantically rushed out of the room.

She was in such a hurry she didn’t even close the door behind her.

Even Gabiya, flustered as she’d been, had closed the door on her way out. It was the kind of habit that came from long practice as a palace maid.

The fact that Lady Deokseong forgot even that said everything about how urgent this was.

And now Qing sat alone in the room.

What. Seriously, what?

Once she had that thought—

GROWL.

Ah. It’s mealtime.

So who’s going to bring me my food now...

*****

“Your Highness, she is the Princess. She is Princess Yeonsul. How can you not recognize your own flesh and blood? She is not an impostor—she is the Princess Yeonsul herself.”

At Lady Deokseong’s words, the Crown Prince felt like his insides were ripping open.

No, what the hell is Heavenly Flower Sword’s true nature supposed to be?

Is the guile of that tongue of hers at the same level as Mara, the demon who bewitched the Buddha? (To be fair, yes.)

How could she have tricked Lady Deokseong this thoroughly in so little time?

“Lady Deokseong. Please, calm yourself.”

“Do I look like a woman who can calm herself? At this rate, the two of you will be wed, aaah, heavens!”

“Haa... Please. Please, just calm down. What on earth did that woman say? Did she claim to be Yeonsul and cling to you cooing ‘nurse, nurse’ or something?”

“No, she said she didn’t know either way, and that she was not Yeonsul. She was greatly flustered that even her nurse could not recognize her and simply did not know what to do when a stranger called her by an unknown name.”

The Crown Prince’s guts twisted even more.

“If she doesn’t remember and even her own nurse cannot recognize her, how can that person possibly be Yeonsul?”

“Well, if the Princess has lost her memories, isn’t that only natural? How could someone with amnesia recognize even her own nurse?”

“Then why, exactly, does that woman become Yeonsul?”

“Your Highness, do you think I of all people would fail to recognize Yeonsul? I am the nurse who received her in my own hands and fed and raised her.”

Lady Deokseong’s expression sharpened.

“Now that I think on it, the shameless fake in the palace—no doubt a scheme by those witchy Indians. It was suspicious from the start. ‘I lost my memories’—she recognized no one, and since when does memory conveniently disappear like that?”

“The other woman also says she lost her memories!”

“The Princess says she woke in a strange cave, in some desolate land, without a single coin to her name... roaming the filthy martial world, begging for food, a beggar—aaah, aaaaah, ah, oh heavens, how much she must have suffered...”

Lady Deokseong’s whole body shook helplessly.

One way or another, she was simply not a woman who knew how to listen to anyone else.

The Crown Prince’s insides twisted even more.

Because no matter how he asked why Heavenly Flower Sword was supposed to be the real Yeonsul, the answer never changed.

Because I’m her nurse and I say so. That’s Yeonsul.

If she had said she wasn’t sure, at least he wouldn’t have felt this strangled and suspicious.

But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed absurd that the Yeonsul in the palace could possibly be a fake.

Both women had lost their memories.

But the palace Yeonsul had scattered fragments she still recalled—every so often she would bring up something from the past as a half-remembered scene.

Heavenly Flower Sword, for her part, claimed to have no memories at all.

Both women had different faces.

The palace Yeonsul’s face was scarred. As for Heavenly Flower Sword—well, Yeonsul had never been that much of a beauty.

But after a plague that horrific, wasn’t it only natural for some trace to remain?

How in the world did it make sense for there to be no trace at all, for her to somehow be even more beautiful than before?

On top of that, Heavenly Flower Sword herself had said she could not say for certain whether she was Yeonsul or not.

The Crown Prince grabbed his bangs and yanked at them.