The moment An Lingrong swallowed the bitter almond was not only the beginning of physical death, but also the final chapter of the breakdown of spiritual shackles. When the bitterness of bitter almond burst between her lips and teeth, she vaguely saw the tear stains on her childhood embroidery frame overlapping with the cold light on the glazed tiles of the Forbidden City. The mornings and evenings when he was ignored by his father, and the years when he was trampled by his aunt, now turned into the poison of bitter almonds, flowing like a river in his blood.
The feeling of suffocation spread from the throat to the limbs, and the thirty bitter almonds were like the crushed past: the tight grip on the clothes when Xia Dongchun was publicly humiliated, the burning pain when swallowing Xiji Pills to please the emperor, and the shivers when she discovered that Zhen Huan and Shen Meizhuang were drifting away. The bitterness of bitter almond is different from the toxicity of musk and oleander. It is more like a chronic poison, turning her from the nickname of "Oriole Concubine" into a drug of self-loathing.
When the death ceremony was completed, she finally heard the long-lost silence. The gasps manipulated by the queen with spices and the humiliation rewarded by the emperor as playthings were all dissipated in the ashes of Jingren Palace along with the poison of bitter almonds. Before she died, she stroked the cold blue thread in her hair and finally understood: it was never her humble background that trapped her, but the glass cover she had put on when she was sixteen, crushing all her sincerity into dust for others to play with.
