The new emperor of the Liang Dynasty, Lu Yiheng, ascended the throne for three days, and everyone in the palace knew that his majesty had changed. The violent and unruly Ninth Prince seemed to have shed his shell overnight, turning a blind eye to the warblers that filled the harem. He often stared at a strange pocket watch alone, with empty eyes, looking at the sky outside the wall of the Vermilion Palace, as if he was looking for some anchor point lost at the other end of time.
Until that day, by accident, he stepped into the most remote corner of Xiyuan. Among the ruins, he saw a woman in plain clothes lowering her head and tending to some withered wild ginger flowers. The wind blew up her whitewashed skirt and a few strands of gray hair. The moment she raised her head——
Lu Yiheng felt like he was struck by lightning, and blood rushed to his head. That face, the curvature of his eyebrows, eyes, lips and nose, exactly matched the person in the photo he had hidden deep in his heart, blurred by time... No, it matched his mother's face when she was young in his memory. It was just more vicissitudes of life, more tired, and there was an inexorable panic in his eyes and a kind of... Silence that he couldn't understand and was incompatible with this deep palace.
"Ou Jiayi..." He muttered out the name of the abandoned concubine on the servant's trembling report, and his heart hurt sharply. According to the data, she was the daughter of a merchant who was brought into the palace by the late emperor. She was neglected because of her "unsociable temperament and lack of words and deeds."
