The night was as dark as ink.
Thirty li south of Shengjing, capital of the Tianyuan Dynasty, lay a mass grave overgrown with weeds, where few people ever passed by.
All was silent. In the hazy moonlight, shadows on the ground floated through the air.
A gust of chill wind swept past, carrying the stench of rot and dampness.
A carriage lay overturned on its side.
The servants traveling with it and the coachman hurried to right it.
Nanny Zhang rushed to the front of the carriage and tried to lift the curtain. “Eldest Miss! Eldest Miss!”
The carriage curtain had caught in a crack and would not budge. The intermittent coughing that had come from inside had now fallen into deathly silence.
The woman slumped against the carriage window was Yuan Zi, the legitimate daughter of the Prince of Zhennan’s household. Her face was now deathly pale, without a trace of life.
Blood dripped from her fingertips into the carriage, then through the cracks onto the ground.
The soil of the mass grave already held many corpses. Fertile and loose, it quickly absorbed the blood.
