Ballads of Fengjing

On their wedding night, he lifted her veil and said, “You’re nothing but something Father forced on me.” Feng Yao knelt in the snow, waiting for him to return home. Instead, he rode past and splashed mud all over her. She brought the soup she had made with her own hands to his study, where he spilled it at her feet without even looking up. When he got drunk, he dragged her onto the bed, but called out another woman’s name: Shen Qingyi, the orphaned daughter of the Grand Tutor, the woman he had kept in his heart for ten years. She bit down on the quilt and endured it all, convinced that he was the one who had saved her life. But when the truth came out, she learned that the young man who had galloped to her rescue in the woods outside the capital had actually been his twin brother, Prince Duan, Sikou Yan, who was stationed far away at the border. At the New Year’s Eve palace banquet, he wanted his beloved to attend, so he publicly made Feng Yao kneel in the snow for two hours. Inside the hall, music and laughter rang out. Outside, snow piled on her shoulders. Feng Yao threw the broken arrow she had treasured close to her heart into the moat. The moment she stood up from the snow, her heart died. When Prince Duan returned in triumph, he picked up the broken arrow and his pupils contracted. It was something he had owned as a boy. The girl he had been searching for over six years had become his imperial sister-in-law. She personally reopened old cases, executed corrupt officials, and cut off her enemies’ power. From an abandoned consort trampled underfoot, she rose to the steps of the throne. Only after losing her did he turn back like a madman, trampling the palace’s red plum blossoms just to beg her for one glance. But when he finally knelt before her and admitted his mistakes, Feng Yao merely waved a hand, her voice calm. “Your Majesty, I once wanted your heart, but you wouldn’t give it to me. Now I don’t want it anymore.” One mistook the truth, one gave their heart to the wrong person, and one missed their chance. Between vermilion walls and jade-green tiles, the deepest resentment is not hatred. It is opening your heart to someone, only for them to shatter it with their own hands.