The Emperor and His Imperial Tutor

A heartless, carefree empress x a frail, child-rearing imperial tutor with eight hundred schemes

At the age of eight, Li Ling lost all her siblings and was put on the throne by Zhao He, the Qi Dynasty's most notorious treacherous minister.

Zhao He was beautiful as a celestial maiden, frail as a willow, with a scorpion's heart and poison in his bones.

A face of peerless beauty, a body ravaged by illness.

The first time Li Ling saw him, she was eating scraps left behind by the noblewomen, scavenged by the wet nurse.

There was meat in her meal that day. She ate earnestly, picking meat out of the vegetables, and didn't notice that someone had silently entered the room.

Zhao He smiled and took out some steaming-hot pastries for her. Li Ling's bright, black-and-white eyes were fixed on his slender waist.

Does he not get enough to eat either? she wondered.

Then, quick as a flash, she snatched the pastry from his hand.

Zhao He only smiled. He bent down slightly, his face like a bodhisattva's, and told her in a slow, merciless voice that he had killed all her brothers and sisters.

Li Ling simply lifted her face and asked whether she would get to eat such delicious pastries again.

Afterward, Li Ling ascended the throne, with a powerful minister ruling the court and her imperial authority reduced to a mere formality. But she was perfectly content. Every day she ate her fill, napped, swung on swings, and played with crickets. She picked fights with her tutor, her attendants, the servants, and her guardian, Dowager Consort Zhou. The only things left were Heaven and Earth.

That was until Zhao He had Dowager Consort Zhou, who had been ruling from behind the curtain, killed, and became chief minister.

By then, Li Ling had heard from many people that Zhao He had killed her entire family.

She also knew that killing someone's whole family was a crime punishable by death.

So Li Ling decided she had to punish the man who had killed her father.

At the morning court session, she spitefully ordered Zhao He to step forward and serve her tea. When the others accused and insulted him, she agreed with them all.

Zhao He always repaid every slight. After court that day, he punished her by killing an attendant to teach her a lesson.

It was the first time Li Ling had felt hatred. There was no fear, only hatred. The next day, she was exceptionally obedient during his lesson. Before the medicine hidden in her sleeve could touch his teacup, an eunuch discovered it by accident. In a fit of anger, she snuck into his room and cut up more than ten of his garments.

The result was predictable: Li Ling was sent to the laundry bureau for a month.

For the next five years, Li Ling devoted herself to tripping Zhao He up, including but not limited to poisoning him, trying to assassinate him, skipping class, and beating up her tutors...

Zhao He, of course, spared no effort in retaliating against her.

Even amid the busyness of killing and burning, and plotting the deaths of loyal subjects, he always found time to strike at Li Ling with childish precision.

Until the Yuan Zhun case broke, and Cao Wen of the Secretariat joined forces with several ministers to bring Zhao He down.

He was thrown into the imperial prison and subjected to inhuman torture, but Li Ling, for once, stopped making trouble for him.

After he was released, he was gravely ill and near death, while she had gathered political allies and grown in power.

The struggle between Li Ling and him officially began.

In the seventh year of Yuande, Zhao He, vice chief councilor and regent, died of illness in Longzhong.

On a summer night, with water flowing softly nearby, Li Ling sat alone beneath the pavilion where they had spent countless days together.

She remembered that day when he had bent down slightly, his beautiful eyes rippling like spring water. His fingers were a little cold. She had never touched a living person's fingers so cold.

He touched her temple with his icy fingers and said, "Until you have a mind of your own, Your Majesty must not trust anyone from now on, including anyone's malice or kindness, even your own."

*

I meant to drag you into the depths of hell, but never expected you to be an uncarved stone, an unteachable block of wood.

Before she saw the world for what it was, she had once possessed a vast wilderness.

A true treacherous minister, not a redemption story.

Theme: Growing up means discovering the mirror and glimpsing yourself.