I am the only daughter of a renowned Jiangnan music family. After my first performance in tribute, the new emperor favored me exclusively for three years, without ever giving me a title. Through those three years of powerful eunuchs, internal turmoil, and foreign threats, Xiao Chen often promised to give me the very best and swore he would never let me down once he held power firmly in his hands. But when I was pregnant and captured by rebels, all he could do was look at his childhood sweetheart, whose hand had been lightly scratched, with tender concern. In front of a hundred thousand troops, he made her empress and sneered that I was nothing but a plaything for his amusement. So I was nothing more than a human shield, meant to take the blade for the woman he truly loved. As several blades pierced my belly and I lost my child, I vaguely saw the emperor, high above me, looking panicked. I turned and staggered away, then leaped from the cliff in my blood-soaked robes, joyful as a free cloud lark in flight, finally escaping the cold cage of gold and jade. I never saw Xiao Chen shove his frail childhood sweetheart aside like a madman and lunge toward me, unable to catch even a corner of my robe. Eyes bloodshot, he knelt on the ground and trembled as he scooped up the soil soaked with my blood, choking on each word, every syllable stained with tears.
