The carefree smile on the empress’s face turned bitter. He didn’t know how to answer Emperor Jingren’s question.

After a long silence, when Emperor Jingren had begun to think he would receive no reply, the empress said quietly, “It isn’t that I can’t feel pain at all. I feel small bumps and scrapes. But past a certain threshold of pain, all the pain vanishes.”

Earlier in his fight with Huyan Xi, he had felt his injuries. But once the knife had entered his ribs, Xiao Jinyi had lost all sense of pain. So it wasn’t his powerful resolve that had allowed him to hold Huyan Xi back despite the pain, but rather the fact that pain meant nothing to him.

Xiao Jinyi had thought to conceal this from the young emperor, but seeing Emperor Jingren ashen-faced but still maintaining a ruler’s poise, he couldn’t bear to lie, so he had stopped pretending to be in pain, instead doing his best to appear carefree and steady. But he wasn’t a good actor. It was hard enough to pretend to be in pain, and even harder to pretend to be hiding pain.

The performance was sure to be flawed, but he hadn’t expected Emperor Jingren to be astute enough to develop suspicions even when he covered up by tapping his acupoints and to test him after a quarter of an hour.

Xiao Jinyi didn’t want to lie to the young emperor, so he had chosen to tell the truth without giving a reason for it.

And Emperor Jingren didn’t ask. He only looked at Xiao Jinyi and quietly said, “We do not know why we should be like this. Ever since waking up after hitting our head, we kept feeling that everything around us was wrong. A voice inside of us told us not to pursue this feeling too deeply, that there are some things beyond the power of man. But this feeling of wrongness would not let us eat or sleep in peace. We still thought about it and investigated it.”

Once he began to investigate, he had no trouble identifying a number of out of place people. No matter how well they performed, different was different. Next he ordered his subordinates to give priority to watching these people. The secret guard who had been assigned to watch the pure consort at the start had never been recalled. Emperor Jingren had been watching their every move this whole time.

“Last year before the autumn hunt, the virtuous consort went to visit the pure consort. She slapped the pure consort and told her she was an idiot for having done something so ‘oh-oh-see.’ We do not know the precise meaning of ‘oh-oh-see’; that is what the secret guard wrote in his report to us. He also gave special weight to this term and said that his investigations had not revealed what kind of secret code this was. But one thing was certain: the virtuous consort was talking about the pure consort dancing for us, so we think that the general meaning is ‘giving yourself away.’” As Emperor Jingren spoke, he observed Xiao Jinyi’s expression. The empress had always seemed as if he would be fearless even in the face of the sky falling, but when he pronounced that peculiar term, Xiao Jinyi’s expression turned rigid, and a glint of fear even appeared in his eyes.

He didn’t stop but continued saying to Xiao Jinyi, “This was reported to us by the secret guard when we returned from the autumn hunt. We already knew about the incense then and had an idea in which particular the pure consort might have given herself away: her dancing. In our memory, the pure consort was an exquisite dancer, like a goddess come to earth. But when she danced for us that day, there was no way to call the style beautiful. It was rather comical. We thought that our prior impression of the pure consort’s dancing had been caused by the incense, so we ordered our subordinates to find Lin Boyuan.”

“Why did Your Majesty want to find Lin Boyuan?” Xiao Jinyi looked dreadful. While he had been fretting over whether he ought to become emotionally involved with an NPC, the young emperor had done so many things.

“Because you had confiscated and destroyed all the incense in the palace, we had no way to test whether the incense could really be used in this way. Therefore, we ordered Lin Boyuan to turn over all this incense. He seemed very unwilling, but you know Jing Xixian’s methods. Merely being resistant to pain isn’t enough to overcome them. Lin Boyuan was far away, so by the time our men returned, Yan Xu had already committed his act of insubordination, so we had Commander Jing confiscate his incense as well.

“We tried to imagine the pure consort’s dancing as we had seen it years ago and lit Lin Boyuan’s incense, but all we dreamed of was a sensual encounter with Lin Boyuan. We then lit Yan Xu’s incense, and, as expected, we dreamed of Yan Xu’s insubordination toward us.” Emperor Jingren let out a lengthy sigh. “We have been alive twenty-three years, and we have never heard of an incense with the power to make someone dream only of its owner, and to give them dreams more convincing than reality. Had we not known that Yan Xu was dead and Lin Boyuan was in fact too far from the capital, we would not even have noticed that these were dreams.

“Can you tell us, Empress, what is this incense? Can you tell us why it can give us such illusions?” asked Emperor Jingren.

Xiao Jinyi hadn’t had the slightest idea that Emperor Jingren’s investigations had reached this stage. With difficulty, he shook his head. He didn’t lie, only said, “I can’t.”

“That is what we thought.” With a bitter smile, Emperor Jingren continued, “We ordered our men to go on investigating and learn the identities of all the people whose incense you had confiscated. Apart from the four consorts and Imperial Concubine Lin, it turned out that Eunuch Lian, Little Shunzi, and Imperial Physician Chen had also possessed that type of incense. Therefore, we ordered all these people to be surveilled. But we instructed the secret guards that if any of these people met with you during the course of the surveillance, they must not continue following them. Our empress has such powerful martial arts that no one can match them. It was precisely because of our instructions that the secret guards kept their distance from you, so you never realized that the consorts and the rest were being watched. Yes?”

“Indeed, I…never realized.” Xiao Jinyi’s heart was sinking. He no longer dared to guess how far the young emperor’s understanding of the situation went.

“Soon after this, an event took place that you may be unaware of,” said Emperor Jingren. “Prince Huainan confessed his love to me.”

“When did that happen? How did he dare?” the empress said in surprise. His appreciation of Prince Huainan’s stupidity reached new heights.

“Yes, that was just what we thought. How did he dare?” Emperor Jingren’s tone didn’t make this a question; instead, he sounded certain that he knew the truth. “When we thought this, we suddenly thought of two other people. These two people had also behaved with such audacity that we could scarcely even conceive of it. And the thing all three of these people had done was one and the same.

“From your expression, it seems you’ve guessed who the other two people are. Yes, we mean Lin Boyuan and Yan Xu. The degree of severity of these three people’s actions was different, but at base, it was the same: inappropriate advances toward us.” Emperor Jingren shook his head. “This was truly strange. It would have been one thing if our consorts or concubines had done such things, but why would so many people with talent, power, and position confess their love to us? They would rather acquire the reputation of a seducer than become a pillar of the nation. Are we really as beautiful as a celestial being, and so bewitching?”

“Naturally Your Majesty is bewitching. I’ve been so bewitched by you that I hardly remember who I am,” the empress said. This was the sincere truth; he was completely different from those three people.

But Emperor Jingren didn’t respond to this. He continued, “Therefore, we had Prince Huainan followed and ordered the Embroidered Guard to search his residence for that incense. As expected, they found it. We tried it ourselves and had an incestuous dream. We truly felt guilty before our ancestors when we woke. Suddenly, we had a thought: when we smell that incense, we have dreams. What about the servants in the harem who also smell it sometimes? Would they also have dreams? So we tested it, but the outcome was rather strange. This incense only affects us. If someone else smells it, it has no other impact on them than ordinary scent.”

Xiao Jinyi couldn’t even manage a bitter smile. He only watched Emperor Jingren, quietly, as if awaiting his final judgment.

“Do you want to know why, despite our investigation having reached this stage, we still wanted to be intimate with you?” Emperor Jingren said. “We trust you. You seem to be the same as those other people, yet you have never tried to harm us, and you confiscated and destroyed the incense belonging to all the rest. We also wondered why, though these people all had inappropriate intentions toward us, none of them were willing to take action themselves but preferred to use this incense that made it easy to…‘oh-oh-see.’ At first we couldn’t understand. Rather, it wasn’t that we couldn’t, but that we did not wish to think that the truth was so dire. If we were only willing to lie to ourself a little, perhaps everything would be exposed. But we still wanted to find the answer, and at last, we worked it out.

“You people want us to fall in love with you, but you are profoundly disgusted by the notion of being intimate with us, so you use these means,” said Emperor Jingren with a self-mocking smile.

Seeing this smile, Xiao Jinyi felt a stabbing pain in his heart. Despite the atmosphere between the two of them now, he threw his arms around Emperor Jingren. Red soaked through his bandages, but he still wouldn’t let go. “Not you people! Them!”

“Really?” Emperor Jingren’s gaze was full of doubt.

“Yes!” the empress said firmly. “You don’t know how glad I’ve been that those people always used incense. You don’t know how glad I’ve been that you’ve always been mine!”

“Oh?” Instead of being moved, Emperor Jingren said coldly, “So you are absolutely convinced that apart from our intercourse with you, we have never been intimate with anyone? Is that it?”

Xiao Jinyi felt as if a bucket of ice water had been poured over him. How far had Emperor Jingren’s investigation reached?!

“But we recall that, prior to our marriage, when we were still crown prince, we took two high ranking concubines who passed away before we were married and now exist only in our memory, yet their faces are so blurred that we cannot recall them. We have asked people how much they remember prior to four years ago, and even Jing Xixian said that he doesn’t clearly recall things that happened too long ago. He cannot remember some people’s faces, though he has clear memories of them. Therefore, we have learned that it is not only our memory that is wrong. We are merely the only one who has discovered the problem!”

By the last word, Emperor Jingren was furious, though perhaps even he did not know just what he was angry about.

“In this whole world, the most deeply-etched memories of everyone around us only begin three months after our wedding, when we first visited the virtuous consort. And none of them think there is anything wrong with this. Xiao Jinyi, your servants, your trusted aides, and even your third brother to this day have not discovered that you are a man. A man as shrewd as Xiao Jinshu can watch with his own eyes as you engage in a lengthy battle against Huyan Xi yet remain completely convinced that you are a woman crossdressing as a man!

“Xiao Jinyi, tell us…what kind of world do we live in? Are we beset by nightmares, or is this land…”

Emperor Jingren couldn’t bring himself to finish this sentence.