Chapter 72
XIAO LI WAS THE EMPEROR’S youngest son, and the only legitimate one; he was fifteen years old. He should have been respected and revered in the palace, growing up spoiled beyond imagination. Instead, due to his intellectual disability, the emperor viewed him as an embarrassment and cast him into a side palace, pretending he didn’t exist. As much as the empress missed her son, she only ever saw him twice a year—once during the Mid-Autumn Festival, and once at New Year’s.
“The sixth prince?” Hu Ji said. “Why would you think of the sixth prince all of a sudden?”
Lin Qingyu found the row that held the princes’ diagnoses. “I want to know the exact details of his illness.”
Although Xiao Cheng was respectful toward the empress, the legal mother within the emperor’s household, his birth mother was still a high-ranking noble consort. If Xiao Cheng eventually took the throne, the empress and Noble Consort Chen would both be empress dowagers. Yet the empress had held on to her seat for a long time, and naturally, she wouldn’t want to share it with another woman.
Anyone who opposed Xiao Cheng’s rise to the throne could temporarily become Lin Qingyu’s ally, and if he wanted to recruit the empress to his side, Xiao Li would be the best starting point.
Xiao Li had been banished to a side palace for his entire life, and the emperor had kept his son’s intellectual disability secret, so there was hardly any information about him in the palace. Lin Qingyu and Hu Ji had both only entered the palace recently, so they just knew that the sixth prince was slow, not what had made him like that.
Hu Ji helped Lin Qingyu look for the diagnosis. “I’ve heard that the empress once searched high and low for a cure for the sixth prince’s ailment, but neither the imperial physicians in the capital nor the miraculous physicians renowned in the martial world could do anything. He must have been born incurably slow.”
Lin Qingyu agreed with Hu Ji, but since Xiao Li would be his main means to gain control over the empress, it was worth spending more time investigating.
“I think I found it!” Hu Ji pulled out a thick book. “Is this it?”
Lin Qingyu took the volume from him and flipped through it. “It really is the sixth prince’s diagnosis.”
They started reading immediately. Each physician who’d taken Xiao Li’s pulse had said it was indistinguishable from a normal one. They couldn’t even figure out the cause of his ailment, much less cure it.
The records on Xiao Li’s pulse were much, much thicker than anyone else’s. In the beginning, his was no different from the other princes’. Each day’s heart rate was normal, although he sometimes fell ill with minor afflictions before age two. After turning two, though, Xiao Li still couldn’t speak, and the empress began to panic. She found more and more physicians, and his diagnosis began to take shape. By the time Xiao Li was five years old, the emperor had completely given up; ignoring the empress’s cries and pleas, he sent his young child to a side palace.
The day Xiao Li left the main palace, one last person had investigated his ailment—not an imperial physician or traveling doctor, but the imperial preceptor of Great Yu, Xu Junyuan. The last record in the stack read, The imperial preceptor says that this is the affliction of a lost soul and cannot be cured.
“A lost soul?” Hu Ji looked thoughtful. “I heard my grandmother talk about that when I was young. Infants often have unstable souls, and if they’re exposed to too much shock, they may lose theirs…”
“Do you believe that?” Lin Qingyu asked.
Hu Ji laughed, embarrassed. “I know that physicians shouldn’t believe those things, but many phenomena truly cannot be explained through logic.”
Lin Qingyu closed Xiao Li’s records. “I wouldn’t have believed it either in the past. But now…”
Gu Fuzhou’s soul had flown all over the world. How could Xiao Li’s lost soul be any different?
“If the sixth prince truly lost his soul, nothing can be done about it, not even if the miracle physician Hua Tuo22 reincarnates,” said Hu Ji.
Lin Qingyu stayed silent for a while. “I still want to see for myself. What kinds of people are the imperial physicians working in the side palace?”