"Did you hear? Dong Yujie is cheating! Dong Xiurong has taken a lover!"
"The elder Crown Prince has been cuckolded! He’s been made a fool of!"
"Hahaha, Dong Xiurong wrote so many love letters to her cousin. A whole pile of them!"
"’Recalling the past warmth of your embrace, my heart overflows with joy.’"
"’My only regret is that these high palace walls keep us apart, but we’ll meet again soon, teehee.’"
Xia Wuyang, currently nestled between two beauties, froze. He’d considered the possibility that one of his concubines might be unfaithful, but now that the day had actually come, it left a complicated taste in his mouth.
He had been listening to the palace’s small animals for a while now, so he knew many of the Eastern Palace concubines were disloyal. But Dong Yujie was the first to go this far.
The other concubines were all waiting for him to die before making their moves. At least they acted decently while he was still alive.
He never thought Dong Yujie would be this impatient. He only had a few months left, and she couldn’t even wait that long.
Besides, he had treated Dong Yujie well over the years. He hadn’t taken out the anger from his own deposal on her, and had even shown her great favor. Her actions were nothing short of repaying kindness with cruelty.
A flash of anger sparked in Xia Wuyang’s heart, but he knew this wasn’t the time to act. ’I have to wait for someone to ’leak’ this to me,’ he thought. ’It won’t be too late to explode then. Can’t let anyone know I get my intelligence from the palace animals.’
He didn’t have to wait long. Soon enough, spies planted in Wenhua Hall by other Princes and Princesses made their move, deliberately discussing the affair right outside the windows of his Sleeping Palace.
"Hahaha, this is priceless! Dong Xiurong is actually having an affair, and the Crown Prince is still in the dark."
"They say the man she’s seeing is her childhood sweetheart. No wonder Dong Xiurong couldn’t hold back. In her letters, she even wrote about ’recalling the past warmth of your embrace,’ calling it an experience ’so enchanting one could never leave.’"
"And that’s not all! She wrote about ’remembering the peach blossom forest, until tears soaked her silk robes.’ It seems Dong Xiurong is deeply in love with this childhood sweetheart. How else could she write letters like that?"
"Should we tell the Crown Prince? It’s such a huge scandal, and the whole palace knows by now. We can’t keep him in the dark forever."
Hearing the deliberately loud discussion, Xia Wuyang sneered inwardly, but his face contorted into a mask of appropriate shock and rage.
"What!"
He shoved the beautiful young women away and smashed his teacup on the floor. "That bitch! How dare she!"
The moment the words left his mouth, Xia Wuyang clutched his chest, his face draining of all color. He coughed up a mouthful of blood, spattering the table and chairs before him.
"Crown Prince, what’s wrong with you?"
"Quick, summon the Imperial Physician! Something’s happened to the Crown Prince!"
"Who was spouting nonsense?! Shut your mouths!"
Wenhua Hall erupted into chaos. The Qiuci Dancer, the new Palace Maids, the girl from the Fox Race... all of them went pale with fright, completely at a loss.
The chaos only subsided when the Imperial Physician finally arrived.
After the Imperial Physician administered first aid, Xia Wuyang "weakly" sat up. His voice trembled, filled with rage: "Quick... quickly drag that bitch before me!"
The Guards deployed at once, and soon they were dragging Dong Yujie into Wenhua Hall.
Her face was ashen. The moment she saw Xia Wuyang, she fell to her knees and choked out between sobs, "Your Highness, please see the truth! I only exchanged a few letters with my cousin, nothing improper ever happened! I haven’t left the Eastern Palace for even a moment during this time. Everyone can vouch for me!"
"Shut up!" Xia Wuyang "propped up" his ailing body and pointed a trembling finger at her. "All these years, I have treated you well! Your family has benefited greatly because of it! And you dare... you dare humiliate me like this!"
As he spoke, he broke into another "fit of coughing," looking as if he wouldn’t last much longer.
"Your Highness, please forgive me! I know I was wrong! Please, give me one more chance!" Dong Yujie wailed, tears and snot streaming down her face as she kowtowed.
Xia Wuyang let out a cold laugh and issued the order directly. "Effective immediately, Dong Yujie is stripped of her rank as Xiu Rong and is to be confined to the Cold Palace! Without my express permission, she is never to set foot outside again!"
Eunuchs and Palace Maids swarmed forward, seizing Dong Yujie and dragging her off to the Cold Palace.
After dealing with Dong Yujie, Xia Wuyang, "seething with uncontrollable rage," dispatched a squad of Guards to capture her cousin, Wang Xuan. He was determined to have his "revenge."
"I want him found, dead or alive! Do not let that adulterer escape!"
Xia Wuyang’s hoarse shouts echoed through the Eastern Palace, ensuring everyone heard his decree.
But in just half a day, the Guards returned, dejected. "Your Highness... th-that Wang Xuan has already fled. Someone tipped him off. We can’t find any trace of him now."
"Bastards! Useless fools!" Xia Wuyang "flew into another rage" and promptly "fainted" from the sheer anger of it all.
’For the news to have reached Wang Xuan so quickly, someone in the palace must have intervened,’ he thought. ’This was a deliberate ploy to make me lose all face, to turn me into the laughingstock of the Imperial Palace.’
What was even more shocking was that before they could even catch Dong Yujie’s cousin, news arrived from the other side: Dong Yujie herself had vanished from the Cold Palace. It was suspected she had escaped to find him.
A frail woman, not even a Martial Artist, escaping from the heavily guarded Cold Palace? Even an idiot could see someone had helped her.
This helper was most likely the same person who’d warned Wang Xuan. It was all a clear ploy to embarrass Xia Wuyang, the elder Crown Prince—or perhaps even to anger him to death.
In the wake of Dong Yujie’s escape, new rumors began to circulate. They claimed that before she fled, Dong Yujie had made a list of damning accusations against the elder Crown Prince.
"I heard the real reason Dong Yujie rekindled things with her cousin is because the elder Crown Prince... can’t perform. They say even after taking the Dragon and Tiger Elixir, he’s completely useless. She had no choice but to leave."
"Not only that, Dong Xiurong also claimed the elder Crown Prince beat and berated her constantly. Said he’s practically gone mad. She only contacted her cousin because she couldn’t take it anymore."
"Dong Xiurong said that ever since his deposal, the elder Crown Prince has become unhinged, a raving lunatic."
She had nearly cuckolded Xia Wuyang, and now she was slandering him like this. Unsurprisingly, upon hearing the news, the elder Crown Prince once again "coughed up blood" and fainted. He wasn’t even sleeping with his beauties anymore—or rather, it was said he *couldn’t*.
"That bitch... I’m divorcing her! Bring me the papers! I’m divorcing her this instant!"
The elder Crown Prince then forced his ailing body to sit up, wrote out the letter of divorce, and cast Dong Yujie out. She was no longer one of his concubines.
Even so, Xia Wuyang had become the laughingstock of the Imperial Palace and beyond.
All sorts of vicious rumors quickly flooded the Eastern Palace. Xia Wuyang took them all in stride. The next time the Imperial Physician came to check his pulse, his "condition worsened" yet again. This development greatly reassured the outside world; the number of Princes and Princesses targeting him dropped sharply, and many of the suspicions that had been focused on him began to fade.
Divine Constable Liu Yiqing, who had been investigating a murderer within the palace, naturally heard all this news as well. She made a point to confirm the details and learned that it was all, apparently, true.

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