The Emperor I Had to Leave

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

In my first year after transmigrating into the palace, I picked up a little cat.

In my second year, I picked up a fallen prince.

Now the cat was dead, and I was dying too.

Julian Vale sat at my bedside in silence for a long time.

At last, he said softly, “Tell me what you want.”

I blinked, then turned my head, ready to answer him.

He cut in before I could speak.

“Don’t tell me to let you go,” he said, his voice low and hoarse. “Anything but that, and I’ll agree.”

I shook my head.

But that was the only thing I wanted from him.

It was deep winter, the sky dim and heavy.

A sharp wind swept through the palace corridors. The maidservants carrying basins and cloths hurried with their heads lowered, shoulders hunched against the cold.

The eunuchs stood in two orderly lines beneath the eaves, waiting for the imperial procession to pass.

Someone cried out in a high voice, “His Majesty approaches—”

At once, everyone dropped to their knees.

I knelt too, forehead lowered, though my mind wandered somewhere far away. I was not thinking about the emperor. I was thinking about the snow.

The corridor roof was narrow, and the snow beyond it fell in a blur of white.

I had always liked snow.

Only now, crouched on the cold stone with my hands tucked into my sleeves, I realized I could not feel much of anything anymore.

There were still ten paces before the procession reached us.

Only ten.

But my frozen legs refused to move even an inch.

Then the steward at the front suddenly barked, “What are you doing there? Move aside! If you block the emperor’s path, do you want your head cut off?”

He was the chief steward from the Empress Dowager’s side, a man who normally lorded over everyone in the Inner Court. Even the senior attendants feared him.

I had seen him before only from a distance.

Everyone around me shrank back, terrified of being implicated.

My shoulder pressed against the wall.

The people kneeling nearest me all shifted away as if I carried bad luck.

The chief steward strode over, anger rising in his face. “You blind fool—”

I lifted my head.

He saw my face and swallowed the rest.

The others stole glances at me too, then hurriedly looked away as though they had seen nothing at all.

No one dared drag me out by force.

Not because they were kind.

Because everyone in the palace knew by now that I had once served in the Abandoned Palace Wing at Julian Vale’s side.

And now everyone knew that Julian Vale had become emperor.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Even if I was only a half-dead palace maidservant, I was still someone who had once followed him through those bitter years in the snow.

Years ago, one young eunuch had tripped and shattered a cup while serving tea.

He had been beaten until his back split open.

After that, no one in the palace dared mistreat the attendants who had come from the Abandoned Palace Wing.

When I first arrived there, though, no one had bothered to hide their contempt.

I still remember wondering whether I would survive that winter.

That was the year I had transmigrated into this world.

The Abandoned Palace Wing was bleak beyond words, with broken walls that leaked drafts from every side.

There was only one old sweeping woman left to tend the place.

Everything in those rooms looked ready to die.

I didn’t understand any of it at first.

I had only known I’d landed in a disaster.

It was snowing too on the day I arrived. I was wearing clothes too thin for the season, shivering so hard I could barely stand. Before I could make sense of anything, I was shoved through the gate by two older attendants and told to go in.

The courtyard was silent as a grave.

I pretended to be calm.

In my heart, I was cursing whatever had thrown me here.

Then I saw him.

A boy sat beneath the eaves in a faded robe, bent over a book.

Later, I would save many people. In the end, I would fail to save myself.

But the first person I ever saved was him.

He had been sick with a fever then. No one cared whether he lived or died. The old sweeping woman had merely left a bowl of thin gruel by the door.

He looked at me once and lowered his eyes again.

I crouched beside him and touched his forehead. It was burning.

I fed him water a little at a time.

Maybe he thought I was like the little cat, something that had wandered in by accident and would soon disappear again.

The cat had appeared a few days before me.

A tiny scrap of fur, all ribs and trembling bones.

It hadn’t found food, but it had found the unwanted prince hidden in the depths of the palace.

One abandoned creature recognizing another.

I had just managed to patch the broken window with paper and block some of the drafts when I noticed him watching me in silence.

When I turned, he looked away as if he didn’t know what to make of me.

The little cat curled beside his sleeve and trembled.

He was going to die if this kept on.

I thought then that if I was unlucky enough to end up in this place, I might as well save whoever I could.

So I borrowed a worn blanket, begged and traded for scraps of charcoal, and found a way to get him some medicine.

The first time I brought him brewed herbs, nearly every attendant I passed looked at me like I was out of my mind.

He was so thin then, all angles and shadows, without the slightest color in his face.

When he tried to stand, his knees buckled and he nearly fell.

He looked at me and said, “Don’t waste your effort. No one here needs to trouble themselves over me.”

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I hadn’t expected the first person to speak kindly to me in this world to be the one everyone had already given up on.

Later, people warned me in secret: “You’d better not get close to him. His mother was disgraced, and the Empress Dowager despises him.”

The first time I heard that, I was still crouched beside his bed trying to cool his fever. I didn’t respond with the clever caution they probably expected.

I just couldn’t understand how an entire palace could watch a living person rot away and feel nothing at all.

So I gritted my teeth and stayed.

And from then on, no one came near that place anymore.

It suited me.

I discovered I could keep him alive.

One day at a time. One bowl of medicine after another.

As the days passed, and then the months, and then the years, I stopped being afraid.

Every time I thought I might not survive, I would remind myself of one thing.

When I had first transmigrated here, there had been a voice in my head.

It called itself the system.

It told me that once it completed my task, I could return to my original world.

But so many years had passed, and it had never appeared again.

Sometimes I told myself maybe it had broken down.

Maybe I would never go back.

Maybe this world and that one were no different after all.

Julian was never one for talking.

Even when he was at his weakest, shivering under ragged quilts, he did not complain.

He never asked me why I stayed.

He never asked what I wanted.

I only remember that once, in the dead of winter, he handed me a branch he had trimmed smooth himself. He said the courtyard was too icy and I kept slipping, so I should use it for support from then on.

I had only smiled and accepted it, teasing, “Then I’ll count on Your Highness to keep me alive.”

Julian had gone still for a moment, then looked at me in a way I did not understand then.

I thought I would be able to leave just like that.

But Julian stepped in front of me.

The young eunuch at his side glanced at me, then at Julian, and hurriedly lowered his head, not daring to look again.

Julian had only just recovered from his illness. He had spent another whole night standing out in the wind and snow, and his face was frighteningly pale. Even from where I stood, I could make out the red at the corner of his lips.

I forced myself not to look too long and kept my voice steady. “Your Highness, your body still needs proper care from the physicians of the Imperial Medical Bureau.”

“Will you stay if I do?”

His voice was hoarse. He sounded as though he had only just learned how to ask.

I answered softly, “You know I only know how to prescribe medicine.”

And I had already taught those physicians everything I could.

Julian fell silent.

He knew, and so did I, that I could not remain in the palace forever.