CH 62

Emperor Jiajing slowly opened his eyes.

“Go…. and get Huang Jin……” Jiajing was breathless trying to get out the words, his lips trembled, he had extreme dark circles under his eyes, his entire face looked sickly and aged, with his white hair dangling over his temples. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was sleeping here, whoever saw him would just think he was some sort of old person who had one foot in the grave.

“Father, you’ve forgotten, Huang Jin committed a grave error and you reassigned him elsewhere.”

“Well, what about the Prince of Yu….”

“San-ge has caught a cold, and is resting at his manor, and has no way of entering the palace…..”

The Prince of Jing’s words tailed off, because he saw that his father was staring at him, although the gaze was hazy, it could still incite great fear in him. “Father…..”

“What about Xu Jie, the other grand secretaries, tell them all to come…..”

The Prince of Jing knew that there was no turning back, so he decided that he might as well just go ahead and break an already broken pot5, he flapped his sleeves6 and then got up: “If father wishes to think like that, then I do not have anything to say about it. In terms of status, or even ability, where am I worse off than my good-for-nothing7 san-ge! Aside from the fact that our eldest two brothers passed away early, so now he has the status of the eldest son! Father’s health is declining day by day, and you are unwilling to issue an official edict. When the time comes, those officials of the Grand Secretariat will definitely want to elect san-ge as the next Emperor, and what wrong have I committed to do this!”

As he spoke, the emotions that he had locked deep inside him began to bubble up and ignited something inside of him: “After all these years, you’ve never even looked at me properly, when the crown prince was alive it was like this, after the crown prince died it was also like this!”

Xu Jie, Gao Gong and the others were intelligent individuals and it was impossible for them not to have felt that the situation was rather odd, but the problem was that they were not serving an ordinary Emperor. According to Jiajing’s previous behaviour, he would often go into secluded meditation from ten days to half a month without seeing a soul and this was quite normal. Plus, this time, the matter was regarding naming a crown prince, Xu Jie and the others had been greatly bothered by the matter and had rejected seeing anyone else, and had only just gradually began to suspect something was up.

Even if he didn’t want to see them, he would not go as far as to lock the doors and not allow them to leave the palace, and even the guards outside seemed to have increased, this was evidently house arrest.

What exactly was happening in the palace, and what was exactly happening outside of the palace? They pondered over it and came up with numerous scenarios, that they’d even thought of the possibility of Prince of Jing bringing troops into the palace. If Zhao Su was present, he’d definitely tell them that they had an overactive imagination.

Now, the four of them had become suspicious, they were still sitting there worrying whilst trapped, they didn’t have any solutions. There was only Xu Jie who remained calm and collected, not flustered at all: “There’s no point in getting worked up, there will definitely be someone coming for us in a bit.”

Just as he spoke, the door was pushed open, the first to enter was a burly stranger who moved to the side to let the others in.