Chapter Text
The boy named Mo Xuanyu had died on the battlefield.
He had been the neglected kin of the Mo family until the war began, and conscription came in the heralding voice of a city official who had ridden a horse past their manor to the surrounding villages. Crowned and bestowed the courtesy name Xuanyu by his maternal family on his twentieth birthday—which had never been celebrated so festively—he had only been granted a brief moment of happiness before he had been sent to war in his household's stead, all to avoid the cost of an exemption.
A life traded to retain a number of silver taels that was insignificant for a family like theirs.
And such a child—easily deceived by the venomous snakes that had tangled around him since he had been brought to the manor—had died so quietly that no one had noticed him lying in a pile of corpses, burying each other in their haste to escape a rain of arrows.
No one had noticed his eyes open with an unnerving clarity that no longer belonged to him.
For years, the chaos of invading armies slaughtering cities and villages was further fueled by the instability of the capital, with the Emperor's declining health and the uncertainty of a successor when the harem had remained unvisited and thus, childless. The wounds of the empire only festered with the surviving kings of the imperial clan—sons of the previous emperor—seeking to claim the throne, even if it could only be obtained by illegitimate means.
The rebellion of a king's private army fomented, and past the gates of the capital, the death of the Emperor was illuminated on an ill-omened night by the palaces that had been set aflame.
Only, the Crown Prince named in the Emperor's last edict—a prince born from the same consort mother who hadn't left the imperial palace after his imperial brother's ascension—had survived.
Far from the capital, surrounded by a city of military tents beaten by winter winds, the ascension of the new emperor had reached the ears of the man they called Mo Xuanyu years too late.
The deceased emperor had only one younger brother whom he had doted on alongside his most trusted officials, the General of the North and the Grand Chancellor. He had been given a residence near the Emperor's own, but despite his close relationship with his imperial brother, his presence in the palace had remained inconspicuous. Many of his own kin had forgotten that a consort-born son of Emperor Qingheng remained in the capital, secluded in his palace, while the rest had been exiled to fiefdoms.
The realm had forgotten him as the Ninth Prince, but the man now called Mo Xuanyu knew him by a different name.
Lan Zhan.
It was his courtesy name that the General of the North, Nie Mingjue, uttered under his breath upon receiving an unmarked letter sent by the men left to guard the General's mansion in the capital.
"Do you know why Emperor Zewu cherished Wangji so much?" General Nie asked his most trusted soldiers the night the letter had arrived, a single candle lit within his tent.
His tone was mild, as if he had not treasonously spoken the young Emperor's name aloud. Whether it was the bravery of a man far out of reach, or one who lived by his own ideals underneath imperial rule, even his next words bore no hesitation.
"Wangji is not fit to be emperor."
Imperial brothers had long since spilled their own blood to usurp the throne. But the reticent Ninth Prince, the younger brother who had trailed behind the elder Second Prince and bore the most resemblance to him, had been deeply cherished by his xiongzhang. If not for his humility, often manifesting into a deep yet distancing deference for his elder brother, he might have become a spoiled prince who had never come to know hardship.
Yet, he had been left alone in a palace reduced to ash, hands and silks stained with the blood of countless people, and his spirit utterly silenced when the remaining ministers loyal to the deceased Emperor had finally found him after the rebellion had been quelled.
"He is honest and forthright, incapable of navigating the Imperial Court when every official is full of deceitful means," the General continued, burning the letter with a single, dying flame that refused to go out under the howling torrent of winter. "So why is it that the empire still stands?"
Not a trace of mourning remained in the darkness of his brows as the General sneered, unable to falter or look back.
"Xichen left him with a treacherous fox."
If even from a distance of hundreds of li from the capital, General Nie could deduce that the young Emperor had been made a puppet as soon as his reign had begun, then the Grand Chancellor should have long expected him to return with hundreds of thousands of troops vying to reclaim the throne. Word was sent to the General's mansion to prepare for the worst, and twenty men were sent to evacuate the second young master from the capital and hide him in the southern region of the empire, even if this legitimized the Grand Chancellor's suspicions to the court and facilitated the General's imprisonment.
Before an imperial edict could be sent to summon General Nie from the frontlines, he had given instructions to a young soldier who had proven his worth in the last year, exceedingly talented at hiding.
Mo Xuanyu was ordered to enter the palace.
Though the General trusted the imperial guards left to the young Emperor by his elder brother, the man called Mo Xuanyu did not share this sentiment. Though he was sent to the capital to investigate the Grand Chancellor and how deeply those allied with him had infiltrated the veins of the empire, the man called Mo Xuanyu could not follow this single objective of his mission.
He thought, if he remembered the Emperor's given name after a decade of decay, surely he remembered his own.
For he was no longer Mo Xuanyu, but the dead Wei Wuxian.
The man named Wei Wuxian had died in the fifth year of Emperor Zewu's reign.
Though his father had been Minister Jiang's subordinate, Wei Wuxian had been brought into the manor upon his parents' deaths and given the same education as the young master and heir. His rise into officialdom was thus aided by his adopted father's generous contributions to his upbringing; he had passed the palace examination as the top scorer and entered the court at twenty-one years of age.
Having left an impression of unfaltering pride, even among noble-born scholars who ostracized him for his background, Emperor Zewu would occasionally pass by the junior official's workstation to inquire about his efforts, tailed by his younger brother, the only living prince without a fief. At some point, Wei Wuxian had learned the given name of the young prince, and though he didn't dare to use it in front of the Emperor, it had grown familiar to him.
That portrait of the fifteen-year-old prince, cold yet radiant snow upon an untouched garden with swaying strokes of black ink caressing a tranquil face, was named Lan Zhan.
When he had been sent to a distant prefecture to investigate the gravity of a corrupt governor's dealings, he never saw him again.
A truly loyal minister could never be bribed. Wei Wuxian's reputation as a servant's son who didn't care for treasures but valued even the most diluted wines brewed by commoners could never be tolerated by the enemies he had made in the short three years he had spent in the Emperor's court. Mercenaries disguised as a group of bandits on the road to the Western Prefecture had hunted his traveling party, and only two months after he had departed the capital, news of his death arrived.
It was a lamentable death, but for a mere junior official with little ties to the noble clans, the Emperor could not afford to purge the court. Wei Wuxian had understood this, but hearing from General Nie that the most vile ministers had kept their high positions in the ten years he had been dead, with some even promoted after the young Emperor reorganized the court, he knew that the little prince, his Lan Zhan, was no longer in power.
Even if it cost him this new life, he fought the distance of a thousand li to enter the imperial palace once more.