63 Keeping Secrets

Lan Chang quickly returned back to the room to reconvene with her son, carrying in her arms a glass of water and a few more candles, all raided from her fast asleep co workers rooms, who had already given her their permission to use at her will.

Days in the kitchens and running around the palace, for those who were living in the Imperial Palace, was hard and tiring, with the cooks falling asleep quickly enough to be ready for the next day of hard work.

The closer that servants were to the Emperor, the more that they were kept from leaving the palace to keep the secrets of the rulers from leaking out into the outside world and disseminated among the populace.

Lan Chang had to wonder sometimes at the lives of the personal attendants of the Emperor and his concubines, as well as all those part of the council who formed the advisors of the Emperor, even if she was sure that the Emperor didn't give much attention to them all.

He had married only a few, scant years after the death of his first wife - the woman who had been exalted and praised by him for days and days on end, the man blushing in front of the entire Imperial Court as soon as he had laid his eyes on her when she was visiting him with her father, a minor noble deep into the countryside.

Concubine Jing was a woman who Lan Chang could see the appeal of, if she was the Emperor and had his type, but she had to stay distrustful of her anyway.

It was far too strange that the Emperor would marry her so soon, without the pressure of his council even who were happy to let him stay without a wife in order to place his warmongering brother on the throne instead, and since Concubine Jing had arrived, she had been locked away in her own palace, not too far from the Imperial Palace building, but far enough that her influence would be dampened, for a reason that Lan Chang never had managed to find or decipher.

Concubine Jing had already expressed some sort of hostile attention towards Ming Cheng, and if she came across this now, then it would possibly spell Ming Cheng's doom.

There was no way for Lan Chang to figure out what she wanted, outside of talking to those within her palace and the servants who brought food over to her palace staff to be given out.

It was far too unlikely that she would get any information out of her Palace servants, who all had an unhealthy and frankly terrifying level of loyalty towards her, and considering their attitudes, it was far too unlikely that they would be willing to gossip and tell her secrets.

Whatever concubine Jing had done to charm the Emperor was something that she had already and obviously done to her servants, putting her on grounds to suspect that she was secretly carrying out illicit rituals and playing around with magic.

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