The selection of the crown prince has always been based on the eldest son before the legitimate son. As the adopted son of the empress and the nominal legitimate prince of Dayu, it would be understandable for Emperor Renshou to make him the crown prince if there were no rumors from the outside world. It's just that every step the little crown prince takes in the future will be extremely difficult.
But now the city is full of rumors, and even if the ministers and officials don't say it, they can't help but doubt the legitimacy of the Eighth Prince's bloodline in private. Under such circumstances, when the edict of Emperor Renshou's succession was announced, everyone in the court was shocked.
He made it clear that even if he appointed an outsider as his successor, he would never pass the throne to Sheng Chengli.
But why is this
It is clear that the fifth prince has been treated favorably by the emperor since he returned from the imperial mausoleum. What reason is there for him to hand over the throne to someone else instead of giving it to his own son
The Qinzheng Hall was filled with luxury and heaviness. Hundreds of years of vicissitudes of history of the imperial capital were concentrated in this hall. Su Huaijing stood up from the floor tiles and inadvertently glanced at the beam above Emperor Renshou's head.
After a few moments, Lord Zhongcheng withdrew his gaze with an ambiguous look.
His parents died here...
She was strangled to death by a palace maid, and then she pretended to hang herself on this beam...
Su Huaijing stepped back respectfully with the secret letter in his arms. The moment the palace door closed, the emperor admired by millions of people in the room began to cough heavily and violently.
Su Huaijing lowered his overly long and thick eyelashes, lowered his head and walked out of the palace gate step by step.
The autumn wind blew through the imperial city, as if playing a dirge.
Su Huaijing walked outside the palace wall, lowered his head and counted the way he came. The scene behind him became like a bubble in a dream.
But he rarely dreams.
-
After the edict to establish the crown prince was issued, rumors spread everywhere. More than one old minister earnestly requested the emperor to revoke his order, and some people, relying on their seniority, broke into the palace and requested Emperor Renshou and the eighth prince to recognize their relationship by blood in order to silence the gossips of the people.
Sheng Xuyan was furious. On the one hand, he was furious because of the mystery surrounding his life which he was well aware of. On the other hand, he was confused as to why people in the world were so ignorant that they all turned against the emperor over a drama that was not presentable enough. How could a commoner dare to discuss the legitimacy of the crown prince
It was difficult to judge Emperor Renshou's mood. He could only have a moment of peace when Huimian came to the palace to lecture every day.
That day, Huimian left the palace, and Sheng Xuyan knelt in the Buddhist temple, chanting scriptures in a low voice, feeling a peace that he had not felt for a long time.
The wooden door behind him closed and opened again. He frowned unhappily and said in a deep voice, "Master, have you forgotten the distinction between respect and inferiority?"
It was he who said that there was no ruler or subject in front of Buddha, and now he was also unhappy because someone came in without informing.
Contradiction, hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness... these words are fully reflected in Sheng Xuyan.
The visitor chuckled and said, "Father, who are you talking to about respect and inferiority?"
Emperor Renshou was stunned, then he suddenly opened his eyes and stood up, staring at the young man who was striding in without blinking, his eyes filled with anger.
If you look closely at the anger, you might even see a few barely detectable traces of fear.
Sheng Chengli became interested. He raised his eyebrows and said casually, "Your son greets the emperor. I wish you good health and a long life."
These words were said frivolously and casually, and anyone who heard them would point at Sheng Chengli's nose and scold him for deceiving his superiors.
Emperor Renshou slowed down his pace, his chest rising and falling violently, and he threw his Buddhist beads to the ground fiercely, shouting angrily, "Rebellious son!"
The sandalwood beads rolled all over the hall. Sheng Chengli looked at them with pity, shook his head and said softly, "What a pity for the material."
He still felt genuine pity for a bunch of dead things, but when his gaze returned to Emperor Renshou's face, his brows slowly grew colder.
He seemed very curious, but not aggressive or revealing his true intentions. He was just extremely puzzled and asked slowly, "Why?"
"My second brother was crowned king, my third and fourth brothers were buried, my sixth brother guarded the imperial mausoleum, my seventh brother couldn't even recite the Four Books, and my eighth brother..."
He paused for a moment, then laughed contemptuously, "Eighth brother is someone else's child."
"I am really confused, Father." Sheng Chengli asked, "Why don't you make me the crown prince?"
The Buddhist hall was extremely quiet. The majestic Buddha statue on the high platform looked down with compassion. Sheng Chengli pressed forward step by step, but no one from outside the hall rushed in. Sheng Xuyan's chest was heaving, without any of the warmth and guilt he had in the past, who knew whether it was a disguise or not. The father and son looked at each other, and Sheng Chengli saw in his eyes full of vigilance and resentment.
After a long while, the young man nodded and chuckled, "I understand what Father dreamed about."
Emperor Renshou's body trembled unconsciously and his pupils shrank slightly, which indirectly confirmed Sheng Chengli's guess.
"What did you dream about?" Sheng Chengli asked, "Did you dream that I killed my third brother, sent someone to poison my second brother during exile, and deliberately caused my fourth brother to suffer from heat stroke? Or did you dream that I fed my seventh brother a poison that causes dementia, and smothered my eighth brother to death with my own hands when he was only two years old?"
He spoke lightly and casually, without any awareness that if any word of his words got out, he would be beheaded.
Sheng Xuyan's pupils shrank, his facial muscles tensed, and his teeth chattered uncontrollably, but he was not frightened. Instead, he was completely overwhelmed by anger and was furious.
On the other hand, Sheng Chengli stood there leisurely, looking at him with a smile: "Father, you have taken my fate and sat on the throne for so many years. I have no intention of getting mad at you, but now it has come to this. What do you think? Can you tell me?"
"Son, I'm really curious, why is it Chengxi, and why do you hate me so much?"
Sheng Xuyan's teeth were chattering, and he needed to hold the Buddhist altar tightly with his hands to avoid falling down.
He is the king of the world and the father of the man in front of him. However, at this moment, the two of them are like two wild beasts fighting in the jungle for the power change. There are no ethics or morals, only pure animality.
The autumn wind suddenly blew outside the courtyard. Sheng Chengli opened his eyes and looked at him for a few seconds. As if he had finally reacted, he lowered his head and laughed happily: "How can I be a monster? I am your son."
He took a step, slowly and calmly approaching Emperor Renshou, his face showing an incomprehensible look of comfort and joy, but also a bit of pity: "He wants to spare your life, what can I do, I can only give it to him."
"Dad." Sheng Chengli called out in a very dependent and docile manner: "Just consider it as a small compensation for you stealing my fate, killing my mother, and letting me fend for myself in the cold palace for so many years."
The autumn wind howled, Emperor Renshou glared angrily, gritted his teeth and said: "Monster! If it weren't for you back then..."
"If it weren't for me, what?" Sheng Chengli walked up to him and stretched out his hand to grab Sheng Xuyan's neck: "Father, what you want to say is, if I wasn't born with that fate, you wouldn't have stolen your uncle's throne?"
"… "
"Come on." Sheng Chengli laughed, happily admiring the red face of Emperor Renshou due to breathing difficulties: "You are a born bad seed, a despicable and insidious villain. Whether I or the master appear or not, you will rebel and collude with foreign enemies to invade Dayu. Don't push the responsibility onto others."
"Come to think of it." Sheng Chengli let go of him. The high and mighty emperor instantly lost his strength and fell down under the Buddha platform, his face pale. "You are not as good as my uncle as an emperor."
Sheng Xuyan suddenly felt a surge of blood and he turned his head to vomit blood. He held on for two seconds before finally falling to the ground, convulsing all over.
Sheng Chengli admired it from above for a while before stepping out of the palace and said urgently, "Father has had a stroke, please call the imperial physician!"
The eunuchs and guards hurried to the Buddhist temple. Sheng Chengli glanced at the sky and turned to go to the harem.
His 'eighth brother' is still being raised by his mother.
How could His Royal Highness the Crown Prince of Dayu hug his mother and ask for milk when the Emperor was seriously ill
-
The emperor suffered a stroke after appointing a crown prince. The country cannot be without a ruler for a day. Although the eighth prince is the crown prince, he is still young. The court is also averse to foreign relatives taking power, so it is impossible for the empress to rule the country from behind the curtain.
As a result, Sheng Chengli took over the power of regent.
Rong Tang frowned slightly when he heard the news, but then he heard that a sorcerer had secretly come to the capital.
He was stunned for a moment, searching for information about the warlock from his distant memory.
It was he who predicted Sheng Chengli's fate at the Prince of Jiangnan's Palace that year, and later Concubine Hui replaced it with her own son.
Rong Tang suddenly remembered that in the last period of his previous life, Sheng Chengli had a distinguished guest in his mansion, and he called the other person "Master".
Rong Tang originally thought that it was the eunuch who taught him martial arts in the imperial mausoleum, but now that all the coincidences had come together, he realized almost instantly that he had guessed wrong.
The story of "The Emperor's Journey" begins with the protagonist Sheng Chengli's fate being tampered with; and the beginning of the rebellion in the 25th year of Yuanxing was also due to the fact that Sheng Xuyan's morale was boosted by the saying of the purple air coming from the east and he went north in one fell swoop.
Somehow Rong Tang felt that he should meet the sorcerer.
But before he could find the person, another shocking news came out in the turbulent imperial city.
Father and son are connected by heart, and the father's illness may be transferred to the son.
Dayu is a man of filial piety. I wonder which imperial physician suggested that if the prince's heart blood is used as a medicine, perhaps Your Majesty can recover soon.
The selection of the medicine inducer is quite particular. He must be a prince who is favored by the emperor and has the highest status, and whose filial piety moves heaven. Only in this way can there be a glimmer of hope.
Superstition has reached its extreme, and I don't know from whom this ignorant and mediocre behavior was passed down.
But the Queen Mother was dead, the Emperor had suffered a stroke, and even if the Queen wanted to, she could not protect the young Prince.
The little prince was taken to the Yangxin Palace by his wet nurse to draw blood. Half a bowl of blood was released. The two or three-year-old child's face turned pale and he fainted early.
The imperial physician quickly boiled it into medicine and fed it to the emperor.
Who would have thought that after feeding a bowl of heart blood, Emperor Renshou not only did not wake up, but his condition worsened and he almost died.
The entire palace was shocked. A group of people from the Imperial Hospital knelt down and repeatedly hinted that if they were biological father and son, this situation would never happen.
The Fifth Prince, who was attending to the patient, acted decisively, cut his wrists to let the blood flow and added medicine again, thus saving Emperor Renshou from the brink of death.
After this incident, the Eighth Prince’s background would become suspicious even with the imperial edict.
A gossipy palace maid mentioned, intentionally or unintentionally, that before Concubine Yi became pregnant with the Eighth Prince, Prince Ningxuan and the Princess seemed to have visited the Queen in the palace.
Rong Tang was in the yard listening to the situation in the capital changing three times a day. When he heard this at last, he was stunned for a moment and couldn't help laughing.
After a lot of twists and turns, the boomerang is used here.
He was not angry, but suddenly wanted to ask Su Huaijing whether he had expected this scene on the day he formed an alliance with Sheng Chengli
(End of this chapter)