Cold, the kind of cold that stings people’s muscles and bones.
The chilly wind and snow, bringing with them a chill, blew over.
Shen Qingzhuo shuddered. He suddenly opened his eyes, felt dizzy for a moment, and subconsciously raised his hand to find a support point.
“Young Master, His Highness the Seventh Prince has been kneeling in the snow for two hours. If he continues to kneel, he may be…”
At this time, a thin, sharp voice came to his ears.
Shen Qingzhuo steadied himself and looked in the direction of the sound.
Next to him stood a boy about 17 or 18 years old, wearing a blue-gray robe and a gauze hat, with his back bent, looking like a…
Young eunuch?
Shen Qingzhuo was stunned for a moment, then he lowered his eyes and realized that he was wearing a sky-blue brocade robe, a white jade belt around his waist, and a long fur cape on the outside.
The workmanship is exquisite, and he couldn’t recognize the shape at first, but he just felt that it was not warm enough.
“Cough, cough.” Shen Qingzhuo couldn’t help coughing twice and raised his hand to close the window in front of him.
Opening the window and letting in the cold wind on a snowy day, their brains really aren’t working well.
“What’s going on? Are you guys filming?” After he recovered from the dizziness, he looked around but couldn’t find any cameras or staff in the room.
The young eunuch was stunned: “What did you say?”
Shen Qingzhuo frowned. Something is wrong ah…
He was typing away at the computer just a moment ago, how come he was in another place in the blink of an eye?
[Not even a blink of an eye.]
A lazy robotic male voice sounded in his mind.
Shen Qingzhuo: “Who?”
[Let me introduce myself. I am System No. 007 of the Book-Traveling System Bureau. Congratulations to the host for having a sudden myocardial infarction. Your soul has been selected to be bound to the “Dayong Dynasty” Book-Traveling System.]
Shen Qingzhuo: “……”
“Dayong Dynasty” is the novel that he just sat in front of the computer and painstakingly wrote a thousand-word review on.
This is a purely fictional political novel that tells a turbulent struggle for the throne during the heyday of the Dayong Dynasty.
The main villain in the novel, Xiao Shen, is a typical beautiful, strong, tragic, and tool-man character1Basically, a side character that was used to help the protagonists.
Although he was the Seventh Prince of the Dayong Dynasty, he was born in the cold palace because his mother was the younger sister of General Zhao. General Zhao was so powerful that he was confiscated and beheaded by the old emperor for treason.
After Xiao Shen was born, Concubine Zhao, who was in the cold palace, became insane. She would beat, scold, and torture her young and innocent son at will. From time to time, she would go crazy and wish she could strangle him to death.
Not only that, with the old emperor’s tacit approval, the other princes even took pleasure in bullying him.
He was forced to jump into the river when he was six years old and was chased and bitten by vicious dogs when he was eight years old. Even the eunuchs and palace maids with the lowest status in the palace looked down on him and openly withheld the food, clothing, and other expenses of the mother and son. In order to survive, he even had to snatch food from the kittens raised in the palace.
It was these humiliations that the Seventh Prince, who lived in shame and dormancy for several years, killed his several royal brothers one by one, finally sent the old emperor to the west with his own hands, and ascended the throne by stepping on the flesh and blood of his closest relatives.
The winner is the king, and the loser is the bandit2Legitimacy belongs to the victor; used to mean a person is judged solely on whether they succeeded or failed.. Looking back at history, there are many emperors who killed their fathers and brothers and usurped the throne. But the biggest problem is that the protagonist of this novel is not Xiao Shen.
This is a dual-male-protagonist conspiracy novel. The real male protagonists are the tyrant’s sixth uncle Xiao Luchi and the Minister of Revenue’s legitimate son Lin Jinyu.
Xiao Shen’s dark upbringing made him violent and ruthless. His actions after ascending the throne made him the number one tyrant in the history of the Dayong Dynasty.
Internally, anyone who dared to oppose or give advice would be executed along with his entire clan, regardless of whether they were civil officials, military generals, or heroes who had made great contributions to the founding of the country. He abolished the cabinet and unlimitedly expanded the power of the secret agency Dongchang3Dongchang or Eastern Depot in English is a Ming dynasty spy and secret guards agency run by eunuchs., from the princes and ministers to the ninth-rank officials. The henchmen of Dongchang were omnipresent, even beheading the third-rank Dali Court’s minister on the spot first and reporting later.
The whole court was shrouded in a terrifying dark cloud.
Externally, he was militaristic and aggressive. He forced all men of military age in Dayong to join the army. He fought wars in the south, the north, the east, and the west. Wherever the Dayong Cavalry went, no grass grew. The war was raging, and the people were suffering. The people of Dayong lived in misery.
In the third year of the Tianqi reign, Xiao Shen finally turned his attention to his uncles and began to order the reduction of the power of the feudal lords.
Without the lips, the teeth feel the cold4lit. without the lips, the teeth feel the cold (idiom); fig. intimately interdependent.. Under the desperate advice of many of his aides, King Qin, Xiao Luchi, finally decided to seize the throne. He then raised the army under the pretext of “clearing the court” and joined forces with the Governor of Beizhen Prefecture, Lin Jinyu, to seize the throne.
According to the normal routine of novels, at this time, King Qin followed the will of heaven, killed the tyrant, and ascended the throne, creating a peaceful and prosperous era in the Dayong Dynasty.
However, the subsequent developments left all the readers dumbfounded. The tyrant Xiao Shen would kill gods and Buddhas if they stood in his way. He killed all the protagonists and supporting characters in the book.
Readers who followed the novel were collectively furious. All the main characters and supporting characters died. They spent months following the novel for nothing? The author is a scammer!
Pay back the money!
Relatively speaking, Shen Qingzhuo was relatively calm and wrote a thousand words to prove the rationality of this ending.
He was not paid to whitewash the author, but he had vaguely sensed that the author could no longer control the character of Xiao Shen since the book was already halfway through.
A vicious tyrant, an evil ghost crawling out of the abyss. Almost all the plot in the later part of the novel was focused on him. Unless Xiao Shen is suddenly put under a spell, it will be difficult for the two protagonists to kill him easily.
This should have been the most exciting climax of the whole book, the decisive battle between the villain tyrant and the righteous protagonists, but unfortunately, the author’s previous framework was too big and he did not have the ability to wrap up the foreshadowing and round out the plot, so the novel had a bad ending.
Shen Qingzhuo guessed that this was probably the reason why he was in the book and turned his attention to another important question: “Who did I become?”
System: [Is there any difference?]
Shen Qingzhuo: “That’s also true. Anyway, all the famous characters in the book died in the end.
“So, I can’t be transmigrated, right?”
System: [Correct answer, you have transformed into Shen Qingzhuo, who has the same name as you.]
Shen Qingzhuo: “……”
As a senior student majoring in history, he took time out from his busy studies to read this fictional novel because there was a little cannon fodder with the same name as him in the book, who was the tyrant’s enlightenment teacher.
Shen Qingzhuo in the book is the youngest son of King Zhenbei. He has been living a life of luxury since childhood, having everything he wants. He was brought up in a pampered manner just for the purpose of replacing his brother to enter the palace and become the Crown Prince’s companion one day.
King Zhenbei, Shen Geng, is the only prince of a different surname in Dayong. He has been guarding Youbei for many years, commanding his own troops and being loved by the people. The old emperor is very wary of him, so he orders King Zhenbei to send his son into the palace.
Therefore, although Shen Qingzhuo was nominally the Crown Prince’s companion, he was actually a hostage used by the old emperor to contain King Zhenbei.
Everyone knows that King Zhenbei loves his youngest son the most, but few people know that he has been an abandoned son since the beginning.
Shen Qingzhuo had been in the palace for three years and had been kept in the Eastern Palace. Until one day, the Empress Dowager accidentally saw the Seventh Prince. She felt sorry for the fact that he was only twelve years old and had not yet started to learn. So she scolded the old emperor, saying, “How could the Seventh Prince of the Dayong Dynasty be illiterate?”
The old emperor reluctantly agreed to let Xiao Shen study and learn calligraphy, while the Crown Prince secretly instructed Shen Qingzhuo to recommend himself as the Seventh Prince’s tutor. On one hand, it was to make it easier to monitor and torture Xiao Shen, and on the other hand, it was to prevent him from having the opportunity to learn real skills.
So Shen Qingzhuo did many inhumane things to the young Seventh Prince under the pretext of teaching.
After Xiao Shen ascended the throne, the first thing he did was to imprison the Imperial Preceptor in the Eastern Palace. He tortured him for three years before ordering him to be executed by slow slicing.
The Imperial Preceptor was already in poor health, and three years of imprisonment had made him so emaciated that he was almost unrecognizable. The new emperor personally fed him ginseng elixir to keep him alive and made him endure three thousand cuts of the sword while remaining conscious.
The torture lasted for three days and three nights. The new emperor fed the scraped raw meat to dogs and finally ground the bones into ashes, leaving no trace.
Thinking of the original owner’s ending, Shen Qingzhuo couldn’t help but feel a heart attack: “There is a difference.”
The difference is that the Imperial Preceptor character died the most tragically.
System: [You’ve already transmigrated, there’s no point in saying this.]
He couldn’t refute it for a moment, so he had to ask a new question: “What time is it now?”
System: [The twenty-third year of Guangxi, winter.]
Shen Qingzhuo glanced at the heavy snow falling outside the window sideways. Combined with what the young eunuch had just said, he realized that the situation was not good.
He walked back to the window, raised his hand to open the window frame, and sure enough, he saw a child kneeling not far away and covered with a layer of white snow. At first glance, he thought someone had made a little snowman outside.
In the winter of the twenty-third year of Guangxi, Shengjing experienced rare heavy snowfall for several days. The original owner found an excuse to punish the little tyrant and made him kneel in the snow to reflect on his actions.
The twelve-year-old Seventh Prince was nearly frozen to death, but his life was saved in the end. However, from then on, his legs developed a disease, and he suffered unbearable pain whenever it rained or snowed. After he ascended the throne, he condescended to crush the Imperial Preceptor’s leg bones bit by bit with his own hands.
Shen Qingzhuo suddenly felt a slight pain in his legs.
Very good, hell from the start.
“So, what is my mission here?” Shen Qingzhuo stared at the little snowman not far away, trying to convince himself to accept the cruel reality.
System: [Your mission is to prevent Xiao Shen from completely turning evil and killing the protagonists of this book, causing the world to collapse. Therefore, you have to…]
Shen Qingzhuo: “Strike first to gain the upper hand?”
System: [……]
Shen Qingzhuo: “Just kidding, how can I bear to make a move on such a cute glutinous rice dumpling?”
Even though the little tyrant was still young and isolated at this time, and it was indeed the best time to strike, but as a well-rounded young man of the 21st century with all-round development in morality, intelligence, physique, aesthetics, and labor, how could he possibly kill people right away?
This is not in line with the core socialist values.
System: [So you must influence him with love.]
Shen Qingzhou: “Oh.”
System: [Again, the target of the mission is the most important supporting character in this world and cannot be simply and crudely eliminated.]
Shen Qingzhuo touched his chin thoughtfully.
What’s the point of using love to persuade him? As long as he helps the two male protagonists defeat Xiao Shen in the end, won’t the mission be accomplished?
System: [I would like to remind you of a fact. Two people who transmigrated into this book have failed their missions before you.]
Shen Qingzhou: “……”
“You can hear the voice in my mind?”
System: [Otherwise? How do you think we communicate?]
Shen Qingzhuo: “I solemnly declare that I need to maintain my personal privacy!”
System: [Don’t worry, I’m usually very busy and have too many worlds to manage. If you don’t call me, I won’t appear again.]
Shen Qingzhuo thought for a moment and said, “So, as long as I complete this task, I can return to my original world?”
The mechanical sound of the system sounded a little bit uncertain: [You can understand it this way.]
Shen Qingzhuo was about to ask about the rules, but the system said, [I’m going to another world. Don’t call me unless it’s a life-or-death situation.]
Shen Qingzhou: “?”
So what’s the use of this system for him? Why not give him a cheat code or something?
The young eunuch at the side saw his master lost in thought and thought his words had worked, so he continued to persuade him earnestly: “His Highness is a prince after all. If something really happens and His Majesty blames, the one who has to bear the consequences will be you ah, Young Master!”
Shen Qingzhuo came back to his senses: “What you said makes sense.”
The young eunuch’s real name was Zhang Houde. He was a personal eunuch given to the original owner by the old emperor.
This person was originally a spy planted next to the original owner by the Crown Prince, but he was young and kind-hearted, and after a few years of getting along, they developed a master-servant relationship and knew how to consider everything for the original owner.
Hearing this, Xiao Dezi breathed a sigh of relief: “Then shall the servant go and ask His Highness the Seventh Prince to get up?”
Shen Qingzhuo thought for a moment, then suddenly turned around and walked out the door.
Xiao Dezi was anxious again: “Young Master, it’s snowing heavily outside, where are you going?”
“Where else can I go?” Shen Qingzhuo said without turning his head. “Of course I should go to see His Highness.”
There is no room for salvation.
Shen Qingzhuo lifted his skirt and stepped into the half-foot-deep snow, leaving deep white pits with every step.
Xiao Dezi hurriedly followed with an umbrella.
The flying snow covered the palace’s red walls, and all that could be seen was a vast expanse of desolation.
Shen Qingzhuo started coughing when he saw the wind, thinking that this body was really delicate. The exposed wrist was white, tender, and slender, as if it could be broken with a little force.
He couldn’t help but feel a little worried. It would definitely be inconvenient for him to do things in the future with such a frail body.
After a moment, he walked up to the Seventh Prince and cleared his throat: “Your Highness, get up first.”
The dumpling, who was kneeling in the snow, did not move.
Shen Qingzhuo was puzzled, thinking that his voice was too soft, so he raised his voice slightly: “Your Highness, the punishment is over.”
Still no response.
Xiao Dezi reminded quietly, “Young Master, the Seventh Prince might have been frozen?”
Shen Qingzhuo: “It’s possible.”
He turned his head and signaled Xiao Dezi: “Then you carry His Highness back to the room.”
Xiao Dezi responded, bent down, and was about to pick up the Seventh Prince.
“Ai, wait a minute.” Shen Qingzhuo stopped him in time. “His Highness is frozen stiff, and the joints of his limbs are very brittle. You can’t hold him like this.”
Seeing Xiao Dezi hesitating, Shen Qingzhuo simply took off his snowcloak, leaned over to hug the dumpling, and picked him up with the snowcloak.
He made full preparations, but he didn’t expect that the twelve-year-old boy was much lighter than he thought. He held him in his hands, and he seemed as light as a paper man, as if he could be blown away by a gust of wind.
Shen Qingzhuo lowered his eyes and looked at the palm-sized little face in his arms.
His cheeks were thin and bloodless, his long and thick eyelashes were covered with white frost, and the corners of his eyes and eyebrows were covered with ice and snow. He really looked like a lifeless snow doll.
He was looking at the young version of the tyrant closely when he suddenly saw his long, frosty eyelashes tremble slightly.
The next moment, Shen Qingzhuo was caught off guard and met a pair of dark and cold pupils.
