Chapter 2

According to the young nurse, White Moonlight's Pampered Daily Life was one of the year's top ten sweet court-intrigue novels.

The intrigue was nowhere to be found, but it was indeed a breezy bit of doting fluff—breezy and doting toward the protagonist and no one else, no thinking required, its hero cradled in the very palm of fate.

The darling at the center of it all was Zhao Yuzheng. Early on he walked the everyone's-heartthrob route, with a suspiciously harem-flavored setup; later the Crown Prince's part was built up until he was locked in as the endgame match. The happy ending had the Crown Prince ascend the throne, with Zhao Yuzheng installed—breaking all precedent—as his male empress. Though according to the young nurse, the bonus extras ended in tragedy.

At the time, Zhao Baiyu had been in the grip of one of his attacks and hadn't caught what the girl said about the tragic ending—though he figured that a doting romance's notion of "tragedy" probably wasn't far off from a happily-ever-after anyway.

From the protagonist's vantage alone, life sailed along without a hitch, showered with affection; even when some venomous side character crossed him, they were slapped down in short order. The plot swung high and low, and readers devoured it, sighing with satisfaction—but shift the vantage onto a supporting character, and things turned downright pitiful.

In the earlier chapters, the single biggest villainous supporting character was named Zhao Baiyu—by sheer coincidence, the same name he'd had in his past life. When the young nurse had brought it up, she'd teased him to hurry and get ready to transmigrate into the book; who'd have thought he actually would.

You could distill the life of this "Zhao Baiyu" into a single title: The Life of the Reviled Villainous Supporting Character. The side character's life ran exactly parallel to the one he was living now—he too had a vicious princess for a mother, one who was loathed and driven out of the Capital, leaving behind a baby boy in swaddling clothes to shoulder everyone's resentment and contempt, alone and helpless.

Unlike Zhao Baiyu's own sunny outlook, the "Zhao Baiyu" of the book had endured a lifetime of being ignored and bullied, never once knowing family love, romance, or friendship. Starved for affection, he had abased himself to please every last member of the Zhao household. And though he envied and resented Zhao Yuzheng, he never once schemed against him—he truly cared for him as a little brother. For his trouble, the pack of men who all adored Zhao Yuzheng banded together and packed him off into the Prince of Lin'an's Residence.

The Little Commandery Prince of Lin'an was infamous for his brutality. His residence had once carried out twenty corpses in a single day—men and women both, every one of them bearing the marks of having been tortured to death.

Just as in the original novel, it had happened two years ago. Zhao Baiyu had only just been recommended to the post of Vice Commissioner of the Capital Prefecture, and had accompanied his superior to handle that very case at the Commandery Prince's Residence. He had seen the ghastly sight of the bodies laid out across the ground, and glimpsed, from a distance, the young Commandery Prince standing backlit—he couldn't make out the man's features or even his height, yet the sight terrified him so badly that he suffered nightmares for a solid month afterward. Ever since, the mere mention of the Little Commandery Prince of Lin'an turned his face pale, and he would give even the street the residence stood on a wide berth.

Which just went to show the sheer breadth of the shadow the Little Commandery Prince of Lin'an had cast.

And if he was this bad, the "Zhao Baiyu" of the original had feared the young Commandery Prince even more. After being forced to marry into the residence, he turned villain on the spot, making it his life's mission to kill Zhao Yuzheng, courting his own destruction at every turn, until he met a wretched death at twenty-six, in the very flower of his youth.

The pitiful part was that when his schemes came to light, everyone wore the same look—See? He's finally shown his ugly true colors—and all the humble goodwill he'd once shown was recast as ulterior motive.

More absurd still, the whole truth wasn't revealed until the grand finale: Grand Princess Changping had planned all along—no matter whether it cost Lady Xie both her own life and her unborn child's—to take a labor-inducing drug, deliver her own baby early, and swap it for Lady Xie's.

In other words, Zhao Yuzheng was the one who was Grand Princess Changping's child, while he, Zhao Baiyu, was the one Lady Xie had borne: the true fifth son of the Zhao family!

The nineteen years Zhao Yuzheng had spent basking as the moon among stars had, by rights, belonged to Zhao Baiyu.

And when the doting novel's ending laid the truth bare, no one blamed Zhao Yuzheng—instead, he was rewarded with a princess mother who cherished him like a precious pearl.

Zhao Baiyu: "......"

He wanted to go get reincarnated. Nobody try to stop him.

As things stood, even though a new soul now occupied "Zhao Baiyu," the plot hadn't budged an inch. What he had smugly taken for simple kindness toward others looked, from another angle, exactly like the original "Zhao Baiyu" endlessly currying favor with the Zhaos. What he thought of as living positively, others read as two-faced treachery masking a hidden agenda. And in the end he was still married off in another's place, still packed into the Commandery Prince's Residence by the combined effort of everyone who doted on Zhao Yuzheng.

Even if he kept his head down from here on and stopped courting death, the sheer force of the plot would likely drive him to self-destruct anyway, to offend Zhao Yuzheng against his will—and once he'd amassed enough enmity, he'd die miserable and alone in the prime of his life.

Zhao Baiyu's gaze went unfocused, his will to live guttering low. If he was going to die regardless, then how he died—and how recklessly he courted it—had damn well better be his call.

Dead coming and going, so who cared—just lie flat and go kick the bucket while the iron was hot.

The door creaked open, and a fair, delicate-featured attendant of about fifteen came in; the instant he saw Zhao Baiyu's eyes open, he cried out in delight, "You're awake! Nanny Xiu, Fourth Young Master's awake!"

"Heaven be praised nothing serious came of it." A kindly-faced old matron of forty or fifty came in bearing a steaming porcelain bowl. "Fourth Young Master, drink your medicine while it's hot."

Zhao Baiyu rolled over and buried his face against the nanny's knee. "My head doesn't hurt anymore. Do I have to drink it?"

Nanny Xiu tenderly brushed the loose strands of hair from his cheek, unmoved by his wheedling, and said with a heart of stone, "No. The physician says your head took a blow, and he's afraid there's clotted blood inside—you'll drink the medicine to head off any lasting harm." Then she sighed. "You've no idea the state you were in when they carried you back, blood all over your head and face. Yanbing and I were afraid you'd never wake, and your Uncle Wei very nearly went to fight the master to the death."

Uncle Wei was a trained fighter, but one man was no match for the several hundred shadow guards the Zhao Residence kept.

"Nothing happened to him, did it?"

"Luckily we stopped him in time." Yanbing crouched by the bed. "Uncle Wei's standing guard at the courtyard gate, keeping those heartless brutes out."

He was seething. "You wouldn't believe it—this morning Fifth Young Master Zhao came sweeping into our courtyard with a whole horde of servants and an armful of tonics, saying he'd come to look in on you. He even claimed he'd had no idea the young Commandery Prince had set his sights on you all along—otherwise, he said, he'd never have offended the Prince and handed him such leverage. So it turns out the whole household kept this pampered little golden boy in the dark, never telling him the truth behind the marriage decree, while everyone forced you to brave the dragon's pool and tiger's den in his place—and the man at the center of it knew nothing! Not a shred of guilt, not a care in the world! How could they be so utterly heartless? Is Fifth Young Master Zhao some precious treasure, and you nothing but scrap metal?"

Zhao Baiyu drank the medicine, bitterness spreading from the tip of his tongue all the way down his throat.

"Yanbing, that's enough!" Nanny Xiu tucked a candied fruit into Zhao Baiyu's mouth, her eyes brimming with tenderness. "Fourth Young Master—run away."

Zhao Baiyu lowered his eyelids. "There's no running from this."

He didn't want to run, either.

In a story where the villainous supporting character was fated to die no matter how hard he schemed, better to lie flat and enjoy what little time he had left.

"Is it because of us?" Nanny Xiu asked, her face full of quiet understanding.

She had watched Zhao Baiyu grow up and knew his heart was softer than anyone's. Others all said like mother, like son; they called him honey-tongued and dagger-hearted, certain he must burn with envy and hatred for Fifth Young Master Zhao, who was a world apart from him—yet Nanny Xiu didn't believe a single word of it.

She would admit that, until Zhao Baiyu was three or four, Grand Princess Changping's cruelty had prejudiced her, and like any ordinary soul she'd looked on coldly while the child struggled to survive in that frigid inner household. But it was Zhao Baiyu who, when she lay gravely ill with a chill and near death, had spent every last coin of the silver he'd secretly scraped together, worn the soles of his feet bloody running to the apothecary in person to fetch a physician for her, filling her prescriptions and brewing her medicine with his own hands. After that, how could anyone harden their heart against him?

"If it comes to it, we'll beat the Petition Drum and lay our grievance before the throne—I'll dash my own head open against the stone lion at the gate of the Capital Prefecture's yamen before I'll believe Chancellor Zhao can blot out the whole sky with one hand," Yanbing said in earnest. "Fourth Young Master, don't let the Zhaos hold us over you as a threat. We're not worth it."

He was three years younger than Zhao Baiyu. At seven, a failed escape had nearly gotten him beaten to death by the slavers who'd seized him—until Zhao Baiyu saved him, kept him at his side, and raised him with all the care of a true younger brother, even teaching him to read and write.

In all the world, save his own birth parents, no one mattered to him more than Zhao Baiyu.

If he could, Yanbing would gladly have killed Zhao Yuzheng to avenge him.

Zhao Baiyu narrowed his eyes into a smile. "It's not that dire. I have a way out."

Nanny Xiu looked skeptical. "Truly?"

Zhao Baiyu: "When have I ever lied to you?"

He never had, in fact.

Nanny Xiu and Yanbing exchanged a glance, both far from reassured.

"The young Commandery Prince won't be easy to manage. It's Fifth Young Master Zhao he wants—whether he means to torment him or fell for him at first sight, the moment you marry in his place it becomes deceit and betrayal in his eyes. I fear the whole of his fury will land on you."

Zhao Baiyu: "The young Commandery Prince won't harm me."

He had only glimpsed the fragment where "Zhao Baiyu" married into the residence; the rest was all spoilers from the nurse. She'd said the story's greatest villain was the Little Commandery Prince of Lin'an—the one and only character in the whole book who worked diligently at real intrigue. Had he not vanished without a trace at the very end, the Crown Prince would likely never have taken the throne at all. And since the young Commandery Prince was written as the villain, his petitioning the Emperor for a decree to wed Fifth Young Master Zhao naturally had to serve some hidden purpose.

The bait-and-switch—the plum tree withering in place of the peach—seemed to have fallen well within the young Commandery Prince's expectations. Though he had used it to raise a public outcry, he hadn't turned any of it against the Zhao Baiyu inside the residence, most likely because he couldn't be bothered with so insignificant a nobody.

As for the young Commandery Prince himself: his birth mother had died young—in childbirth, it was said—and at ten he had killed a half-brother with his own hands, giving rise to his reputation for savagery. That was why Zhao Yuzheng's insult—that he had "jinxed his own mother to death and butchered his own brothers"—had struck such a nerve.

The young Commandery Prince was cruel and unrestrained, and yet a born military genius.

At twelve he first marched to war; at fifteen he crushed the Tujue, seizing ten cities one after another and making his name known across the realm in a single stroke, whereupon he was granted the junior-fourth-rank title of General of Illustrious Might. At eighteen he took the field as commander-in-chief against Great Xia, captured the enemy's supreme general alive, and returned to court in triumph, decorated with a senior military merit honor. At twenty-one he was ambushed and trapped in the Southern Frontier, where he fought with his back to the river and, badly outnumbered, still carried the day; he returned victorious, then laid down his armor and surrendered his command.

Because he always fought behind a fanged iron mask, and because some swore they had seen with their own eyes the venomous sores erupting across his face, rumor held that he was hideous, earning him the nickname the Asura General.

After surrendering his command, he was enfeoffed as General of Cloud Banners and decorated with a military merit honor—a title of rank but no real power—and then, by unprecedented exception, created Prince of Lin'an, granted Lin'an Prefecture as his fief and permitted to establish his own princely household in the Capital.

Powerless in office though he was, his prestige within the army ran so deep that even five years off the battlefield he could rally a hundred men with a single shout. Yet the young Commandery Prince answered to Emperor Yuanshou alone and never formed factions for private gain, and so was deeply trusted.

This was precisely why Emperor Yuanshou had granted the young Commandery Prince's outrageous request for a marriage decree: first, out of genuine regard for him; second, to steady his people's hearts—and by it to overawe the restless designs now stirring among his court ministers.

A further aim was to strike a balance between the various princes and the Chancellor; but the deeper tangle of it all, Zhao Baiyu could not yet quite make out.

The Zhao family prized Zhao Yuzheng, so Emperor Yuanshou would not press them too hard; the maneuverings of the princes below were all within his reckoning, and the young Commandery Prince, having been made a fool of, would be compensated in turn.

Everyone on this chessboard got the outcome they wanted.

Only Zhao Baiyu was sacrificed, innocent—but who would care?

He was nothing more than an unwelcome mistake of an existence.

"How long was I out?"

"Two days."

Zhao Baiyu's heart gave a lurch. "Did someone send word to the office that I'd be on leave?"

Yanbing: "I went and requested leave for you myself. They said all the right things, but the paperwork came just the same, piled up like a little mountain—every last trivial, chicken-feather-and-garlic-skin matter still had to pass through your hands. Do they even remember your head was cracked open and you were lying there unconscious? You're only a Vice Prefect—there's the Acting Prefect and the Prefect above you, and a whole crew of clerks below, yet somehow the moment you're gone the entire office grinds to a halt!"

Three years ago, Zhao Baiyu had meant to sit the imperial examinations, only for his intent to spark a whim in Zhao Yuzheng to sit them as well. But Zhao Yuzheng's constitution could never have withstood the punishing pressure of the exams, so to snuff out the notion the Zhao family strong-armed Zhao Baiyu into abandoning the attempt—then, by way of compensation, recommended him for a junior-sixth-rank post as a Vice Commissioner in the Capital Prefecture.

Ever since the founding of the Great Jing, the dynasty had drawn talent broadly through the examination system, supplemented by a recommendation system whereby a high-ranking official could sponsor another's appointment or promotion. Zhao Boyong had used one such recommendation slot to install Zhao Baiyu in a minor post—but in doing so he also made Zhao Baiyu the only son of the Zhao house to gain office through an elder's patronage rather than genuine merit, heaping frost upon snow for a name already beyond saving.

About two years ago, Zhao Baiyu had taken on an ordinary homicide case that grew thorny where cold law collided with human feeling and statute clashed with the question of clemency. In the end it was Zhao Baiyu who combed through every legal code and laid his findings before his superior, the Acting Prefect, allowing the case to be brought to a satisfactory close—for which, a year ago, the Acting Prefect recommended him for promotion to Vice Prefect of the Capital Prefecture.

Though still junior sixth rank, and scarcely different in function from a Vice Commissioner, the post carried far more latitude and flexible authority: he could step in to take over the Acting Prefect's duties on a temporary basis, ranking on par with the Acting Prefect himself. And should another official be assigned to serve as Vice Prefect for a time, the sitting Vice Prefect would step back down to Vice Commissioner—a genuinely powerful and endlessly adaptable position.

Yanbing grumbled on without pause.

Zhao Baiyu said with a smile, "With the Spring Examination upon us, the prefecture's affairs are bound to pile up—" Wait. "Has the Spring Examination already begun?"

"It opened today."

Zhao Baiyu recalled that, by the nurse's account, the very first scheme in the original novel had been an examination-fraud scandal. The Crown Prince was implicated in it, only to be spared by the sheer dumb luck of the protagonist Zhao Yuzheng—not merely cleared of all charges, but able to deal a crippling blow to the rival camp, the faction of Prince Qin.

But the examination-fraud case was a boon only to Zhao Yuzheng and the Crown Prince's party; to everyone else it was a catastrophe of blood and slaughter.

Emperor Yuanshou would seize on it to unleash a great inquisition, executing several hundred, until even the remonstrance officials fell silent as frozen cicadas, not daring to breathe a word.

An examination-fraud scandal, a sweeping inquisition—what a splendid chance to get himself killed!

Yanbing looked puzzled. "Fourth Young Master, what have you got to be so happy about?"

"Yanbing, from now on you should call me Fifth Young Master—don't go handing people something to hold against us." Zhao Baiyu smiled, eyes crinkling. "I mean to draw up a plan, and check it off my bucket list one item at a time."

He was going to die anyway—better that he be the one to decide how.

And if die he must, then he'd go out in a blaze of glory.

In his past life he'd always envied those deathbed bucket lists in the movies—how he'd longed, before dying, to cut loose, to court disaster with everything he had, and then throw up his middle finger at Heaven and roar: Screw you, old man!

And then, amid roaring laughter, to close his eyes without a single regret.

"What plan?"

Zhao Baiyu only smiled and said nothing.

The plan had a name: Operation Seek Death.

— Author's note —

Our little one has had a bit of a self-destructive streak going for a while now, y'know.