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“Welcome back,Gege.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The following week, Empress Wu halted the production of life gold.

While the palace servants were busy fishing bodies from the ponds, the new guards took shifts keeping the nobles from tearing the walls down. Magistrates from the nearby provinces joined the uproar by nightfall, and surely those from the south would come once word reached them. Almost all of them scattered when the Empress took her favorite pet lion on a stroll a bit too close to the front gates—if there was one thing that the rich hated more than aging, it was risking their lives.

The royal court was in quiet hysterics, no one wanting to offend the Empress and end up with their head in a bucket, but her advisers had red-rimmed eyes and bald spots where they’d tugged their thin hair out.

“Your Highness,” one of them said, pacing back and forth while the Empress ate her third bowl of soup, “your people are...unsettled.”

“You meanthe richare unsettled,” she said, waving her spoon at the man, as if she could cast a spell and make him disappear. “I bet the farmers and merchants couldn’t care less. I need more soup.”

A servant hurried away to fulfill the order while the adviser clenched his jaw so hard that he almost definitely shattered some of his gold teeth. I sat at the far end of the table beside the prince, gnawing on a cucumber.

“There will be uprisings,” the adviser said.

The prince scoffed. “The rich are afraid to even leave their homes in case they scratch their perfect skin,” he said. “For all we pay the royal guards, are you saying they can’t handle them?”

“Well, no,” the adviser said, “but the morale of the people—”

“Which people?” the prince said, his glare silencing the adviser.

“Oh, that reminds me,” the Empress said, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. “Morale in the south is low. Tomorrow, I’m lowering the imperial tax back down to five percent and sending rice to all families in the southern provinces until harvest season.”

The adviser dropped his scroll, barely even reacting when it hit his foot with a heavythunk.

“Your Highness,” he said, voice trembling, “the cost—”

“Demolish one of the guesthouses or rhino farms and sell it for parts or something,” the Empress said, turning to the servant carrying her new bowl of soup. “I have no more alchemists to pay and cellars full of gold. Rip off some of this gold wallpaper if you have to. It’s hideous.”

“Your Highness, it’s not that simple,” the adviser said, closing his eyes. “I’m not sure what’s caused your sudden...benevolence, and I can appreciate your sympathy for our country’s poor. Truly, you are a kind and gracious ruler. But this childlike idealism simply won’t work. There are important people you need to please if you want to stay in power. You will have to make compromises.”

“Compromises?” I said, crossing my arms. All eyes turned to me, except for the Empress, who continued eating. “Compromises like drinking the blood of peasants to make more life gold?”

“Cutting off production entirely is jarring,” the adviser said. “Perhaps a slower process—”

“So, only drinking a little bit of peasant blood?” I said.

The adviser frowned, turning to the prince. “I’m sorry, why is your concubine part of this meeting?”

“She’s not myconcubine,” Wenshu said, making a sour face. “She’s the head alchemist.”

“Theonlyalchemist,” Yufei added through a mouthful of rice. “She’s more valuable to me than you, who can be replaced easily.”

The adviser shook his head. “You must be willing to compromise—”

“We can compromise on tonight’s dinner menu,” I said. “We can compromise on the color of silk used for the Empress’s dresses. We don’t compromise on scamming the poor out of their corpses.”

“What Zilan said,” Yufei said, waving her spoon in my direction. “Just pretend I said it.”

The things you want are nothing more than foolish childhood dreams, the Moon Alchemist had once told me. I hoped, more than anything, that she was wrong. I hoped that growing old didn’t mean growing complacent with other people’s suffering, like the adviser Yufei had dismissed, who I could hear letting out an anguished scream in the hallway.

The good news was that Yufei adored pretending to be the Empress. She’d learned too quickly that she could quite literally have any food in the world prepared for her within an hour. She spent her mornings solving the city’s problems with alarming but efficient bluntness, her afternoons floating in one of the palace’s many pools, and her evenings arranging for Auntie and Uncle to move in.

Wenshu handled the more practical matters. He’d arranged a funeral with a fake corpse for the Emperor, since we had no idea where the body had gone, as well as a funeral for the alchemists. He’d hired new servants and guards and had the palace interior repaired and the exterior fortified so the rich couldn’t burn it down. He drafted all the legislation that Yufei enacted.

And I did...nothing.