Soft morning light filtered through the frosted glass.
Xianlan sat at the table in the center of her room.
By her hand lay a small jade ring, quietly returned via an anonymous servant.
"This ring disappeared after my mother was accused…"
"But the chipped corner at the base—that's something I remember clearly."
She turned it over slowly.
Inside the groove of the ring was a faint, nearly invisible red thread—
the kind Consort Yifei once used to hang it from her fan.
"If this ring has found its way back… then someone who once stood beside Mother… must still be alive."
⸻
That night, Xianlan snuck into the old archive hall,
a place long abandoned.
Beneath the floor tiles of the final chamber,
was a hidden drawer mentioned in her mother's journal.
Click…
She pulled away a wooden plank and discovered dust-stained paper,
the hurried handwriting bearing a single signature: 'Yan.'
⸻
Suddenly, she heard the faint sound of footsteps outside.
Xianlan quickly hid the evidence and extinguished the lamp,
slipping behind a wooden screen.
Then came a whisper.
"Princess… I'm not here to harm you."
"I… was the one who sent you the ring."
The voice was familiar.
As Xianlan slowly emerged,
she saw the speaker's face: Liu Meirong—
her mother's trusted maid, who had vanished eight years ago.
⸻
Elsewhere in the palace,
Jiang Xinluo walked back from the Noble Consort's residence.
In her hand was an old tea cloth, discreetly taken from the servants' quarters.
"If this cloth matches the one found near the document fire…"
"I'll know exactly who planted the false evidence against Xianlan."
⸻
That night,
Jiang Xinluo did not send a report back to Jianrong.
Instead, she wrote a new letter—addressed to someone outside the palace.
She signed it with an alias and closed with this message:
"If any more intelligence leaks into the inner palace without passing through me,
I will assume my homeland no longer seeks the truth."
For the first time,
she set her own conditions against those who once controlled her.
Because deep within her,
she was beginning to believe—
that perhaps the one framed in this game had never been guilty at all.
⸻
The next day at the Crown Prince's residence—
Feng Yuhan sat reading a spy report.
One name caught his eye, and he read it twice:
"Liu Meirong."
"She vanished for over half a decade… yet now she reappears at the old archive with a jade ring in hand."
"Who… is sending people back to her now?"
⸻
Wen Yichen entered quietly and spoke in a low tone.
"You've started to feel something for her… haven't you?"
Feng Yuhan didn't respond.
He simply raised his fan to cover his mouth, then murmured:
"I've never let anyone overlook the silence I wield…"
"But she… hears my silence as if it were a voice calling her to play her hand."
⸻
That evening,
Xianlan sat in a soundproof chamber, speaking with Liu Meirong.
The older woman explained how, after Consort Yifei was unjustly imprisoned,
she tried to smuggle out messages—
but palace servants silenced her, hiding her away in a false tomb.
"Until recently… someone came, dressed in the seal of the Crown Prince,"
"and quietly released me—returning this jade ring to your hand."
Xianlan's eyes widened.
The answer no longer pointed to any enemy—
but toward someone she had never expected to help her at all.
"Feng Yuhan…"
"Why… did you do this?"