Refusing to Serve Me? Then Off With Your Head!

Chapter 47

A Virtuous Empress?

The concubines in the palace seemed to had their own unique (must never be known) housekeeping skills. Consort De liked to punish her people by pricking them with hairpins while Consort Yu liked using whips. Zhen Pin liked stubbing burning incense on the skin of her maids. Nobody would raise question even if she did it in the most obvious places.

When I first became the empress, my head hurt by the large number of murders committed in the back palace. The empress dowager was compassionate and lenient; those concubines had lived under her rule for so long, it was only natural that some of them could not adapt to me being in power. Because of that, I sent them to Yi Ning Palace to learn about virtue and Buddhism from the empress dowager in hopes that they would stop become delinquents.

The empress dowager was probably taken aback by my move. I heard, before those concubines were accepted, the empress dowager smashed the newly replaced vases in her Yi Ning Palace. In the end, those concubines had to kneel for a long time while studying, their first lesson was learning about benevolence and meditation.

The empress dowager's prayer hall was overcrowded. Because of that, the empress dowager invited the emperor over to request permission to rebuild the prayer hall. The emperor rejected her suggestion because the kingdom's treasury was empty.

In the end, the empress dowager became ill.

After His Majesty returned from Yi Ning Palace, he poked fun of my method of re-organizing the harem. He was laughing now, but if he found out that I had told those concubines that those who studied well and became benevolent would get His Majesty's favor soon, would he still be laughing like this?

There was a saying that if you did not want a donkey to dawdle without wasting resources, you could just dangle a radish in front of the donkey's nose. In this case, the radish was His Majesty.

Amitabha, chenqie was wrong!

E Huang admonished me from the sideline, "Your Ladyship, you have good intentions and is very lenient, but those consorts may not understand your good-will."

En... Even in battlefields, people would use soft-measures first before resorting to violence. I was only being light-handed for now.

Ten days later, another maid was murdered in Consort De's Palace. The female officials that His Majesty hired were really quick and efficient. After I received the news, I brought imperial guards with me and blocked people from hap-hazardly burying the victim. Then, I ordered them to place the dead body in the entrance of Consort De's palace.

Consort De swept her eyes over the crowd, probably looking for her so-called 'biaoge'. When she realized that he wasn't around, she stepped forward bitterly before paying her respect.

In my opinion, the situation in the harem where the women outnumbered the men may not be a good thing. There were so many women eyeing your husband like tigress, waiting for their share. That feeling was not good. I invited the rest of the concubines to come over and allowed the dead body to be examined. I accused Consort De of being indifferent to death and punished her for it.

On the next day, I summoned the concubines to the palace's cuju field. They were dressed to the nines, wearing riding gears. With E Huang as my voice, they walked elegantly to the cuju field, dust and dirt rising to the air.

The autumn air of the 9th month was really comfortable, it was just the right time for me to feast on the views. I would find time to enjoy the scenery once every day.

When those concubines arrived, they were looking exquisite and pretty, but after running around the field for two laps, they were all drenched in sweat and their makeups were all ruined. What was even more unfortunate was the emperor was getting off from the morning court and decided to pick me up so we could return to Zhong Hua Palace together. In the end, he was shocked when he saw what was becoming of his concubines. He looked at them with bulged eyes and gaped mouth. He probably did not expect that I was destructive enough to ruin the exquisite people in his harem.