I. The Late-Night Visitor
"The Princess Consort of Qi?"
Zhang Xin put down the military logistics report he had been auditing, rubbing his temples as he looked up at his giant bodyguard. His brow furrowed in genuine confusion.
What on earth is she doing here in the middle of the night?
His first, instinctive thought was that she had come to beg for her husband's life, hoping to secure the release of King Liu Cheng of Qi. But the terrifying spectacle he had orchestrated within the royal palace during the day should have been more than enough to state his unyielding stance. He had broken the King's pride and thrown him into a hole like an animal. There was no negotiating, no turning back.
No, it's absolutely impossible, Zhang Xin reasoned, shaking his head. Judging by how sharply she had read the political situation earlier, the Queen Consort was no fool; she knew exactly what kind of man she was dealing with. She had to know a simple tearful plea would accomplish nothing.
Then what was her true angle?
Zhang Xin couldn't fathom it. Yet, regardless of her husband's current disgrace, she remained a high-born royal peer. For her to visit his temporary quarters meant that, both out of aristocratic courtesy and fundamental political principle, he could not simply bar the door against her.
"Let her in," Zhang Xin commanded.
"Understood."
Dian Wei bowed his massive frame and stepped out. A few moments later, the heavy felt curtains were parted, and he escorted the lady into the candlelit room.
The moment she crossed the threshold, Zhang Xin's eyes widened slightly, a silent curse echoing in his mind: Holy crap.
Tonight, the Queen Consort had completely shed the formal, heavy royal vestments she had worn during the day. She was arrayed in a meticulously tailored, flowing silk gown that accentuated every curve of her figure. Her features were painted with breathtaking precision; it was clear she had spent hours preparing her appearance for this exact hour.
As a high-born woman who had been pampered with the finest oils, silks, and delicacies since youth, her skin was flawless. During the day, beneath the shadow of her heavy crown, she had looked to be in her late twenties—roughly the same age bracket as Zhang Xin himself. But now, under the strategic placement of cosmetic powder and the soft glow of the oil lamps, she looked even more radiant.
She possessed a masterful grasp of style. Her look was charming without being vulgar, pure without being frigid. Coupled with the innate, effortless elegance born of her noble bloodline... she was the absolute epitome of pure, dangerous desire.
What virtue or cosmic luck did that pathetic creature Liu Cheng possess to inherit a woman like this as his wife? Zhang Xin wondered in his heart.
However, after campaigning across the length and breadth of the empire for so many years, what kind of legendary beauty had he not witnessed? Leaving the rest of the world aside, he had a woman waiting for him back home in Pingyuan who was naturally alluring enough to topple kingdoms.
Thinking of his home, a sudden pang of longing hit him. Damn it, I miss my wife.
The flash of raw amazement in Zhang Xin's eyes lasted for only a fraction of a second before his iron discipline reasserted control. His expression flattened back into a mask of polite, official neutrality. He rose from his desk and offered a measured, proper bow. "This humble minister greets Your Highness."
Instead of returning the greeting with a noble nod, the Queen Consort stepped forward and, with a soft plop, fell directly to her knees upon the cold floorboards before his desk. Her beautiful eyes instantly brimmed with unshed tears, her shoulders trembling with a fragile, heartbreaking grace.
Zhang Xin was genuinely startled, stepping back a half-pace. "What is the meaning of this, Your Highness?"
The lady remained entirely silent, letting small, pearl-like tears trace silent paths down her cheeks.
Zhang Xin lowered his gaze, only to realize that from his standing position, the low drape of her loosened collar—pulled forward by gravity as she knelt—offered an completely unobstructed view of her porcelain chest.
So white... No, wait, if memory serves, my Xiao Bai's are definitely larger.
Amused by his own internal commentary, Zhang Xin instinctively reached his hand out to help her rise. But mid-motion, his battle-hardened reflexes flared. His hand froze in mid-air. He cut his eyes sharply toward Dian Wei, who stood like a statue by the door.
Did you search her? the Governor's eyes demanded.
Dian Wei caught the silent query instantly and offered a slight, almost imperceptible shake of his massive head.
She's a consecrated royal princess, Boss. How could I dare put my rough paws on her body?
Zhang Xin smoothly withdrew his half-extended hand, concealing the movement by tucking his fingers into his wide sleeves as he took another half-step back, maintaining a rigid, formal distance. He spoke with cold, unyielding respect. "Your Highness, if you have a petition, please speak frankly. I am a minister of the province, and Your Highness is a sovereign peer of the realm. I cannot legally or morally accept such a grand submission from your royal person."
Something was deeply wrong here.
In the dead of winter, long past the midnight bell, instead of sleeping securely within her heavily guarded royal chambers, the Queen Consort of Qi had applied seductive makeup, donned her most alluring silks, and slipped into a warlord's private inn. Zhang Xin could deduce her intentions with his eyes closed: she was attempting to deploy her physical beauty as a weapon to ensnare him.
But to what end?
There were only two logical calculations behind such a dangerous gambit. Either she had come to assassinate the tyrant who had destroyed her house, or she intended to offer her own flesh as a desperate bargaining chip to purchase survival and privilege from the conqueror.
During the twilight of the Han Dynasty, the bloody, uncompromising customs of the ancient Spring and Autumn Period were still very much alive; high-stakes political assassinations were a regular currency of statecraft. One only had to look back to Zhang Xin's first arrival in Pingyuan, where the elite assassin Tao Qiuhong had nearly taken his head.
No matter how politically castrated the feudal lords had become relative to the absolute authority of provincial governors, imperial inspectors, and Chancellors, to the common world and the lower military ranks, they remained demigods sitting high above the clouds.
Zhang Xin might view the title of the King of Qi as a joke, but a common soldier like Dian Wei still carried the cultural weight of imperial reverence; he naturally wouldn't have dared to subject a royal princess to a invasive physical strip-search. Yet only hours ago, Zhang Xin had brutally beaten and locked away her husband. If this woman had concealed a slender bronze dagger beneath her silk robes and used the pretense of seduction to slip past his guard, the entire province of Qingzhou would plunge into absolute anarchy before the dawn.
II. The Status of a Commoner
"Zhang Qingzhou..." the lady began, her voice a soft, melodic wail that could melt stone. "There is no royal Highness standing before you within these walls tonight. There is only a wretched, common woman named Jiang Cai."
Jiang Cai? Is that her birth name? Quite an elegant ring to it...
Zhang Xin's strategic mind raced through a hundred possibilities, but his spoken tone remained entirely flat and professional. "My lady, I must urge you to speak with absolute clarity. If word escapes these walls that a provincial governor and a royal consort were sequestered alone in a private chamber at this hour of the night, the damage to our respective reputations will be absolute."
Hearing his rigid refusal to play along, Jiang Cai flicked her tear-filled eyes toward Dian Wei. The meaning behind her gaze was unmistakable.
Tell your guard to leave the room.
Oh? She wants the giant out of the way? Could she truly be carrying a blade?
Zhang Xin took another deliberate step backward, his internal combat readiness instantly hitting its absolute peak. His hand subtly drifted closer to the hidden hilt of his concealed dagger, his tone dropping into a freezing register. "Is Your Highness here with the explicit intent to tarnish my political standing? If you refuse to state your business within the next breath, I will have my guards violently escort you from the premises!"
A flicker of genuine panic and hesitation flashed across Jiang Cai's refined face. She took a deep, shuddering breath, her chest heaving as she forced herself to look directly into his cold, unyielding eyes.
"From this moment forth, Governor... I beg of you to never address me by that royal title again."
Jiang Cai clenched her small fists against her knees. "Before I walked through the outer gates of the royal palace tonight, I formally executed the legal decrees to sever all marital, familial, and political ties with Liu Cheng. I am no longer the Queen Consort of Qi."
Zhang Xin froze, his analytical mind completely derailing for three consecutive seconds.
What?
The King of Qi... just got divorced by his wife? While sitting in a cold dark hole?
III. The Architecture of Han Divorce
Reflecting upon her initial words, Zhang Xin realized that Jiang Cai had indeed introduced herself using her maiden name and claimed the status of a commoner.
In the legal jurisprudence of the Han Dynasty, the dissolution of a marriage was a highly structured, rigid affair, categorized into four distinct legal mechanisms: Outing (Direct Expulsion), Amicable Separation, Judicial Divorce, and the Severance of Righteousness.
The most ubiquitous method known to the common folk was Outing—a process entirely initiated by the husband to cast the woman out of his household. However, an aristocratic wife could not be discarded on a whim. By imperial law, a husband could only execute an expulsion if the woman had flagranly violated one of the Seven Grounds:
Absolute disrespect toward her parents-in-law.
Failure to produce a male heir by the age of fifty.
Exhibiting toxic, disruptive jealousy within the household.
Engaging in malicious, divisive gossip.
Committing acts of physical infidelity.
Suffering from a disruptive, incurable pestilence.
Theft or misappropriation of the husband's ancestral estate.
Yet, even if a woman was found guilty of one of these offenses, the Han code provided an ironclad shield known as the Three Protections Against Expulsion. A husband was legally forbidden from casting his wife out if:
She had no surviving maternal family or home to return to, rendering her destitute.
She had stood by his side during his years of poverty, and he had subsequently achieved wealth and rank after the marriage.
She had dutifully observed the full three-year mourning period for her deceased parents-in-law.
Because of these profound legal constraints, marriage within the empire had always been defined by a singular cultural truth: Easy to enter, but terrifyingly strict to escape.
Aside from direct expulsion, Amicable Separation was an option initiated by the woman. It carried no rigid legal penalties or moral stigmas; as long as the husband signed the formal release papers, the bond was severed—a process strikingly similar to the filing of a mutual divorce in later centuries.
Judicial Divorce occurred when a couple could no longer endure cohabitation, but their grievances failed to meet the strict parameters of the Seven Grounds. In such deadlocks, they were forced to file a formal lawsuit within the provincial commandery courts, begging a local magistrate to sever the bond—a path famously walked by the legendary poetess Li Qingzhao in later dynasties.
But the final mechanism—the Severance of Righteousness—was entirely unique, and it was precisely the lever Jiang Cai had pulled.
Under imperial law, if one spouse committed an act of gross ethical, moral, or criminal transgression that threatened the fabric of the state or the ancestral line, the innocent spouse possessed the absolute legal right to unilaterally force an immediate, total severance of the marriage, completely insulating themselves from the criminal's impending fallout.
And within the borders of the Han Dynasty, if active, armed treason against the provincial administration wasn't considered the ultimate "gross ethical and criminal transgression," then the term had no meaning.
Zhang Xin stared down at the kneeling woman, a profound sense of shock rippling through his mind.
Jiang Cai's decisiveness was nothing short of terrifying. The title of Queen Consort of Qi—a position of immense, generational prestige that thousands of noble daughters across the empire would gladly trade their souls to possess—had been casually discarded by this woman like a piece of waste paper, long before a formal imperial verdict had even been handed down against her husband.
She would rather strip herself of her royal rank and declare herself a commoner tonight, all to cleanly sever her fate from Liu Cheng before the executioner's axe falls on his neck, Zhang Xin thought, his gaze intensifying as he analyzed her submissive posture.
This woman... is absolutely not simple.