The first time I stepped into the imperial palace was three days after my engagement was broken off.
That day, I cut my hair, discarded my name, and put on the new blue robe made for palace servants. Standing in the shadows beneath the palace walls, I watched a group of real eunuchs walk past, carrying basins of blood.
"Girls like you—it’s normal to have a hard life." The matron who brought me in patted my shoulder, her tone somewhere between consolation and a eulogy.
I didn’t cry.
I spent the night learning how to lower my voice, how to walk without swaying my chest, how to laugh before suspicion could take root.
I turned myself into a person without gender.
What I didn’t expect was that this life-or-death masquerade would lead me straight into the Crown Prince’s gaze.
And the Crown Prince—he knew I was lying from the very beginning.
That night, I was assigned to the Imperial Kitchen Directorate, given the lowest tasks: washing vegetables, peeling roots, picking out worms.
The fires burned hot beneath the stoves, yet I shivered from cold. The nights were frigid, my underrobe damp—sweat and soot clinging to my skin like a sheet of thin ice.
Someone kicked me.
"Hey, new one! Move faster. What, you think you’re some nobleman’s daughter?"
I bowed my head and apologized, my voice rough as torn cloth.
No one knew—I was a nobleman’s daughter.
Just the kind that had been thrown away.
On my third day in the palace, I met him in the storage room.
He wore brocade robes but had no guards—just walked into the kitchens alone. No one recognized him, assuming he was some supervisor’s bastard.
Only I saw the golden-threaded clouds embroidered on his sleeves: the Crown Prince’s personal insignia.
I dropped to my knees too fast, my forehead hitting the stone floor with a thud that stunned the servants around me.
He only looked down and laughed. "You know who I am?"
"This lowly one deserves death," I whispered, not daring to lift my head.
Instead of letting me rise, he crouched, fingers brushing aside the hair on my forehead—his gaze sharp as a blade.
"You shouldn’t have come here," he said. "This place devours people without spitting out the bones."
"But since you’re here—" His thumb slid down, tracing behind my ear before stopping at a mole on my neck.
"—don’t disappoint me."
I froze.
That mole—it was the one thing I never let anyone see. The last trace of the woman I used to be.
How did he know?
No. He couldn’t know. It was just a coincidence.
I forced myself to stay calm, kneeling on the cold ground until his footsteps faded before I dared to look up.
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
Because I understood one thing:
The Crown Prince… was interested in me.
Not in a petty eunuch.
But in—a fake one.
ns13.58.212.163da2
and then Add to home screen.