Sweet Romance14 min read
My Lucky System, My Dangerous Palace
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I woke to cold water and a raw sting behind my eyes. I fought the pull down, lungs burning, and spat until the taste of river mud filled the air. When my head cleared there was a pale rectangle floating just above the rocks, half translucent and blinking slow.
"Loading..." it said in the middle, then a progress bar crawled.
I touched the water from my skirt and the moonlight made the surface glassy. My name in that life felt thin as tissue—someone else's memory stitched poorly to mine. Around me, the old east palace smelled of mildew and old incense.
"Who's there?" a whisper scraped my ankle. I looked down.
Soledad Lombardi—small, sallow, dressed in a servant girl's robe—had latched on to my foot with what might have been hope. Her lips parted. "Please... help—"
"Hold still." I crouched, forehead aching but steady enough to feel my fingers. I checked for breath.
"No breath," I said.
Her hand slipped loose. Moonlight showed bruises, needle marks, a purple darkening at the throat. Poison. Murder. The dead girl knew me before anyone else could have known me. The world narrowed until only the half-screen and its crawling bar mattered.
"Progress: 3%," the box croaked.
"What kind of system seeds me in a pond and hands me a corpse?" I hissed at it.
A force clutched my ankle then, and a tiny voice near my ear gasped, "Army—" then nothing. I saw a ripple of fear and remembered nothing but a title: Anning County's young lady, raised at the Empress's knee. The palace called me a county princess. The rest was fog.
A man stepped out past the fake rocks—tall, quiet, hawk's jaw, moonlight in his eyes. He reached and grabbed me before I hit the stones. When his hand brushed mine he made a show of wiping it.
"You're filthy," he said, and the handkerchief moved like a small wind in his sleeve.
"Give me back my dignity," I wanted to say, but I only said, "Thanks for catching me."
He bowed like the sky had taught him manners and walked away. I watched his retreating back and he seemed ridiculous to be so neat.
"Progress: 10%," the rectangle said.
I did the only reasonable thing. I bashed my head against a pillar hard enough to make sure I would be found. People came with that rush of voices—"A princess!"—and a weight lifted. I let them carry me like a leaf until the palace beds swallowed me.
Days later I learned faces, titles, habits.
"You're awake," the Empress said as she covered me with cool silk. Her voice was soft, but her eyes measured like an accountant. Estefania Ellis wore the crown of duty like a veil. "You look pale, child."
"I feel like I fell out of the moon," I told her. "I don't remember right."
"Memory comes with rest," she said. "We will help."
Soledad told me with small choked words where I had been and who had died—Pure Soledad. I had no right to ask more than that; the Empress had already placed an inquiry in motion. "We will find justice," she promised, but her promise had the quickness of a shape that could bend.
"Progress: 98%," the little box brightened in my head.
It slammed open with a white light and a voice that sounded too small to be useful floated through me. "Dear owner, System 007 at your service. Quick trial task: obtain ten taels of gold to bind the God-of-Wealth module."
"Ten taels?" I echoed. "Is this a joke?"
"Task: obtain golden ten taels quickly."
"Fail and the time tunnel closes forever," the box added.
I stared at my hands—skin still pricked by the dead girl's needles—and felt the system roll its dice inside my skull.
"Okay," I said. "Fine. Try me."
For three days I did exactly nothing. Soledad fussed over my pillow. Kenia Graham, my loyal maid who had been sent from the palace, scolded and then coddled me until I felt like a child. The palace investigations wrapped themselves in silk and called it completed—"a guard acted alone," they said, and set a man in chains for theater. They patched what they wanted patched. I did not sleep.
"Progress: 30%," the system breathed. "Speed matters for extra gifts."
I wanted the extra, but I wanted justice more.
On the fourth day I almost ran into a disaster—a carriage came breathless toward us at the gate and I lunged aside, falling and scraping my palm.
"Princess!" Kenia cried.
A man of calm voice and cold expression climbed down from the carriage. He took one look and said, "Are you injured?" His hand hovered at my shoulder like a raindrop hesitating.
Zane Schwarz had hands that seemed made to refuse dirt. He accused my palm of spoiling his sleeve without saying a word. He was the one who had scolded me before with the handkerchief, the one who moved like he was always avoiding a smudge.
"You're the woman who biffed me last time," he said as if naming me settled a ledger.
"No, I am the woman you tampered coins with," I lied back. It was quicker and funnier.
"Pay me," he said.
"Pay gold, then," I said. "Gold calms scrapes."
His servant—Alric, or "Ake" as he called him—threw some taels at me even before the question left my lips. Ten taels dropped into my lap like a sudden harvest.
"Take it and go," he muttered.
I hugged it to myself like a child. "We did it," I whispered to Kenia. "Ten taels."
"Progress: 99%," the system croaked in satisfaction. A white packet popped into my mind and then something that made me stumble: "Newbie gift: a small potion and... Ah. Consent item loaded."
The packet read absurdly: "Hehuan Powder with Perfumed Oil"—a pairing that made my face feel hot and my stomach cold. Next, a new requirement blinked: "Acquire twenty thousand taels of gold."
"Buy a brothel," the rectangle insisted. "Time: three days."
"Kiss my ribs," I told the system. "You are a scam."
Kenia looked shocked at the next task. "We can't—buy a brothel? But we have how much?"
"We have creativity," I said. "Come."
In three days I learned to bargain and learned faster how to mark up goods. With the ten taels and the pocket silver I could muster, I bought a shivering little shop on a side street—old tailors and foolish men had left it to rot. Five thousand silver, a price steep but possible. I "improved" the place, plied trade, and sold a story to a naive princess—Masterpiece: a crooked sale to the gentle Princess in a tearful scheme earned me silver and, more importantly, connections. The system ticked upward.
"Progress: 45%," it hummed.
People saw me as a daring county princess out in the market. They liked being bold. A hallway of eyes followed me—some warm, some sharp. Someone watched from the corner with interest.
"Jade," said Kenia. "You are reckless."
"I am resourceful," I corrected.
There was another man who lingered in the scenes of my life. Finnegan Lindgren moved like winter—calm, necessary, always two steps from action. He was quiet and steady, and people leaned on him like an old bridge. He looked after a noble lady in pain at the palace: the Grand Princess, Jiang Eileen—no, she called herself Jiang Yu, but she was known as the gentle eldest, battered by a brother's cruelty. She kept a secret that trembled like a candle.
One night in the royal mess, I found Jiang Eileen alone and pale, hair knotted with the marks of lashes.
"Who did this?" I asked.
"Nobody is supposed to know," she whispered. Her voice had been clipped by pain into a thin string. "If I speak, I will be wrapped and hidden."
"Who?" I demanded.
"Her own brother," she said. "Dax Carlson. He says he 'loves' me."
"Progress: 58%," the system noted. There was a green pulse in my mind as though the screen approved my anger.
It took a week of sorting linen and bargaining cloth and dressing old men—the old marquis at my house, Ernesto Contreras—who loved me with a prickly kindness, but would not say it aloud. I learned how to make sugar figures from a street candy-maker and made one for him. I bought jade trinkets, traded favors, played the part of a woman with many needs and very little patience.
I also lived a lie. I had told Empress Estefania I wished to go home to my marquis grandfather to rest and remember childhood. She smiled and gave me leave. The palace gave me a medal of breathing space. "Go," she murmured. "Be yourself."
"Progress: 70%," the system said lazily.
Out of the palace the city smelled of clay and sweat and the real weights of men. I bought a small cloth shop proper, then I bought a brothel—an old one called "Orchid House" on a quiet lane. It was the shock of my life, the building like a lantern that had been minded too many years. Its manager bowed and offered contracts; I counted my silver until it matched and signed in ink that smelled like rain.
"You're mad," Kenia whispered when we opened the door for the first time. "You're really mad."
"Call me audacious," I said. "Now, listen. We will not sell bodies. We will sell crafts and story and art. We will train them to sing, to use blade and verse. They will be artisans who can brave a new life."
The men inside the house were pale and clever and frightened. Lan—he called himself Sebastian Bond—was a quiet man among them with a look like a wolf that had been convinced to smile. He came forward, curious.
"You want to change the house?" he asked.
"We'll change the world," I said. "Begin tomorrow. No selling contracts. No chains. Skill, and freedom to leave when they find their way."
"It will anger people," he warned.
"We will make them want us," I said.
They trained. They learned to fence and to recite, to play stone flute and to invent dances the city had never seen. They became, in less than a season, impossible to forget. The Orchid House filled with men who could fight and sing and charm. I watched them learn, and when the city looked for the old lantern on the lane, they found something new.
"Progress: 90%," announced my box.
Meanwhile, dark things moved quietly in the palace. Grand Princess Jiang Eileen grew stranger—sometimes smiling venom before she smiled light. She had been broken by a tormentor and then touched by a small green system in her skull, an ugly friend promising power: the Revenge System. She smiled at me once at supper and said, "If a machine tells me I can repay the world, shall I bind it?"
"Who told you this?" I asked.
"A little thing, green as ruin," she said. "It wanted to be fed."
I kept my way, sold silk and shaped stories. And the city hummed like a living thing.
Then the hour of reckoning came like a storm.
I had earned the money the system required. It blinked "Complete." Then the new task hid like a cobra: "Find the murderer who killed your girl Soledad. Expose him publicly."
I felt ice. Soledad. The girl who had gripped my ankle in the moonlight and died that night. The palace had set their scapegoat on parade—a low guard whose hands smelled of easy deeds. But my eyes had seen needle marks and poisoned lip, the signs of a hand that wrapped craftily, not the fist of a drunk.
"Who in the court benefits from a maid being disposed?" I asked myself.
"Not many," whispered Kenia. "But second prince Dax Carlson keeps unusual hours."
I had met Dax Carlson once, in the smell of heated rooms—somewhere between a fume of wine and a fume of a sad man's temper. He had looked at a woman as if he would own her, and the look had been a thing like hunger.
I found threads: a needle hidden in the seam of a palace robe, a private perfume bottle with a trace of exotic poison, a message from Dax's servant to a quiet apothecary on the edge of the city. When I pulled, a web came down around Dax; it wrapped with courtly silk.
"Out of the way!" Dax snarled when the first of my accusations reached his ear.
"Why do you do this?" I asked him later, face to face in front of a crowd that had been called to the palace hall under the Emperor's vague curiosity.
"Do you think I would stoop to murder a girl?" he said, white not with fear but with a practiced arrogance. "I am the Emperor's son."
"Then you will explain," I said. "Now."
They assembled: household people, the Empress, the Emperor Lorenzo Said, the ministers—faces like judge's stones—along with the city guards and the small crowd from the market. I carried Soledad's cloth with me—the rag I had taken from her mouth.
At first he laughed, the way monsters laugh when someone reads the fine print of their story.
"Listen to our princess," he said. "She believes herself clever. What has a county princess ever done? She plays with markets and brothels. She thinks she can bind the winds."
"Did you give the poison?" I asked.
"No," he said. "I would never—"
But I had proof.
"Your servant wrote for delivery," I said, and I unrolled a scrap of paper the apothecary had been forced to give the guards once the apothecary had been threatened with a lock and a key. The ink on it was faint but the handwriting a match. "You wrote 'clear the path—Pure Soledad' and the ink matches your private seal."
The hall quieted like a pool. Dax's face changed in that stillness: from smug to colorless, to blank denial.
"That is foolish talk," he said. "You plant lies."
"Would my lie poison the throat of a servant who called me friend?" I asked. "Or would your hand? You were angry that she recognized your secret visit to the kitchens. She knew something."
He sat like someone insulted that a game had ended badly.
"You're a liar," Dax spat.
Around us, people shifted. Some drew cloth to their mouths. The Emperor paced like a storm moving on the sea.
"You will show your face to the public," I said, "and let the ones you use stand."
"Do it," the Empress said, voice like a blade.
So the court assembled a public reckoning. They invited not judges but common people—the market stall owners, the silk sellers, the six-doors captains, the ladies who had felt the tilt of Dax's favor like a push in a crowd. They came, crowded, watching.
"Confess," I said.
At first Dax smiled to cover the shiver. "Stupid girls," he hissed. "Who benefits? I do not."
"Then tell us who benefited from Pure Soledad's death," I said. "Tell us why your perfumed bottle matched the poison we found."
A hush. Someone from the crowd whispered—"Look, the poison bottle is common in the north trade." A boy pointed at Dax's sleeve—there was a faint stain that matched.
Dax's expression flickered. He tried denial again, then to mockery, then the secrets began to leak like petals from a squeezed rose.
"You... you threatened the maid," someone said. "I heard you—"
"I had her killed because she made noise," Dax snapped suddenly, as if blurting an answer could make it less true. "She saw me. She told—" He stopped, eyes wide, then hollered, "But I did not order poison! I did not—"
"Then explain the soap of that apothecary," I said. "Explain the needles on her collar. Why would a random guard learn such subtle methods? You taught them."
The crowd saw him shrink a hair. His arrogance shook.
He moved through shame stages like someone floundering down a staircase: indignant, then irate, then gasping denial, then a moment of stunned silence as the meaning of his life rolling in front of him—power—slid into view like fog.
"Do you know what this means?" he snarled at me suddenly. "They will cut me off. You will all conspire!"
"Look at them," I said. "Do you hear the market? They note a truth. You thought you could hide behind velvet and whispers. You could not. You are small in a great room."
He tried to force laughter—"This is theater! This is slander!"
"Then swear," said Finnegan Lindgren in a voice like stone. He had been standing in the crowd, quiet all this time. "Swear under oath before the Emperor."
Dax took up his hands like a trapped animal.
"Father," the Emperor's voice was slow and cold. "If this is true, you took a girl's life over nothing. You made my household rotten. You defy a law I will not let stand."
He looked at Dax with the tiredness men have when their own children fail them. Dax's face convulsed. He was a prince accustomed to immunity. He had never felt so naked.
"Get him," the Emperor said, and the guards moved.
But the punishment was not the simple clank of iron. I wanted him to see the unravelling.
"First," I told the crowd, "you shall stand where he made the deed. Near the east pond where the moon shows us. You will be made to confess each lie."
They led him to the place the city knew. Lanterns lit his face. The people stood in silence.
"Next, the ones you used—your servants—will stand as witnesses. They will tell who ordered what. You will be tied with silk, not metal, and left in the market for the watchmen and tradesmen to shout at. You will be taken to the apothecary's son and he will pour before you the same potion."
He tried to plead.
"No," he breathed. "No, please—"
"Humiliation is the sharpest blade some men cannot hide from," I said.
A dozen voices rose. "Show us his face," someone cried.
At first he laughed as if to hide. Then, when his favored servants told of his temper, his laughter fell. The apothecary's apprentice came forward and named the ingredients he had been paid to mix. A baker who had once taken Dax's coin to buy silence spat on the floor in shame. A woman who sold mittens lifted them like flags.
Dax's expression changed from denial to shock. He tried the old tactic: threat.
"Who will trust you?" he cried. "Emperor! Mother! I am your son!"
"Not for long," said Estefania Ellis, her voice like winter's clear noon. "You betrayed the trust of this palace."
Dax's face crumpled. For a long time the crowd watched him lose the world as if a rope had been burned away behind him. He went from pride—striding like a man with armor—to pleading, then to a brittle, careless cry. He fell down on his knees and begged to be let up, to explain, to be spared.
"No," the crowd said, and the sound of their chorus was a hammer.
"What do you want?" he begged finally, the performance gone.
"I want you to see what you made," I said. "You will be removed from court. You will be watched. You will not be hidden by silk. You will sit in the market and listen to the vendors curse you. You will face every person you used and watch them turn from you. You will be burned in memory."
"Please!" he shouted to the Emperor.
The Emperor's eyes were plain. "So it is written," he said, and something of the father's love had been traded for the father's duty.
The crowd had its say—the guard commander catalogued Dax's arrogance. Men who had taken money for hush now told his acts. The crowd recorded it in bread and gesture and rumor. Dax's collapse into pleading and the crowd's reaction were a spectacle the palace would recount for years.
Dax was led away with his head bent. He moved through stages: a flash of temper, a flash of mockery, a blank denial, then sudden pleading. He moved in front of the women Soledad had worked with; they spat or turned their faces. A child who had once been ignored hurled a stone at his boots.
At the end he was not broken by blade but broken by eyes. He had been idolized by his station. Now he had to stand in the press of ordinary people's righteous teeth and feel how small he had become.
"Progress: 100%," my system purred like a satisfied cat. A small white packet hovered and landed in my hand. The God-of-Wealth module had linked. I had achieved the first binding.
When the final parade of witness ended, the Emperor turned to me.
"You did what we could not," Lorenzo Said said with a tired softness. "You pushed what the palace would not push."
"She died under my feet," I said. "I could not sleep while they made apologies into things that sealed nothing."
He nodded. "Then go home and let the old house know that the blood stopped."
Back at the old marquis's dining table, Ernesto Contreras gaped at the sugar figure I had made. "You made this?" he asked like a man who had found a toy he had lost as a boy.
"For you," I said. "So you would sit and enjoy."
He ate slowly and chewed like a man savoring a story. He laughed suddenly, not a violent gesture, but a soft one, and it felt like a spring thaw. "You have the spirit of risk," he said. "Don't lose it."
I kept the system at my wrist like a secret coin. It hummed when I moved and, late at night, when I had stolen a little peace, I opened the little box.
"Do you have more tasks?" I asked it.
"Many things," it answered. "You will be tested."
I smiled.
In the weeks that followed, I saw Zane Schwarz more in the streets. He came with odd offers and an odd gentleness. He never spoke of those first moments when he would wash his hands at my touch. He simply stood now, a constant who did not expect much in return. He once pressed a clean handkerchief into my palm and just said, "For the cut."
"Thank you," I said.
"You're clever," he said, then turned his face to the sunset like someone afraid a smile would ruin it.
When I told him of the Orchid House he came with a list of prices and a ledger, and two nights later he was there when I first let my new troupe show before paying customers—I mean, patrons. He watched them perform—a boy blow stone flutes like winter rain, a young man handle the spear like a new moon—and, to my secret delight, he applauded.
"You're not as much wash as you first looked," I teased later.
"And you are less of a beggar than you claim," he replied.
We saved and planned and lost sleep over ledgers and compassion. One night, while the lanterns hissed in the wind, he took my hand.
"You make me feel like there is work for me," he said.
"And what work do you have?" I asked, thumb tracing the seam of his palm.
"To stay," he said simply.
The system hummed, almost jealous. The green orb inside the Grand Princess pulsed in rumor. The city watched as an odd sort of life unrolled—one stitched from market days, system asks, and the quiet growth of those who had been ignored.
At my coming-of-age banquet, the Emperor himself mentioned the Orchid House in passing and praised my stubbornness. When he said it, the crowd clapped and at the back Lan—Sebastian Bond—found my eye and offered a small, private bow. Soledad's name was spoken not as a footnote but as memory.
Later that night, I went to my little set of tea cups in my room—the set with the funny stitched doll faces my marquis had once made for me. I closed my fist and felt the little packet in my palm—the system gift that could have been used to sway a bed or a heart. I set it beside the cups and let it cool.
"Progress matters," the box whispered in my skull.
"Progress," I replied, and slid the tiny, green-glowing module into a drawer with the doll-faced cup on top.
Tomorrow the system would want more. The city would ask me for more kindness. Dax's fall had been a lesson wrapped in humiliation; many more hands had to be righted. I would keep binding poverty to skill and cruelty to exposure.
"One step at a time," I whispered, and lifted the laughing doll cup to my lips. It felt like home.
The End
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