The days leading up to the Harvest Festival were a study in quiet manipulation. Princess Wang Xiu, now Prince Lie's wife, had been a constant, seemingly innocent presence at court, her every move a calculated gambit. Her true target was not Prince Lin, but the Queen, the gentle, kind woman whose opinion held immense sway with the King.
Wang Xiu's plan was a masterpiece of subtle poison. During her private audiences with the Queen, she would praise Prince Lin's ambition, but in a way that planted seeds of doubt. She spoke of his "unusual" interest in the common people and his "strange" obsession with the scholar's agricultural ideas. She would hint that this was not a sign of a caring ruler, but a clever facade to curry favor and undermine the traditions of the court.
She painted a picture of Prince Lin as a man who sought to replace the strength of the army with the fleeting loyalty of the people—a dangerous gamble that would leave the kingdom vulnerable to its enemies. She warned that his interest in the people was a sign of his true intent: to build a new kind of power base entirely separate from the court, from the King, and from the Queen herself.
The whispers took root. The Queen, though she loved Prince Lin, began to see him through the lens of Wang Xiu's words. She grew anxious, questioning his motives and his commitment to the old ways. It was a subtle, insidious betrayal, and by the time of the Harvest Festival, the Queen's mind was a battlefield of doubt.
This was Wang Xiu's plan in full. By poisoning the Queen's trust, she believed she could isolate Prince Lin, cutting him off from the very foundation of his legitimacy. She intended to make his public displays of benevolence seem like a hollow, calculated performance, thereby turning his greatest strength—his connection to the people—into a weapon against him. But what she didn't account for was Li Mei's counter-gambit.
The People's Decree
Princess Wang Xiu's subtle poison came to a head a week later during the annual Harvest Festival. It was a day when the common people were invited into the palace grounds to celebrate the bounty of the land. This was Li Mei's chance to directly counter Wang Xiu's insidious whispers.
Li Mei had been waiting for this moment. For days, Scholar Feng had been tirelessly working, and Li Jin, through her network of wives, had ensured that the rumors of a new, bountiful crop were already a common whisper on the streets. Li Mei instructed Prince Lin not to speak of the crops in the formal banquet but to instead walk among the people as if he were simply another citizen. He was to listen, to learn, and to be seen.
The first part of her plan worked beautifully. As they walked through the festive crowds, Li Mei watched as Prince Lin, dressed in a simple, elegant robe, listened to the farmers speak of their newfound prosperity. They spoke not of the Prince, but of the "scholar of the people" who had provided the wisdom that saved their fields. The whispers of doubt that Princess Wang Xiu had planted in the Queen's mind now seemed like a distant, absurd echo.
Then came the climax of Li Mei's plan. As the festival reached its peak, a young farmer, his hands calloused from hard work, knelt before the Prince. He held a small pouch of seeds. "Your Royal Highness," he said, his voice thick with emotion, "I have no great treasures to offer you, but I offer you this. It is a new strain of rice, a strain that has saved my family from starvation. It is a gift of your wisdom, given to us by the Scholar Feng."
The Prince took the pouch, a look of genuine emotion on his face. "This is not my gift," he said, his voice carrying over the crowd, "it is your gift to me. It is a testament to the fact that a kingdom's true strength lies not in its armies but in the heart and mind of its people. I will cherish this, as a reminder that I am here to serve you, not to rule you."
The crowd erupted in a roar of cheers. They were no longer cheering for a Crown Prince. They were cheering for a man who understood their struggles, a man who had brought them not a crown, but a harvest.
From a distance, Li Mei saw Princess Wang Xiu. Her face, which had been a mask of perfect composure, was now a pale, trembling visage. Her plan had not only failed but it had made the Crown Prince stronger in the eyes of the King, the Queen, and the entire kingdom. The very people she had warned against were now his greatest strength.
The scholar's wife had delivered a new decree. Not from a king, but from the people themselves. And now, Princess Wang Xiu was faced with a new reality: her subtle poison had only served to nourish the very man she sought to destroy