Chapter 4 — Kneeling before the Queen and Duke

Three days after the fateful night of the party, Khinh Vu still lay motionless on the bed, her breathing was shallow, her body gradually cold as if she had lost all vitality. Bach Quan invited another doctor, not the familiar one who usually took care of the health of the whole family, but a strange physician from the suburbs, whom Nhuoc Lan herself had secretly arranged in advance. The doctor, after briefly checking her pulse, announced that the lady had breathed her last from a heart attack that could not be cured. Then he immediately wrote a death certificate, stamped it with his own seal, and handed it over to Bach Quan to keep.

Bach Quan held the death certificate in his hand, his fingers trembling slightly, not because of regret but because of a chilling feeling of relief when thinking that with just this thin piece of paper, all the legal constraints that had made him bow his head for the past three years would completely disappear. He put the paper in a separate drawer, locked it carefully, then walked out with his face arranged with just the right amount of pain, not too obvious nor too cold, enough for the neighbors to stop by to offer condolences without the slightest suspicion.

The truth is, Khinh Vu never died. The poison Nhuoc Lan used, although it caused the drinker to fall into a deep coma, with the heart beating extremely weakly and breathing almost imperceptible to the naked eye, it did not actually take life immediately. That was exactly what Nhuoc Lan had carefully planned from the beginning: a fake death, enough to bypass all normal judgment, enough to get a legal death certificate, but avoiding the risk of leaving obvious traces of poison in the body if, unfortunately, someone suspected and invited a good forensic scientist to examine her. She learned that remedy from an old medicine man in the eastern market, who had a shady past, specializing in selling forbidden remedies to those who needed to purge their opponents but did not want to commit outright murder.

The news that the young lady of the Tu family had passed away from illness quickly spread throughout the Tu palace and then spread to the family's business acquaintances. Old lady Tu cried unconsciously at her daughter-in-law's bed, determined not to believe that her gentle and diligent daughter-in-law could pass away so suddenly like that, but in front of the death certificate clearly stamped and the doctor's firm affirmation, she had no choice but to accept that heartbreaking truth.

According to custom here, people who die from infectious diseases or show unusual signs must be buried urgently within three days to avoid spreading evil spirits, and the body must not be left in the house for too long. Bach Quan, with a skillfully staged and painful expression, personally arranged the burial, using the excuse that he wanted his wife to have a quiet resting place, away from the crowded and noisy cemeteries of the family, so he chose a deserted mound in the suburbs, about half a day's journey from Khanh Duong capital, called Tay Lang mound, a place that few people had ever visited because it was said to have many wandering souls.

No one in the Tu palace had any doubts about that decision, even thinking that Bach Quan really loved his wife very much and wanted to choose a pure place for her to rest in peace. Only Nhuoc Lan clearly understood the real reason: the deserted Tay Lang mound, with few passersby, was the ideal place to carry out the final step in their plan, a step that if exposed, both would have to pay with their lives.

Butler Binh, who had followed Sam Dinh Ngan since his youth and then continued to stay and serve Khinh Vu when she got married, was the only person in the palace who was a bit worried about the decision to choose Tay Lang mound as the burial place. He once spoke softly, asking Bach Quan if he should take his wife to rest at the Sam family's ancestral grave, where someone would look after the incense and smoke properly, rather than a deserted mound where no one goes. Bach Quan then simply replied that it was Khinh Vu's wish during his lifetime. He once told him that she liked silence and did not want to bother anyone after leaving the mountain. Butler Binh heard that and had to stay silent. In his heart, he still couldn't help but feel that something was wrong, but because of his status as a servant, he did not dare to question him further. He just silently kept that doubt in his heart. He did not expect that this small caution would later become an important link to help reveal the entire truth.

The night before the burial, when the coffin was closed and placed in the middle of the main house for relatives to pay their last respects, Nhuoc Lan secretly returned and opened the coffin lid to check. Khinh Vu was still lying there, her face pale but still faintly warm, her chest gently rising and falling with each weak breath, almost impossible to detect if he didn't press his ear close to it. Nhuoc Lan stood still and looked for a long time, an indescribable feeling arose in her heart, not quite repentance, not quite gloating, but a strange emptiness of someone who has gone too far to be able to turn back.

"Don't blame me," she whispered softly, her voice cold as ice, "I'm just trying to survive in my own way. You've always had everything, and I, for the past fifteen years, have never truly had anything of my own."

Having said that, she closed the coffin lid, sealed it carefully as if no one had ever touched it, then quietly left in the dark night, not knowing that those whispers, even though Khinh Vu was in a deep coma, still echoed into her subconscious, becoming part of a vague memory that later, when she woke up, she would remember like an indelible nightmare.

The next morning, the funeral was held simply but solemnly, with only the closest people accompanying her to Tay Lang mound. Bach Quan stood next to the grave, his face bowed so that no one could see his true expression, his hands clasping the hem of his funeral robe. When the coffin was lowered, shovels of soil were covered one by one, his throat was choked, his hands were clenched so tightly that their nails dug deep into the hem of the funeral robe, but then the image of the transfer documents, the image of the Sam family business about to belong to him, quickly overwhelmed all remaining emotions. He told himself, everything is over, from now on, no one can stop him anymore.

Old lady Tu stood by the grave, tears in her eyes, repeatedly calling her daughter-in-law's name, her trembling hands grabbed handfuls of soil and threw them into the grave according to custom, her mouth constantly lamenting the ungrateful fate of her virtuous and short-lived daughter. Right under that newly laid layer of soil, less than an arm's length away from her hand, her daughter-in-law still had a fragile breath, struggling in the cold darkness of the narrow coffin, between the boundary between life and death that no one standing on the ground knew.

The mourners left one by one when it was getting dark, leaving only a new grave in the middle of a deserted mound, with no one around, only the sound of the wind whistling through the sparse bushes and the chirping of insects in the night. Khinh Vu, in that cold ground, was still breathing weakly, her heart still glimmering with a fragile glimmer of survival, as if fate still did not want to completely let go of the woman who had devoted herself to her family for so many years.

In the narrow coffin, thick darkness enveloped Khinh Vu, the air became thinner and thinner, the cold air from the newly laid layer of soil on top seeped through every crack in the board, penetrating into the bones. If she were a normal person, she would probably have stopped breathing a long time ago due to asphyxiation, but thanks to the special poison that puts her entire body into a state of almost hibernation, all her life activities were slowed down to a minimum, her heart beat weakly, her breathing was so gentle that she did not need as much oxygen as a normal person, so even though she was buried under a thick layer of soil, she had not completely passed away. It was an irony of fate, when the very poison created to kill people accidentally became the thing that kept her last breath, buying enough time for a miracle to happen before it was too late.

The night gradually fell, cold mist covered Tay Lang mound, no lights, no people, only the late moonlight dimly shining through the thin trees, casting the shadows of old graves into silent black streaks on the frosty white ground. In that cold ground, Khinh Vu's heart still beat, so slowly that it almost no longer had the shape of a beat, just like a tiny spark trying to cling to life in the thick darkness surrounding it on all sides.

At midnight, from the nearby open forest, the sound of horse hooves suddenly sounded, mixed with the fierce barking of hunting dogs, getting closer and closer. No one in that group of horse riders could have imagined that, in just a few moments, the leading dog would stop right in front of the newly built grave, scratching frantically at the loose soil, and a spontaneous decision in the middle of the night would rewrite the entire fate of a woman lying barely a foot under the ground, and at the same time revive a shocking secret that an entire dynasty had tried to bury for twenty years.