On our wedding night, my wife acted strangely.

"My God! What did I just hear?"

"This is absolutely amazing!"

"This feels like the biggest news of the year!"

"This...how could this be? How could Your Majesty do this?"

Several tea drinkers on the street slapped their thighs in disbelief.

"Oh dear! Don't you all understand? The day before yesterday, Lady Li ran out of the Prince's mansion disheveled, crying and shouting that the Regent had bullied her. Today, she admitted it herself!"

"So it must have been His Majesty's doing! He deliberately let Lady Li cause trouble at the Regent's residence to tarnish the Regent's reputation!"

"No wonder the people in the Prince's mansion are now explaining to everyone they meet that the Prince did nothing."

"So this was all a conspiracy orchestrated by His Majesty!"

The common people have boundless imaginations, and they love these kinds of palace secrets with conspiracy theories.

With Luo Hongtu and Li's candid confessions in the prison van, the logical chain instantly came together.

"How shameless! A ruler of a nation, doing such a thing!"

"Exactly! They did such despicable things themselves, and now they want to pin the blame on the Regent!"

"To resort to such despicable means against the Regent is simply incompetent!"

"Bah! What a load of bull! He's not even as good as the Regent's toe! The Regent gave us land and a way to survive, but what has His Majesty given us besides humiliation?"

The crowd was immediately outraged.

I don't know who started it, but a rotten vegetable leaf was thrown onto the prison van.

Immediately afterwards, rotten eggs, mud, and broken shoe soles rained down on the prison van.

"Kill those two scoundrels!"

"It's truly a tragedy that the Great Zhou Dynasty has such a foolish ruler!"

"How dare you, you lowly commoners, hit me!"

"Ouch! Stop hitting me, it hurts!" Luo Hongtu and Li Shi screamed in pain as they were hit in the prison van, their heads and faces covered in filth.

......

The Regent's Palace, Study.

Lin Yi sat in a grand chair, holding a white porcelain teacup in his hand, and slowly blew on the tea leaves.

This tea is a new tea that was just delivered by the servants. It tastes quite good, and there's a sweet aftertaste when you drink it.

While it can't compare to Longjing tea before breastfeeding, it's still considered top-grade.

Actually, Lin Yi never really understood what was so good about the Longjing tea before drinking it; even if it just had a milky taste, that would have been fine.

"Tsk..." Lin Yi put down his teacup, smacked his lips, and said, "Old An, you know, these people are really strange. It's just a few blades of grass, but they actually sell it for sixty taels of silver a pound. Hehehe, they really treat grass like a precious commodity."

Lin An bowed slightly and said, "Your Highness is absolutely right. In fact, tea is not very useful. Even this old servant cannot tell the difference between good and bad tea. It's just like the court's policy of converting rice paddies to mulberry fields last year. Grain is clearly the foundation of the people's livelihood, but the locals converted rice paddies to mulberry fields to make more money because the officials and nobles liked silk. They didn't realize that this was putting the cart before the horse."

"There's nothing we can do about it. After all, farming doesn't make money. When the people are willing to farm on their own initiative, that will prove that the Great Zhou is strong."

"Oh, right, I haven't congratulated the Prince yet."

Lin Yi raised an eyebrow: "Tell me, what's the good news?"

Lin An was the most well-informed, and he quickly learned about what had happened that morning.

"Of course it's about that poisonous woman, Li. I don't know why, but today Nangong Xiong issued an order to behead Li and Luo Hongtu and display their heads to the public."

"Oh? A beheading followed by public display? This old man must be out of his mind."

"you do not say!!"

Lin An was a seasoned veteran, usually very steady in his words and actions, but today's incident was truly satisfying. As he spoke, he stretched his lips behind his ears.

"Your Highness, you didn't see it on Zhuque Street, did you? It was truly gratifying! Luo Hongtu and Li were paraded through the streets in a prison cart, and the people on both sides of the street threw everything they could at them. Rotten vegetable leaves, rotten eggs, swill—they were smeared all over their faces."

Lin Yi changed his posture, crossed his legs, and fiddled with a string of incense beads in his hand.

"Tell me, what are the people complaining about?"

"They're saying all sorts of things! Everyone's not stupid. The day before yesterday, Lady Li ran out of our Prince's mansion disheveled, crying and shouting all over the streets. The news spread like wildfire, and the common people were cursing our Prince's mansion behind our backs. But this morning, in his prison cart, Luo Hongtu, in front of the entire capital, yelled at Lady Li, calling her a slut, saying she ran off to the Imperial Garden in the middle of the night and all that. Lady Li wasn't going to back down, and right there in the street, she yelled back at Luo Hongtu, calling him a coward, saying he knelt outside the Hall of Mental Cultivation and didn't dare utter a single word!"

Lin An couldn't help but laugh out loud at this point.

"Hahaha, Your Highness, those two were fighting like dogs in the prison cart, spilling the beans. Now the people of the capital all understand. Everyone says this was all a conspiracy orchestrated by His Majesty, who instructed Li to cause trouble at our palace, trying to smear Your Highness and ruin your reputation! Now the whole street is cursing Nangong Xiong as a tyrant, worse than a pig or a dog!"

Lin Yi smiled smugly after hearing this.

That old man, Nangong Xiong, is usually very concerned about his image and always tries to put on the airs of a wise ruler.

Now that this mess has been put on us, it's going to be hard to get it off the hook.

Moreover, once his reputation is ruined, it will be much less legitimate for Nangong Xiong to rally the 200,000 loyalist troops to attack the capital.

Who would be willing to serve such a tyrannical ruler?

Lin An laughed so hard he hiccuped, and quickly tried to calm himself down.

"Your Highness, news from the palace says that His Majesty is furious. He thinks that Luo Hongtu and his wife deliberately set a trap to find something on him, and this morning he directly issued an edict to have them taken to the execution ground and beheaded immediately."

At this point, Lin An paused, still feeling a lingering fear.

The prince's tactic of using someone else to do his dirty work was incredibly ruthless; it turned a seemingly hopeless situation around.

He sighed and said, "Alas, he's probably already being executed. His Majesty is trying to silence him so there's no way to prove anything."

Lin Yi sneered.

"Ha, with this imperial edict, he has completely blocked his own escape route. In these kinds of matters, the more eager one is to execute someone, the more the people will think he has a guilty conscience. However, from this we can also see that emperors... are not all smart people."

"Hehehe." The two looked at each other and smiled, everything understood without words.

After laughing, Lin Yi got up and went to the window, looking at the few green bamboos in the yard.

The old saying is so true: You reap what you sow.

That crazy woman, Li, deserved it all.

Who let her come to the Prince's mansion to play the honey trap?

"Your Highness, what should we do next? Should we send someone to keep an eye on things at the execution ground?" Lin An asked from behind.

"Just two dead men, what's so interesting about that?" Lin Yi waved his hand with his back to him. "Didn't Nangong Xiong want to issue a 'Declaration of War' to curse me? Fine, have your men continue spreading the news in the streets, making the details of Nangong Xiong's affair as outrageous as possible. Within three days, it must spread to every prefecture of the Great Zhou. I want to see whether the whole world is cursing him or cursing me!"

"This old servant understands, I will arrange the manpower immediately." Lin An nodded in agreement.