Besides lying down, I also know a little about power struggles

Chapter 179 How did your mother die?
There was a sound of hurried footsteps approaching, and accompanied by heavy breathing, the Seventh Prince appeared outside the door.

His face was filled with excitement and he shouted, "Your Majesty, the Cavalry Guards have reported that they have killed all the rebels outside the village."

"I understand," the emperor said calmly, "Go down."

The Seventh Prince looked into the room and saw Feng Twelve covered in blood. He asked nervously, "Twelve, are you seriously injured? I will go find the imperial physician right away."

After he finished speaking, he ran away. The emperor frowned, shook his head, and looked at Feng Yuyang on the ground: "I heard that you killed Old Seventh. With his temper, is he worthy of your fear?"

It was not until this moment that Feng Yuyang's expression on the ground changed slightly.

"If there is a legitimate heir, the eldest son will be the heir, if there is no legitimate heir, the eldest son will be the heir. If I am not here, the throne will belong to the seventh son, not to mention that he is so disobedient." He raised his head and looked at the emperor steadily, "Father has known my plan for a long time, right?"

The emperor said with his hands behind his back: "You have been running around these years, claiming to be traveling, but in fact you have spent a lot of money to bribe people from the underworld. But it's good this way, those playboys are under control, and it saves the government a lot of effort."

Feng Yuyang laughed: "I knew that the prefect of Guzhou was also my father's man."

The emperor looked at him and said, "Among the subjects of Dazhao, who is not my subject?"

"Yes, father... No, Your Majesty always treats his subjects well," Feng Yuyang smiled self-deprecatingly, "As for us children, in your heart, I'm afraid we are worse than the foreigners at the border."

"How dare you." The emperor said, "Haven't I treated you well enough?"

"What do you think, Your Majesty?" Feng Yuyang tilted his head and looked at him. "I'm afraid you haven't read a single word of that whole box of birthday poems. You may even have burned it a long time ago, right?"

The emperor remained calm and said, "Such a big incident happened at the Yaotai Banquet. How can I not be suspicious?"

Feng Yuyang laughed out loud.

"I should have thought that you only care about yourself. Even your favorite prince has to give way to you. I even took great pains to ask everyone to write a poem. I was wrong, very wrong."

"Asshole," the emperor said in a deep voice, "I have never treated you unfairly, how could I raise someone as heartless as you?"

"What do you think, Your Majesty? You drove me out of the capital before I was even twenty. In your eyes, you wish you had never had a son like me."

"Nonsense!" The emperor was angry. "I treat you all equally. What I choose for you is always the best."

Feng Yuyang laughed out loud.

"Go ask your sons, is what you gave them really what they want? If they respect and love you from the bottom of their hearts, their names would not be on the recommendation letter."

The emperor closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then slowly exhaled: "Compared to them, I treat you very well."

"Yes, His Majesty has made me the King of Respect and asked me to stay in my fiefdom with utmost respect. As a prince, I have nothing to rely on except a little money." Feng Yuyang said loudly, as if he had given up on himself, "The prince's mansion still has 800 soldiers, but as a vassal king, I can't have a single soldier in my mansion except for a few dozen guards, let alone armor, swords and arrows."

The emperor snorted, "If you have no intention of rebelling, what do you need soldiers and armor for? Can't such a big Guzhou government protect you?"

"Whether it is protection or surveillance, your majesty knows it clearly," Feng Yuyang said, "I think the prefect of Guzhou alone is not enough to make your majesty feel at ease, so I released Liu Congwen to my house." "If you don't do anything wrong, no matter how many people I put around you, it will not harm you." The emperor said, "It is you who are greedy and have to take a desperate path."

Feng Yuyang dropped his shoulders, supported his body with his hands, changed from kneeling to sitting, and crossed his legs.

"Am I greedy?" He laughed softly, "Who is the greediest person? Your Majesty, you should look at yourself in the mirror."

After Feng Yunxi applied medicine to Feng Twelve's wound, she heard Feng Yuyang's increasingly outrageous words, and finally spoke up: "Your Majesty, it's getting dark, we'd better return to the city as soon as possible."

"Feng Yunxi, don't interrupt." Feng Yuyang interrupted his proposal, "Don't you want to know how your mother died?"

As soon as these words were spoken, the emperor's face changed suddenly.

Before he opened his mouth, Feng Yuyang continued speaking quickly.

"Your mother, Concubine Zhuang, died of complications during childbirth. You were supposed to be born in November, but you were born two months early. Guess why?" He smiled strangely, "Because your father, our Majesty, gave her premature birth pills."

"...Impossible." Feng Yunxi blurted out.

Feng Yuyang turned his head and looked at him, as if he had expected this reaction, and smiled, "Nothing is impossible. My mother was pregnant a few days before Concubine Zhuang, so I should have been born earlier than you, but our father wanted his beloved woman to give birth to his first son, so he secretly put premature birth drugs in your mother's food."

He turned around and looked at the emperor's gradually livid face, and laughed even more wantonly: "Unfortunately, man proposes, God disposes. Concubine Zhuang was weak, and the medicine took effect earlier than expected. Concubine Zhuang desperately gave birth to the child, but she died on the delivery bed."

"Shut up!" the emperor shouted.

The corners of his mouth folded downwards into two very deep lines, which looked particularly stiff in the dim light.

The emperor turned the jade ring on his thumb and told the imperial guards, "Get out."

The door closed with a soft sound, and the room became even darker.

Feng Yuyang laughed softly: "Your Majesty, what are you afraid of? Are you afraid that I will reveal a bigger secret?"

"Third brother," the emperor looked down at him, "where did you hear these nonsense? Is it your mother, Consort Xian?"

"Your Majesty, don't blame everything on my mother," Feng Yuyang said, "If you really love Concubine Zhuang, you shouldn't favor other women in the palace."

The room was silent, with only Feng Yuyang's low laugh to be heard.

"After your first wife, the former queen, died, you wanted to make Concubine Zhuang the queen, but the previous court was against it. You were afraid that they would say you were obsessed with sex and that it would damage your reputation as a wise ruler, so you spread the word in the court that whoever gave birth to the eldest son in the harem would be made queen." Feng Yuyang said, "You thought a bowl of contraceptive soup could prevent all future troubles, but who knew that God couldn't stand your hypocrisy and used my existence to slap you in the face."

The emperor had a gloomy expression and stared at him without saying a word.

Feng Yuyang smiled and said, "The whole harem understands your thoughts. When my mother found out she was pregnant, she was too scared to speak out and kept it a secret for five months until you found out. You wanted to kill her at that time, right? But unfortunately, Concubine Zhuang begged for mercy, and you had to maintain the illusion of your tenderness in front of the woman you loved, so you endured it. Probably from then on, you had made up your mind, either to kill my mother or to let Concubine Zhuang give birth early. You didn't want the world to think that you were untrustworthy and went back on your word, so you chose what you thought was the most clever way."