Chapter 12 The Knife
Zhao Yan fainted.
Blood was still seeping from the wound on his body.
I helped him bandage it roughly.
After I finished, I looked at his handsome face and suddenly realized—this was the man who had slaughtered my entire clan in my previous life.
He had treated me terribly as well.
Since my rebirth, I had forced myself to forget those memories if I couldn’t get revenge.
Yet now, he lay before me, almost fragile.
I couldn’t stop myself. I reached out and took out the short knife I kept at my waist.
This knife had been given to me by Zhao Yan.
He told me to use it for self-defense.
But now, I was going to use it to kill him.
Everything from my past life flashed before my eyes.
I saw—
My children, the dragon-phoenix twins, taken to Zhang Ruhua’s palace the moment they were born.
When he ordered the extermination of the Chu clan, I cried and begged him on my knees. I said I regretted everything, that I wanted nothing anymore, and pleaded for him to spare my family. He refused.
……
On the day I died, it was my children’s birthday. I went to find them but was turned away at the door.
I watched the four of them playing happily in the imperial garden. In the end, I went mad. I cursed Zhao Yan, calling him a cut-sleeve who had fallen for me back when I was still living as a man.
And Zhao Yan had said to me, “If there is a next life, I would rather never have known you were a woman that day.”
Then I felt that living alone like this was truly meaningless.
That same night, I took my own life.
When my thoughts returned to the present and I looked at the man in front of me again, hatred surged through me like a tide.
I raised my hand, ready to plunge the knife into his chest.
But before the blade could fall, my wrist was seized.
At some point, Zhao Yan had woken up.
He stared at me with calm eyes.
“Chu Bingzhi.”
“What were you trying to do just now?”