Chapter 74
Si Lili felt as if she were dreaming . In her dream she had met a husband, and they were consummating their marriage . After a few rounds of sex, she slowly awoke . The first thing she saw was an unfamiliar yet handsome cheek .
She realized what had happened the previous night . The young man who had held her was the charming young Master Fan . She felt somewhat odd . Perhaps she had drunk too much - how could she not remember the details? She thought about it, and couldn't help but feel slightly bitter . She knew that she was walking a difficult path, but when she recalled some memories of overwhelming ecstasy, she couldn't help but press her legs together, feeling limp and painful all over .
When she noticed the man by her side begin to move, Si Lili quickly pretended to be asleep .
After Fan Xian woke up, he looked at the girl's sleeping face, delicate as a flower . Finding it hard to bear, he held her tenderly for a while . Pleased by her faint scent, he washed his face, rinsed his mouth, and left .
After a little while, Si Lili opened her eyes and began to rearrange the room that had been messed up the night before . She didn't know what she had discovered, but she let out a shamed and doubtful cry .
. . .
. . .
Daylight had yet to break through fully as he left the flower boat . The Crown Prince was still sleeping with Yuan Meng in his room, so Fan Xian decided not to call after him . The reason he had left so quickly was because he had only just come to the capital . It was not proper to visit prostitutes, and furthermore, he presumed that the Guo family would soon come to raise a fuss, so he got ready to return to Fan Manor and watch the proceeding scene .
He had not really done anything with Lili the previous night . It was not because he was some kind of Daoist master, but simply because, psychologically and physically, he had developed an obsession with cleanliness that had ruined the mood . He found it difficult to be with a woman who had been touched by another man, and in his previous life, he had seen plenty of notices about preventing sexually transmitted diseases, so he was scared of catching one . There were no condoms in this world, so while there may have been no harm in visiting a brothel, actually doing something there would no doubt have its dangers .
But this didn’t all happen without a consequence . Fan Xian looked at the unsightly bulge in his pants and sighed mournfully . He had some regrets from when he was in Danzhou, and one of them was that nothing had ever developed between him and Sisi . When the sedan chair reached the corner gate of Fan Manor, the three servants and their master quietly called for the gate to be opened, and slipped inside, telling the guard at the gate not to say anything . When the guard saw Master Teng and the young master from Danzhou, he did not dare intervene, and simply went back to sleep .
Fan Xian crawled into bed to catch up on sleep . When he woke up, morning had broken . Putting on his wooden clogs, he walked to the front courtyard . When he heard a loud racket, he guessed what might have happened, and feigned a puzzled expression .
It was said that that morning, the city magistrate Mei Zhili was napping in his study when he unexpectedly heard the sound of a drum . He was rather annoyed, and wondered what sort of hooligans would dare to interrupt his slumber . But there were court rules he dared not neglect, and so he made his way to the court where, after a bout of yelling, he was presented with an accusation .
When Mei Zhili read the paper the accusation was written on, his heart skipped a beat . Neither the plaintiff nor the defendant were ordinary people . The plaintiff was Guo Baokun, a man of some renown, the only son of Guo You, Director of the Board of Rites and now an editor at the palace . The defendant was Fan Xian, son of Fan Jian, assistant minister of the Treasury . Fan Xian was accused of stopping Guo Baokun in the street the previous night, starting a fight, and assaulting an official of the court .
When he saw their two surnames on the paper, Mei Zhili was rather worried . The royal court was divided into two factions . One faction supported the Crown Prince; the other faction was secretive, but was secretly headed by the Second Prince . Guo You, Director of the Board of Rites, had been the Crown Prince's teacher, so naturally he took the side of the Crown Prince . Although Treasury minister Fan Jian did not outwardly pick a side, he had always had good relations with King Jing, and Crown Prince Jing was the Second Prince that the other faction supported .
The case was simple, but it was not a good case . He feared that he might provoke the wrath of either the Crown Prince or the Second Prince . As he pondered, he secretly cursed Fan Xian, this young man who had no sense of what was important . Fan Xian had begun to make a name for himself in the capital; the bureaucrats all knew he was the illegitimate son of Count Sinan, raised in Danzhou . He spent all this time in Danzhou, thought Mei Zhili, but as soon as he gets to the capital, he gets into a fight in the street . How am I supposed to deal with this?
But the accusation was very clear, with human testimony and material evidence . There was no way he could put it off . He looked at the paper and frowned . He sent off a secretary to Count Sinan's estate to apprehend the defendant, and then secretly sent an attendant to the Treasury to let Minister Fan know as soon as possible . .
Fan Xian saw that a city bailiff had been dispatched to apprehend him . He wanted to know, considering that the Fan family and the royal household such a close relationship, on what grounds he was being detained . So, taking up their clubs, the manor guards got ready to loyally defend their master, preparing to pounce like tigers on the put-upon bailiffs .
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