The tension in the room had stretched to breaking point.
Jiang Yuejian wiped the slender silver tube with strong liquor. Firelight danced along its surface, making it look like a cold snake poised to enter an abyss.
Half kneeling, half sprawled on the couch, Li Ce trembled faintly with pain and humiliation. He heard her footsteps approach: steady, calm, with a rhythm that made his scalp prickle.
“Jiang Yuejian...” His voice sounded as though it had been dragged across sandpaper, carrying one last attempt at resistance. “If you dare... I shall—”
“Exterminate nine generations of my family?” Jiang Yuejian supplied smoothly. She knelt on one knee beside the couch, her hands steady as rock. “Save that speech for when you have the strength, Your Highness. For now, you can either relax yourself, or I can help you relax by force.”
Without giving him a moment to prepare himself, she touched that forbidden area with cool fingers and unyielding professional detachment.
“Ngh!”
Li Ce went rigid. The eyes that always seemed to hold the world in their calculations flew wide, bloodshot with pain and shame. He was the prince regent. Since the day he was born, not even his imperial father and mother had ever so... so violated his person!
“Don't move.” Her voice sounded beside his ear like an injection of ice-cold sedative. “Would you like this silver tube to go through your bladder, or would you like me to drain it properly?”
Li Ce clenched his back teeth. He could feel the cold silver instrument, slick in a way that made him shudder, beginning to force its way into his body, little by little.
It was worse than the blow to his back. This was not simply pain. It was the helplessness of being stripped of all control, the humiliation and fury of having a foreign object forced into his body—enough to make him want to destroy the world.
“Deep breaths. Relax.” Jiang Yuejian focused on the pressure in her hands, feeling the resistance. “Good. Past the first bend... Li Ce, don't hold your breath. Count with me. One, two, three...”
Li Ce could not hear what she was counting. Countless thunderclaps seemed to be going off inside his head. He closed his eyes, and tears—he swore they were merely an involuntary form of sweat—slipped from their corners into his hair. With every inch the tube advanced, it seemed to grind another piece of his lifelong dignity into the dust.
Suddenly, Jiang Yuejian's hands stopped.
“There.”
As she spoke, Li Ce felt the pressure that had seemed about to split him open find an outlet.
Whoosh.
It was the sound of life flowing.
The pressure he had endured for an entire day and night poured through the silver tube like floodwater bursting through a dam.
In that instant, Li Ce collapsed bonelessly onto the couch. The agony, shame, fury, and murderous intent all gave way to an almost absurdly overwhelming physical relief. The sensation of being snatched back from the edge of death left his mind blank. Even his fingertips tingled.
Jiang Yuejian calmly examined the color of the draining fluid and curled her lip. “That dark? How much heavy metal have you been drinking? Li Ce, the state of your insides is every bit as rotten as the political situation in Tang.”
He lay there, his chest heaving, the hair at his temples soaked with sweat. He could not lift so much as a finger. All he could do was let this woman do as she pleased with him.
A long while passed before he opened his eyes. His voice was almost too weak to hear.
“...Over?”
“We've barely started.” Jiang Yuejian withdrew the tube, briskly put her things away, and gave his lower back a pat, as though rewarding a student who had finally behaved. “That was just flood control. The culprit in your ureter is still there. In a moment, you'll drink some water, and then—”
Her lips curved into her first smile since arriving in this world. To Li Ce, it looked positively demonic.
“Get up and jump rope. If you can't jump it out, tomorrow we do the tube again.”
Li Ce looked at her, his expression impossibly tangled. The humiliation was real. So was his desire to kill her. And yet... the dependence born of having his life saved by her had settled like a seed, taking deep root in the prince regent's heart on this absurd night.