Poisonous Goddess: I'm just lazing around in the mortal realm.

The next day, around midnight

The crown prince led 10,000 elite troops in a surprise attack on the southern barbarian spies who were less than 20 miles from Philadelphia.

First victory

However, over a thousand soldiers from Nanyang were killed or wounded.

Only about a hundred of the southern barbarian scouts survived, retreating to a point fifty miles away from their original encampment.

breaking Dawn

Gu Hou Mansion

The servant, hurrying across the covered bridge, turned and went into a secluded and rarely seen room.

The servant kowtowed in the tunnel

"Reporting to the general, the Crown Prince has won the first battle, and the Southern Barbarian scouts have withdrawn their troops and are stationed fifty miles outside the city."

"what?"

In the dim candlelight, Gu Changzhe sat upright at his desk, his eyes dark and swollen, clearly having not slept all night.

He threw the memorial in his hand onto the table, his face filled with disbelief.

The servant, thinking the general hadn't heard him clearly, bent down and repeated.

"The Crown Prince has won his first battle, but..."

"Just what?"

Gu Changzhe stood up, his emotions inevitably running high. He had initially believed the Crown Prince would inevitably lose this battle, or even win by sheer luck.

Unexpectedly, the sneak attack went so smoothly.

"However, the Crown Prince was injured and has been temporarily sent back to his residence to recuperate. But now the Imperial Hospital is suddenly short-staffed, and we can't find any trace of them in the entire residence!"

The servant lowered his head very low.

Gu Changzhe frowned upon hearing this and muttered to himself.

"That shouldn't be the case. I heard that the Emperor assigned half of the Imperial Medical Academy's personnel to accompany the Crown Prince on this campaign. This is only the first battle; there shouldn't be a shortage of manpower. Are there any physicians in the manor waiting?"

He glanced at the servant lying on the ground, even though he was usually extremely frugal.

However, they were extremely generous to the family's physicians.

"The physicians of the manor have all been assigned to the garrison. Although the Crown Prince won his first battle, there are still over a thousand dead and wounded. General, you said..."

He slowly raised his head, glanced at Gu Changzhe, and was suddenly startled by the latter's piercing gaze, quickly pulling his head back.

What did I say?

"You said that if there was a shortage of doctors in the army, they would be directly transferred from the Gu family mansion. After all the doctors in the mansion were sent away, the Crown Prince was carried back to the mansion."

The servant's voice grew softer and softer until he pressed his head and body to the ground.

Gu Changzhe secretly gasped.

He said that, of course!

However, he never expected that the Crown Prince would be injured! Moreover, none of the old fogies he brought from the capital could be relied upon!

"Let's go check on the Crown Prince's injuries first."

He waved and opened the door, only to bump right into Pei Zhiheng.

"Pei... what are you doing here? Didn't you say the Crown Prince was injured? You should be visiting him right now."

Gu Changzhe gave a wink to the servant beside him, who immediately understood and got up to close the door from the outside.

Once the sun rises, the remaining poison in Pei Zhiheng's body will dissipate, and he will be able to enter the house and sit in the armchair placed in front of Gu Changzhe, just like a normal person.

“I came here specifically to stop you.”

"Stop me? The Crown Prince is injured, are you going to ignore this?"

Although Gu Changzhe looked down on the Crown Prince from the bottom of his heart, he was still the legitimate heir of Nanyang and the future successor to the throne.

He would spare his life no matter what, out of respect for the emperor.

Pei Zhiheng gave him a cold glance and slowly said...

"Don't think I don't know what you're thinking. Now that you've managed to plant such a big surprise for me in the Pei family, can't I find my own way to survive?"

"What do you mean?"

Gu Changzhe frowned and looked at his friend.

Pei Zhiheng calmly poured himself a cup of iced tea and sipped it.

The bitter taste of the tea prevented him from swallowing it in one gulp.

"Speak up! Stop stammering! You civil servants always put on airs!"

Before Pei Zhiheng could finish drinking, Gu Changzhe rushed forward and snatched the teacup from his hand, spilling the tea all over the floor.

Seeing this, Pei Zhiheng became even more nervous, and thus felt even more eager to play hard to get.

He took out a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the tea stains from his lips, and then spoke.

"The Crown Prince's injury was not caused by the war, but because I tampered with his horse, causing him to fall off and cut his back."

His expression was calm, as if what he was saying was just a trivial matter.

"You old fool, how could you be so ruthless? That's the Crown Prince you've watched grow up!"

Although Gu Changzhe was verbally unforgiving, he still lowered his voice, afraid that someone might be eavesdropping through the wall.

Even if this was a secret room he had set up in his spare time.

Upon hearing this, Pei Zhiheng smiled at him and said

“A knife is already at my throat, and you’re telling me I should try to persuade him? I may be old, but I’m not senile. I can still tell right from wrong.”

"So you can let someone use your two daughters to blackmail you?"

Gu Changzhe turned around and poured himself a glass of water.

"If you don't want to talk to me, you should hurry up and go find a doctor for the Crown Prince, lest his wound heal by the time you return!"

Pei Zhiheng knew the other person was deliberately trying to provoke him, but he still wouldn't let him off the hook verbally.

Gu Changzhe sneered

"Yes, yes, yes, if I had gone any later, the Crown Prince's injuries would have healed. Then why did the messenger tell me that no one from the Imperial Hospital was there? Could that have been your doing too?"

"They mixed some laxatives for horses into their food, so we probably won't see them today."

Pei Zhiheng shook his head to himself, his face full of regret as if expressing his feelings.

"You really are inhuman. Those pampered imperial physicians, eating the food that beast eats, it... in the end, you still went too far!"

Gu Changzhe placed the empty teacup on the table and gave him a cold glance.

Pei Zhiheng, however, stood up dismissively and slowly walked to Gu Changzhe's desk. He picked up the memorials and toyed with them in his hands.

"Don't think I don't know that these imperial physicians have offended you in the past. Since they've offended you, it wouldn't be unfair for me to settle the score, would it?"

"how do you know?"

Gu Changzhe's smile vanished instantly.

You see, these old fogies from the capital, although they usually kept to themselves, he vaguely remembered his past in the capital.

At the height of his fame for saving the emperor, his wife was in the midst of difficult childbirth. (Gu Shining)

At that time, the emperor dispatched two groups of imperial physicians to examine the patient, but both took a long time to arrive, almost causing his wife and unborn child to die.

Although his wife was lucky enough to survive the ordeal, afterwards those quack doctors passed the buck and refused to admit that they had been ordered to come.

And now, on the day he was welcoming the Crown Prince to Philadelphia, he saw from afar that among the imperial physicians accompanying the army were those same people!

"Li Chengxu, Zhang Zuomen, Liu Chang. Is that right?"

Pei Zhiheng's voice pulled Gu Changzhe back to reality.

His face stiffened slightly, clearly not expecting Pei Zhiheng to read out the names of the three imperial physicians.

How did you know about this?

He still couldn't believe that Pei Zhiheng knew about this.

When the emperor first ascended the throne, fearing that outsiders would use this incident to imply that his mind was not stable, he secretly allocated a large sum of gold and silver to the Gu family to keep them silent.