My Empress Bestie Wanted Bubble Tea, So I Unleashed My Hidden Power

1: 1

My best friend and I transmigrated into the ancient world at the same time.

She became the Queen of Dayong, the most beloved woman in the royal harem; I became the Realm-Guarding High Priestess who reads fate from the stars and communes with the living and the dead.

After ten months carrying the child, she gave birth to the only little princess in nine generations of the dynasty.

And then she told me she wanted to go home.

"Stella Henson, I want to go back to the slushie stand."

I froze where I stood.

"You want to go back where?"

She held the little princess, and something like homesickness welled up in her eyes.

"Back to our hometown, of course. You know the little jingle from home."

"You love me and I love you, sweet as the slushie stand, honey-honey."

I stared at that achingly familiar face, and every drop of blood in me ran cold.

In our first year here, we had made a pact.

So that we wouldn't be branded as outsiders and executed in these lawless times, we swore never to breathe a single word about the modern world.

But now my best friend had the slushie stand on her lips, and was even calling it our hometown.

This woman smiling so gently in front of me was absolutely not my best friend, Mabel Pruitt.

1.

I kept my face calm, untroubled, and answered in an even voice.

"You're joking again. There's no city called the slushie stand anywhere within Dayong's borders."

She lifted her head, eyes curving into a smile.

"Are you getting muddled? Our hometown before we transmigrated was called the slushie stand."

She took my hand and went on talking, lost in it.

"I miss the days we spent in school together before we came here."

"Splitting one bagel in the morning, sharing a single pair of earbuds to watch shows in class."

The way she spoke, the little crinkle of her nose when she smiled, even the messy bun she'd twisted up without thinkingall of it was Mabel Pruitt down to the last detail.

But an alarm was going off inside me, and my hand tightened instinctively around the short blade at my waist.

Back when we first transmigrated.

On our very first day here, Mabel had done nothing but casually say she wanted to charge her phone.

And she'd been taken for an enemy spy, nearly strung up on the city wall for all to see.

After surviving that, Mabel had made a solemn pact with me.

"To stay alive, we can never mention anything modern again."

But now she not only had the word transmigrate on her lips.

She'd even turned the slushie stand into the hometown we came from?!

I pushed down the panic rising in me.

And ran through the situation fast.

Was it just that Mabel was weak after the birth?

Her guard down, joking with me?

Or was she not Mabel Pruitt at all.

I drew a slow breath and probed carefully.

"You have a husband who loves you now, and a sweet little daughter."

"Stop dwelling on the past. Just settle in and be Dayong's queen."

Then I watched her reaction closely.

Mabel raised her head.

A single tear dropped onto the back of my hand with no warning at all.

"How can I not go back..."

"All those relatives of mine scraped together a hundred thousand to send me to the northern capital for school."

"I'd just gotten the money, and then I vanished without a word."

She covered her face and sobbed, tear after tear soaking through the thin garment over her chest.

"My mom is such a proud woman."

"When she borrowed that money she swore up and down she'd pay them back the moment my student loan came through."

"Now both I and the money are gone. I don't even know how she's supposed to face them."

My throat tightened, and some of my suspicion eased.

Mabel came from a single-parent home, and her mother's health was poor.

The two of them were proud in exactly the same way.

She'd been working odd jobs to help with the household since high school.

The fact that her family had scraped together the money for college.

Was her most private secret.

Besides her family, I was the only one who knew.

So I really had been too on edge.

I wrapped an arm around Mabel's shoulders and murmured to comfort her.

"Don't worry. I'll take you home, I promise."

She threw her arms around my waist, gripping hard enough to nearly crack my ribs.

"Stella, thank god I have you."

"No matter where we are, you're my best friend."

I let my guard down and said a few soothing words.

When I turned back to play with the little princess, delicate and lovely as carved jade.

Emperor Jasper Harding strode into the royal bedchamber, his whole face lit with the joy of new fatherhood.

"Stella, hurry, cast a fate chart for my little princess."

"My daughter is surely a lucky star sent down from heaven!"

I noted the little princess's birth time and laid out her chart with celestial fate-charting.

But the moment the pattern surfaced, I felt myself plunge into a pit of ice.

2: 2

2.

The princess's chart showed a life starved of family ties.

The moon-star had fallen into the seat of the void, its light snuffed out, no trace of living breath left in it.

What the chart laid bare was unmistakable. The princess's mother was already dead.

Yet here, right now, Mabel Pruitt lay on the bed and smiled at me, soft and gentle.

"Stella, what's wrong?"

Seeing the change in my face, she braced a hand on the edge of the bed and began to rise.

Jasper Harding, emperor of Dayong, strode over to me, his eyes anxious.

"Stella, you don't look well."

"Is something the matter with the princess?"

A line that sounded like concern, and it pulled every nerve in me tighter still.

Right now I had nothing to go on.

If I blurted out that Mabel was a fake, one wrong move and I'd only tip off the enemy.

I wasn't afraid to die.

But if something had truly happened to Mae.

I couldn't let her die alone, unknown and unexplained, in this deep palace in a broken age.

And besides, celestial fate-charting wasn't always entirely accurate.

If someone had deliberately tampered with my reading, then accusing her outright could be the very thing that hurt Mae.

I lifted my head and forced down the suspicion churning inside me.

I dredged up a faint smile.

"With Your Majesty's protection, the princess is surely blessed with every safety and grace."

Jasper was delighted.

"With those words from you, Stella, my mind is at ease."

"To bless the daughter I share with my Mae, from today I proclaim a general pardon across the realm and open the granaries to feed the people!"

"I will have all under heaven celebrate my daughter's birth!"

As if she'd sensed my unrest, Mabel gathered the child up and brought her over to me herself.

"Stella, back in school you always used to say you'd never marry."

"You made me promise that if I had a daughter someday, she'd call you her godmother."

"That name doesn't come free, you know. Hurry up and give her a name."

She hummed a little tune, patting the soft pink bundle in her arms.

I searched her every move for a single crack.

But her expressions, the small gestures woven through her words, all of it was the Mabel Pruitt I remembered.

Then something flashed in my mind, and I ventured a test.

"How about we name her Ivan?"

She nodded without a moment's hesitation, teasing the baby with a tender smile.

"Any name you choose, I love it."

"Baby will love it too, won't you?"

Her voice was gentle as water.

But it landed in my ears like a thunderclap.

Every word set my eardrums trembling.

Mabel Pruitt's first love was a piece of trash.

Freshman year, he was carrying on a sweet campus romance with her.

While every night he was online with his ex, hot and heavy.

None of us had any idea, not until the ex went after Mabel online, branding her the other woman.

Only then did the whole truth come out.

That trash of a first love was named Ivan Fletcher.

The kind of name Mabel would curse out loud even when it surfaced in a dream.

And yet I'd named the princess Ivan, and she hadn't gotten angry?

Instead she went right along with me, saying she loved the name.

In that moment, my heart sank all the way down.

She wasn't my Mae.

She was nothing but a counterfeit carrying pieces of Mabel Pruitt's memories.

3: 3

3.

I made an excuse and slipped away.

I hurried back to the observatory tower.

Using the braided bracelet Mabel had given me the year we both crossed over as my medium, I cast three divinations in a row.

Every chart came back steeped in danger.

Every single one was a death sentence, the kind where the person dies and the lamp goes dark.

Just then, a faint rustling came from beyond the door.

I threw it open and rushed out.

"Who's there?"

A young woman in a pink palace gown was crouched behind the door.

The moment she saw it was me, she whispered.

"High Priestess, it's me. Consort Larissa."

I looked at that round, girlish face.

It took me a long moment of searching before it came back.

When Mabel and I had first arrived in this world, we'd saved a consort who'd nearly drowned by accident.

That was Consort Larissa.

She came from a modest background and had never found favor in the palace.

Ever since that day she'd been endlessly grateful to Mae.

She was trembling like a leaf, and she glanced back to make sure no one was around.

Only then did she draw a protective charm from inside her robe and press it into my hand with great care.

"Three days before the birth, the Queen gave me this protective charm."

"She said that when the High Priestess returned, I was to place it in your hands myself, no matter what."

My heart dropped, and in an instant I felt like I'd plunged into ice.

A month ago a great drought had struck the south.

I'd been summoned out of the palace to pray to the heavens for rain on behalf of the stricken people.

Once it was done I traveled day and night, and only made it back after Mabel had already given birth to the little princess.

While I was gone, something had happened in this palace. I was certain of it.

Mae had sensed the danger closing in and had no time to send word.

So she'd left it with Consort Larissa to wait for my return.

"Did she say anything else?"

"No. The Queen only said that once the charm reached the High Priestess's hands, you would understand."

After I'd seen Consort Larissa off, I lowered my eyes to the charm in my palm.

It was made of tribute paper, and Mae had inked the words herself.

I opened it and read it several times over, and found nothing out of the ordinary.

But Mae had gone out of her way to have it delivered. It had to be some important hint.

I turned it over and over, and then it hit me.

Before we crossed over, Mabel had loved horror movies.

In a lot of them there was a plot where the lead prays for a protective charm and disaster follows instead.

Back then she'd joked to me about it.

"This isn't a protective charm, it's a death warrant."

"Soon as you see the charm, you know it's time to pack your bags and run."

I gripped the charm in my hand, and the blood ran cold all through me.

This was a warning.

Mae wanted to tell me there was danger in this palace.

She was telling me to run, and fast.

Even at her most desperate hour, the thing she'd been thinking of was still my safety.

But Mabel was the Queen. Who in the inner palace could threaten her position?

The first person I thought of was Jasper Harding.

Yet everyone under heaven knew Jasper loved Mabel to the marrow.

At their wedding he had offered half his empire as the bride-price.

As emperor, at the rite of heaven, he had sworn an oath.

In this life he would have no wife but Mabel, or else the throne would pass to another and his head would be parted from his body.

And ever since, he truly had not touched another consort.

At the thought, grief welled up in me before I could stop it.

In the end, my Mae never did get to have me bring her home.

I allowed myself only the time it takes an incense stick to burn to grieve.

Then I got up at once and sealed every door and window of the observatory tower.

The most pressing thing now was not weeping.

If she lived, I would find her; if she was dead, I would find her body.

Whether the real Mabel was living or a ghost, wherever she was, I would find her.

I drew the dagger from my waist and, without hesitation, drove it into my heart.

Violent pain burst out from my chest.

I pressed my lips tight together and cupped the blood from my heart, letting it fall onto the braided bracelet Mae had given me.

Fighting through the pain, I lit three soul lanterns.

I offer ten years of my lifespan in sacrifice. The soul-burning rite to pierce the world of the dead.

A thread of black mist drifted out of the bracelet, following the winding corridors of the inner palace, and floated toward the northwest.

4: 4

4.

The palace was terrifyingly still that deep in the night.

The black mist led me on, threading me through the dark.

What shook me was this: it skipped past every remote dead well and every abandoned hall in the palace.

In the end it pointed straight at the bedchamber Jasper Harding shared with the queen.

My throat went tight.

Mae's remains were still here.

Watching the fake queen and her own beloved twined close together, day after day. How much pain must that have been.

This time I didn't hesitate. I went over the wall and kicked the bedchamber doors open.

Jasper Harding and the fake queen were getting ready for bed.

Seeing me barge in like that, they rose in surprise.

"Stella, why have you come?"

Behind me, the imperial guard rushed in at the noise and closed a ring around me, their spears leveled at me all at once.

I lifted my hand and pointed past Jasper Harding at the fake queen.

"She is not Mabel Pruitt."

"The real Mae, her body, is right here in this bedchamber!"

Jasper Harding froze, then turned back to look at the wife he loved above all things.

The fake queen startled first, then let out a bitter, resigned little laugh.

"Stella."

"Have you worn yourself thin praying for rain for the people, until your mind's not right?"

"You can't just say things like that."

Jasper Harding said nothing.

After a moment, he spoke, low and quiet.

"Mae, Stella is the Realm-Guarding High Priestess."

"All these years she's prayed for Dayong and put down our troubles."

"If she doubts you, just prove it to her."

The fake queen's eyes reddened.

Then, in front of everyone, she pushed up her sleeve.

Baring a vicious, ugly scar along her arm.

Tears at the corners of her eyes, she looked at Jasper Harding, wronged to the core.

"When His Majesty was attacked all those years ago, I took the killing blow for him with my own body."

"I lost so much blood I was hanging by a thread, and Stella prayed for me three days and three nights without a drop of water."

"Have you all forgotten?"

With that, the fake queen let her sleeve fall.

"Stella, I know worry has clouded your judgment."

"But such hurtful words, don't say them again."

Guilt flooded Jasper Harding's face at once, and he pulled her into his arms.

"Stella, this scar is proof. She truly is my Mae."

"For the sake of all your years with the queen, I won't hold you to the crime of breaking into the royal bedchamber."

"Let this matter drop."

I gripped the dagger in my hand, my eyes gone to frost.

"Fine. You don't believe me."

"Then let Mae tell you herself!"

I cut open my palm with the dagger and smeared the hot blood across both my eyes.

When I opened them again, the black mist that had blurred and faded gathered once more.

Like a snake slithering down beneath the bed!

I said nothing. I stepped around Jasper Harding and the fake queen.

Threw back the brocade quilt on the bed.

Worked the dagger under the yellow rosewood boards to pry them up.

Drew a deep breath, and heaved them open.

When I saw what lay inside, I clapped a hand over my mouth, tears bursting free.

Jasper Harding took one look and spat out a great mouthful of blood.

He snatched a guard's sword and whipped it back against the fake queen's throat.

Eyes gone bloodred, teeth clenched, he roared:

"Who the hell are you!"