Everyone in Xinyang Imperial Palace knew that Empress Dowager was the Emperor's mother, and they also knew that the old woman had two daughters-in-law.
Her first daughter-in-law died so young at the age of twenty-three before she could even witness how her son had grown up. The young lady named Luo Xiaoli was indeed unlucky. At the age of sixteen, she was chosen to be Wu Shun's wife and had to marry a man who was four years her senior at such a young age.
Perhaps the only luck she had was that she didn't have to serve her husband immediately after the wedding ceremony. She didn't need to live with her husband right after her marriage, and instead, she only started living with him when she was nineteen years old.
Nineteen was still a young age, and perhaps it was another stroke of luck for her when she didn't get pregnant right away even after she started serving her husband in bed. Luckily, she had only gotten pregnant when she was twenty-two years old and could be said to be quite the age for a woman.
But then again, Luo Xiaoli didn't have much luck in life, and that was why she died just a few months after giving birth to her first child. Before her son could even call her "mother," she had already left the world, and it was perhaps one of the saddest tragedies in Xinyang Imperial Palace.
Luo Xiaoli was indeed Empress Dowager's first daughter-in-law, but she had to remember how her son married another woman not long after he was appointed as the new Emperor. It wasn't her son's wish to marry another woman when he already had the wife he loved the most, but pressure from the East Faction forced him to marry someone from that faction in order to balance the empire.
After the Central Faction split into two as the East and West Faction, Luo Xiaoli's family became part of the West Faction, and that was why the people of the East Faction thought that it was unfair for the Emperor to only have a wife from the West Faction. Hence, they forced Wu Shun to marry a woman from the East Faction, and that woman was none other than Zhu Ruolan.
Zhu Ruolan was indeed Empress Dowager's second daughter-in-law, but Empress Dowager hated that woman very much. Zhu Ruolan was actually the same age as Luo Xiaoli, but Empress Dowager knew that the two women had different characters which were like the two opposite poles of the planet, and that was why it could be said that her favorite was Luo Xiaoli. In her eyes, only Luo Xiaoli carried the title of her daughter-in-law.
It affected the way she looked at her son's lineage from Zhu Ruolan. Wu Jingguo was indeed her son's descendant, and the young man was none other than her second grandson, but that didn't change the fact that the young man was born from Zhu Ruolan's womb. That was why Empress Dowager had such poor judgment towards the young man.
Perhaps the cause of those feelings was how Luo Xiaoli was killed, and many people believed that it was the people from the East Faction who killed her years ago. There wasn't enough evidence for that assumption, but Empress Dowager had her own beliefs, which was why she hated the people of the East Faction even if her son claimed that he didn't belong to either faction.
"I am loyal to this empire, Your Majesty," Yu Ming finally answered the old woman, and when the woman looked at him again, he continued, "This empire has two Princes, and I am loyal to both of them. That's not bad, is it, Your Majesty?"
The pink-robed man didn't look panicked even after feeling the obvious tension between Empress Dowager and Wu Jingguo. It seemed he had foreseen that the situation would turn out like this, and that was why he was able to give the old woman a calm response.
"This empire does have two Princes, but you know how one of them is so cunning, right, Ming'er? Do you still want to support a bad person? Do you want to support the son of a murderer?" Empress Dowager responded to Yu Ming coldly.
It could be said that the old woman's complexion was still not good because of her illness, but the way she spoke was still extremely loud and arrogant, and Yu Ming knew that that was the woman's character.
The Empress Dowager was indeed not the soft-hearted type of woman. Once she hated someone, she would hate that person until her last breath. She wasn't the type to easily change her judgment of someone, and that was why she was true to her opinion about the Second Prince who could only sit quietly at the table.
Yu Ming knew about it very well, and that was why he patiently replied, "It still hasn't been proven that Concubine Zhu was indeed involved in Empress Luo's murder case, Your Majesty. And even if it is proven that Concubine Zhu was indeed the person behind Empress Luo's death, I can't blindly blame His Highness the Second Prince because he is not his mother, Your Majesty. He is an individual, and even if he is indeed related by blood to Concubine Zhu, we cannot blindly attribute him to Empress Luo's murder case."
Truth be told, what Yu Ming had just said to Empress Dowager was a slap in the face for himself. He had to admit that he had blindly hated Wu Jingguo in the past just because he was Zhu Ruolan's son. Just because Wu Jingguo took the title of Crown Prince from Wu Jinhai, Yu Ming hated the young man without trying to find out the truth behind everything.
Even if Yu Ming didn't want to admit it, he felt bad for blindly hating Wu Jingguo, and that was why he didn't even glance at the younger man as he uttered a statement directed at Empress Dowager.
He was different from Wu Jingguo who focused on his figure at this time, and it was clear that the Second Prince was stunned by what he had just heard.