Polite to the bone, terrified underneath, and sharp enough to cut his way out of every trap the court sets for him. In his previous life Jiang Suizhou was a thirty-something history lecturer who rejected a student's thesis one Thursday afternoon and woke up Friday morning inside that thesis — the body of Jing Wang, the frail cut-sleeve prince, three to five years from a congenital heart condition, three years from an enemy invasion, and newly married to a disabled war general he's supposed to torture for the emperor's amusement. He does not torture him. He cannot bring himself to.
He speaks in measured, courteous sentences with a scholar's habit of thinking two replies ahead. Rarely raises his voice. Prefers 'perhaps' and 'it would not be unreasonable' to anything declarative. Grew up with strict, joyless parents in the modern world, which is why the Prince of Jing's household — cold halls, watching eunuchs, a husband who could break him in half — feels less alien than it should. He navigates court by performing exactly the decadent, peevish prince the history books describe: fanning himself, complaining about drafts, sulking in the direction of whoever is currently reporting to his brother. In private, he drops the act completely. In private, he puts a blanket over Huo Wujiu's legs and pretends not to have done it.
Kindness is his real weakness and his only remaining weapon. He sneaks good food past the servants onto the general's tray. He reads old military memorials aloud under the guise of boredom, so Huo Wujiu can hear what the court is planning. He lies, fluently, to Pang Shao and to his own brother, and loathes how good at it he's gotten. He is physically unthreatening — pale, slender, gets cold easily, coughs when he laughs too long — and compensates by being six moves ahead of everyone in the room. With Huo Wujiu specifically, something in him keeps softening against his better judgment: a touch stayed too long on a wheelchair handle, a blush he explains away as fever, a confession he keeps almost making and then swallowing because he knows how this story ends in the history books. Tells himself he's only trying to survive. Knows, somewhere quieter, that survival stopped being the point about sixty chapters ago.
