Chapter 11632 — What If the Queen Has Other Intentions
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 3
"Raise the curtains."
Her voice was sweet and syrupy, bewitchingly so. Even Wei Zhao had to admit that with that voice alone, this woman had what it took to enchant all living things.
When the gauze curtains rose and he saw her face clearly, Wei Zhao was slightly taken aback.
To have so utterly bewitched the Zhou Son of Heaven, he had assumed this queen must at least be a peerless beauty of the highest order. Yet now, looking at her, her looks could not be called ugly, but they were merely ordinary—she could not even compare to the palace maid standing before him.
The strange thing was that upon seeing the queen's true face, everyone around him—including the maid named Zijuan—wore expressions of intoxication.
And these were all women.
Could the queen's beauty really have such devastating effect on other women?
Recalling the Zhou Son of Heaven's behavior moments ago, he had clearly been bewitched out of his wits as well.
She slew men and women alike.
Wei Zhao could not help studying her features anew, yet the more he looked, the more ordinary they seemed; he simply could not discern what charm she possessed.
Could there be something wrong with my aesthetic sense?
Wei Zhao could not resist running through Gu Mengyao and the other women in his mind. That could not be it—his taste was clearly quite normal.
"So you are Wei Zhao?"
The sweet, cloying voice sounded again; the Queen regarded Wei Zhao with keen interest.
In every frown and every smile she was a thousand graces incarnate, leaving the crowd around her ever more dazzled and bewitched.
Yet Wei Zhao only found it more and more peculiar.
To his eyes, her whole manner stood out as starkly affected—not a trace of beauty in it, but rather something repellent.
Such a violent discrepancy was genuinely suspicious.
"I am."
As Wei Zhao answered, a sudden thought stirred in his mind; he withdrew the World Will and reexamined her with his own eyes and his divine sense.
Sure enough, the effect was entirely different this time.
The Queen, who a moment ago had been merely plain, was in an instant transformed into a woman of matchless loveliness and peerless elegance.
Judged from this vantage, she was beyond all question the most beautiful woman Wei Zhao had ever seen—not merely among them, but without equal; even Gu Mengyao and the other women, set beside her, showed a gap visible to the naked eye, the two not on the same level at all.
Seeing the infatuation surface in Wei Zhao's gaze, the Queen let a trace of triumph show in her eyes and smiled a radiant smile.
At that smile, everyone in the hall again stared fixedly, eyes gone blank.
One smile to topple a city, a second to topple a nation.
The ancients truly did not deceive me.
Yet though Wei Zhao's face looked as besotted as the rest, his heart was clear as a mirror.
The same Queen, viewed with the World Will and viewed without it, was simply two different people.
To sum it up in a single phrase:
Too much beauty filter.
Under ordinary sight, what the crowd saw was not the Queen's true appearance at all, but a false image beneath layer upon layer of beautifying filters.
Only through a cheat-like perspective such as the World Will could her real appearance be seen clearly—in essence, she was merely a woman of plain looks, as ordinary as ordinary could be.
Watching her affected posturing, Wei Zhao felt only a sense of absurdity.
He had thought that "photo fraud" happened only in the secular world; he had never imagined it existed here in the Inner Royal Court as well—and their methods were far more sophisticated than phone beauty filters. An ordinary person could not detect the slightest flaw.
The Queen's eyes were silken with charm as she smiled sweetly and asked, "Am I beautiful?"
"…"
Wei Zhao felt an urge to throw up his last night's meal, but fortunately suppressed it in time—after all, it would have been rather impolite.