To his consternation, she then re-combed her hair with her fingers, wetted her cracked lips with her tongue, edged down from the heap of straw, knelt in front of him, and slowly unfastened the belt of her wrap.

With the wrap falling down from her body, she prostrated her naked self at his feet.

It presented a shocking, surreal scene.

Despite having washed herself earlier, her naked back was smeared greenish again through contact with the moss-covered cell wall, and a layer of loose straw was stuck to her bare, bruised buttocks.

The posture kept the front of her body partially out of sight, but he could not help glimpsing her white breasts flattened hard against the cold cell floor.

It was not a gesture to show her gratitude, nor likely an attempt to seduce him. In those glamorous nights of her fashionable poetry parties, ironically, such a dramatic tableau could have overwhelmed a bookish old man like Judge Dee. But not here, not at this moment, not with her torture-ravaged, cell-sullied body groveling in the dust.

What was the point of her choosing to make such a degrading gesture at this moment?

He was struck with a vague, inexplicable, uneasy sense of déjà vu. Somewhere he might have seen or read about the strange pose, but for the moment, the meaning of her prostration at his feet eluded him.

‘I’m putting myself at your mercy, Your Honor. There is no point having the case drag on like this; you’re surely right about it. I have suffered more than enough in prison. With this truthful confession, you may put an end to the investigation.’

So it was a gesture begging for mercy – but why should she have made it in such a self-humiliating way?

In a shaft of light penetrating through the rusted iron bars of the cell, his glance fell on the shining yellow silk underrobe beside her on the ground, and he saw her clutching its sleeve – perhaps subconsciously – in her trembling hand.

He felt his heart sinking at the connection of it.

What had been worrying him from the beginning turned out to be true. The posture on her part made a subtle yet unmistakable acknowledgment of the identity of the man she had been seeing in the yellow silk underrobe.

She did not have to say his name – Prince Li, her secret lover from the Tang royal family.

To those Li loyalists, the crown prince was entitled to such a piece of imperial clothing with dragons embroidered on it. Prince Li himself must have believed it, too.

So Xuanji’s pose came like an echo from a fallen empire in the ancient time. Judge Dee was hit with the recollection of it – a defeated king, along with his queen and imperial concubines, surrendered themselves to the conqueror outside the surrounded city, kneeling with their bodies stripped naked to the waist, groveling in utter submission in the dust.