After the rebirth, the queen took the Meiqiang tragedy script

"I was wondering why Lord Gu was so eager to take Gu Haiwang out of the palace. He even immediately accepted the punishment of being demoted to a commoner. It seems that Lord Gu has been planning this game for a long time." Ye Qinghuai murmured.

Seeing Ye Qinghuai's frustrated and worried look, Aunt Fanghua comforted him, "Your Majesty, don't worry. The Queen is just pregnant, and it's hard to say whether it's a boy or a girl."

Ye Qinghuai didn't think so.

"If they could go to such great lengths to get the queen pregnant, they would not allow the child to be a girl."

Aunt Fanghua was surprised and asked, "They... could they possibly replace the newborn baby in front of His Majesty?"

Ye Qinghuai raised his eyes and looked at Aunt Fanghua calmly, smiled bitterly and said, "What if I don't live to see the child born?"

By then, Lord Gu will hold great power in the court, and the Queen will have the final say in the harem. Whether the baby is a prince or a princess, won't it just a matter of a word from them?

As for Gu Haiwang, who was demoted to a commoner, it seems that it is just around the corner for him to return to officialdom.

What Ye Qinghuai said was far beyond Aunt Fanghua's imagination. She was dumbfounded, and seemed to want to refute, but she didn't say anything.

However, Ye Qinghuai changed the subject and said, "This must be what Gu Shihai is planning. But I am not someone who will just sit there and wait for death."

She was silent for a moment, then asked Zhou Shouyi, "Grandpa Zhou, is there any way to get rid of the baby in the queen's belly without anyone noticing?"

Zhou Shouyi frowned slightly. After all, he was a doctor from an orthodox background who was good at pulse diagnosis and traumatology. He had always been dismissive of such inferior specialties as gynecology and toxic herbal medicine.

But now was not the time for him to worry about the subject and the method. The old man quickly returned to normal and replied, "Of course there are many ways to have an abortion. But whenever you use drugs, there will be traces. If you want to do it secretly, I'm afraid there is no such method."

Zhou Shouyi's answer was within Ye Qinghuai's expectations. She withdrew her gaze from Zhou Shouyi, stroked the teacup in her hand, and fell into deep thought.

"As long as Imperial Doctor Zhou has a way, I am willing to do it. We must not let the Queen give birth to...give birth to that bastard to be the Crown Prince." Aunt Fanghua said angrily.

Ye Qinghuai looked at her annoyed expression, smiled softly, and said: "If it really comes to that, it shouldn't be Aunt who does it. If Aunt does it, it's the same as me doing it. In that case, everyone will know that it is I who wants to kill the baby in the Queen's belly."

Ye Qinghuai withdrew her gaze. She looked at the cold tea at the bottom of the bowl. A chill flashed across her eyes. She murmured, "The one in this palace who least wants to see the Queen give birth to a prince is not me, but someone else."

Ye Qinghuai stopped talking, but Aunt Fanghua already understood.

"Your Majesty, do you want to use the Imperial Concubine to get rid of the Queen's child?"

Ye Qinghuai did not respond. She continued to look at the tea bowl in her hand, as if in a trance. After a while, she said, "This is the last resort."

After all, if the queen can get pregnant once, she may get pregnant a second time.

If you want to sleep soundly without anyone else beside you, you must get rid of the root of all this - Gu Shihai, once and for all.

Thinking of Gu Shihai, Ye Qinghuai could not help but frown. In the past year, she first dismissed Shi Taiping, the Minister of Rites who obeyed Gu Shihai's orders, and then eliminated Du Jing, Gu Shihai's right-hand man, and took the opportunity to purge the Ministry of Rites and the Ministry of Justice. It can be said that most of the power of Gu's party in the court was eliminated.

But Ye Qinghuai still had to maintain a respectful and polite appearance in front of Gu Shihai. No matter how unhappy she was in her heart, she had to keep smiling in front of Gu Shihai and not touch him at all.

Because Gu Shihai has absolute influence in the Dajing Army.

Ever since the war broke out in the north, in order to get rid of Gu Shihai's threat and control as soon as possible, Ye Qinghuai spent a lot of energy studying Dajing's army and military system. Then, she discovered a thorny problem.

Dajing's military generals and civil officials are two completely different systems, and there is almost no connection between the two systems.

If the civil service group is a big network woven by the binding of interests, then the Dajing army is a group of factions formed with the aristocratic families as the core.

For a young man who has just joined the army, what determines his position and promotion speed in the army is not his martial arts skills or his military strategy, but his surname and hometown.

Because these two options often determine his family.

For example, the surnames Xu and Lu can be found everywhere in the army of Yunzhou. Although people with the same surname may not necessarily be from the same clan, they are ultimately from the same origin. Going back three or five generations, they are all more or less related.

The most serious one was Rongzhou. Ye Qinghuai had counted that among the officers above the rank of lieutenant general in the Rongzhou army, more than half of them were surnamed Cai.

One advantage of this situation is that the army's cohesion and combat effectiveness are stronger. As the saying goes, fathers and sons fight together, and people from the same clan and hometown who speak the same dialect can share weal and woe and work together on the battlefield.

But conversely, it is also more difficult to manage.

Once a fight broke out among fellow villagers in the army, the government was completely unable to intervene and the matter had to be handled by the army itself.

For many years, the emperor's management of local troops was, on the one hand, to control the number of local troops, and on the other hand, to win over the military governors of various states.

Due to the aristocratic nature of the Dajing army, it was often difficult for military commanders sent from the capital to the local areas to gain a foothold, so the Jiedushi was often the leader of the largest military commander family in the local area. For the emperor, as long as he captured the Jiedushi, he could stably control the army of one side.

Therefore, in the history of Dajing, most of the military governors who served longer were the emperor's children and relatives.

This delicate balance lasted until the Xingrui period.

In the 12th year of Xingrui, the King of Beidu was executed for collaborating with the enemy, and a large number of the Black Flag Army were implicated. Afterwards, Emperor Xingrui believed that the excessive autonomy of the local armies in various states was a threat to the court, so he drastically reduced the establishment of local armies and concentrated them in the Jingji Guard. He also lowered the ranks and treatment of military ranks in the army as a whole, and even the rank of the Jiedushi was lowered by one level, one level lower than the prefect.

From then on, although the emperor and the governors of various states still maintained a marriage relationship, they did not seem as close.

During the reign of Ye Qinghuai's father, he had few children and could not marry so many direct relatives. He was also frail and sickly, and was bedridden in his last few years. He was exhausted just to control Shengjing under his nose, and had no time to care about the local emperors who were far away.

Unfortunately, during the Shunping period, wars continued in various places, especially in the southwest, where Jinchuan repeatedly invaded the border and fought with Dajing intermittently for five or six years. Frequent wars forced the prefectures bordering neighboring countries to increase their establishment, but Emperor Shunping did not have the energy to maintain and clamp down on these local armies one by one. As a result, by the end of the Shunping period, the armies of various prefectures were almost completely out of the emperor's control, even worse than during the Xingrui period. (End of this chapter)