ironically, was executed by her in 689 on accusation that he had considered rebelling against her.) Di responded: Wu Zetian was impressed by the response and praised him. Later that year, when the imperial university's student Wang Xunzhi (王循之) submitted a petition to Wu Zetian asking her to permit him to go on vacation, she was poised to issue an edict to approve of the request, when Di opposed the edict—not on the merits, but on the basis that university students' vacations were such minor events that she should not bother herself with them, but rather should order that such petitions be directed to the university secretaries. She agreed. In 692, Wu Zetian's secret police official Lai Junchen falsely accused Di, along with other chancellors Ren Zhigu, and Pei Xingben, along with other officials Cui Xuanli (崔宣禮), Lu Xian (盧獻), Wei Yuanzhong, and Li Sizhen (李嗣真), of treason. Lai tried to induce them to confess by citing an imperial edict that stated that those who confessed would be spared their lives, and Di confessed and was not tortured—but when Lai's subordinate Wang Deshou (王德壽) tried to induce him to implicate another chancellor, Yang Zhirou, refused. Di then wrote a petition on his blanket and hid it inside cotton clothes, and then had his family members take the clothes home to be changed into summer clothes. Wu Zetian thereafter became suspicious and inquired with Lai, who responded by forging, in the names of Di and the other officials, submissions thanking Wu Zetian for preparing to execute them. However, the young son of another chancellor who had been executed, Le Sihui, who was seized to be a servant at the ministry of agriculture, made a petition to Wu Zetian and told her that Lai was so skillful at manufacturing charges that even the most honest and faithful individuals would be forced into confessions by Lai. Wu Zetian thereafter summoned the seven accused officials and personally interrogated them, and after they disavowed the forged confessions, released but exiled them—in Di's case, to be the magistrate of Pengze County (彭澤, in modern Jiujiang, Jiangxi). In 696, during the middle of an attack by the Khitan khan Sun Wanrong against Zhou prefectures north of the Yellow River, Wu Zetian promoted Di to be the prefect of Wei Prefecture (魏州, roughly modern Handan, Hebei). It was said that Di's predecessor Dugu Sizhuang (獨孤思莊), in fear of