Chapter 54 - 2#

When the Emperor truly lost control, the only result would be rivers of blood — and those caught in it would not be limited to Jingzhe alone.

Even letting his mind brush against that future made Ning Hongrú’s courage fail him.

He had no excess of kindness. But he had no wish to see that kind of hell.

“Hah—”

Jingzhe lurched upright, gasping, pressing one hand to his throbbing forehead. Cold sweat had soaked through him.

He had just had a nightmare, out of nowhere.

He had dreamed of the people around him dying, one after another, while he stood unable to move, unable to stop any of it — just watching.

The hatred, the helplessness, the despair — it felt so real that even after waking, his heart was still hammering.

His fingers shook as he clawed at his own hair. Then, fumbling around in the storage box beneath his bed, he found a small bottle.

Two fingers pulled out the stopper. A sweet, dense smell drifted out — wild honey that Yunkui had brought him at some point.

He tipped it back and swallowed a large mouthful.

The sweetness, thick and slightly bitter at the edges, slid from his tongue down his throat, clinging to everything as it went.

Jingzhe worked hard at swallowing it. The excess of sweetness — overwhelming as it was — helped him think more clearly.

He exhaled several times, pressing the strange, nameless panic down, and tucked the bottle away. He got out of bed and moved without a sound, feeling around for a clean inner robe, and changed in the dark.

The clothes he’d been wearing were soaked through with cold sweat. Unwearable.

Winter was almost here. The days were getting colder.

Jingzhe walked barefoot across the floor, feeling the chill creep up from his toes and work its way into his bones, mingling with the remnants of that inexplicable dread and settling like a weight in his stomach.

He threw a robe over his shoulders and slipped out.

Moving by feel in the darkness, he made his way to the washroom outside. The water left there had long gone cold. Jingzhe picked up the wooden bucket and followed the familiar route to the boiling room.

There was only one place in the Directorate to heat water.

Each bureau had an allocated ration of firewood, but the Directorate of Cleaning always received the most — partly because Jiang Jinming had the connections to arrange it, and partly because they genuinely needed it more than the others.

A young junior eunuch was on duty at the boiling room, and had dozed off against the doorframe. He rubbed his eyes at the sound of footsteps and looked up.

“Oh — Jingzhe. You need water?”

It was unusual for Jingzhe to do something like this — getting up in the middle of the night wasn’t really acceptable. But the junior eunuch peeked outside, then quietly pulled Jingzhe in.

“Head Jiang had water brought up before he went to sleep. There’s still some left in the pot. I can give you some if you want.”

The duty guard didn’t speak with Jingzhe very often, but he clearly knew who he was — he bustled around to help, which surprised Jingzhe a little.

“Did you know me before? From somewhere?”

The junior eunuch paused, looked up at Jingzhe for a moment, then quickly looked back down at the ladle in his hands.

“I used to be in the Bureau of General Affairs,” he said quietly. “After that man died, things got better for us.”

The former head of the Bureau of General Affairs — that was Wufu.

Jingzhe went quiet at that.

The junior eunuch said nothing further, ladled a full bucket of hot water for Jingzhe, and dragged a low stool over.

“You can soak your feet here. This corner doesn’t show from outside, and the water’s easy to dump when you’re done.”

He gave Jingzhe a small smile, turned, and went back out to his post.

Jingzhe stood there for a moment, then sat on the stool and slowly took off his shoes.

He had felt cold before. Now, unexpectedly, he felt warm.

He put his feet in the bucket, leaned forward, folded his arms over his knees, and let out a slow, quiet breath.

This was genuinely comfortable.

He had come outside driven by a kind of restlessness, and now, with the cold gradually leaving him and the heat from the water spreading upward, the low heaviness he’d been carrying began to lift.

He thought it was probably because of what he’d learned about Zheng Hong today.

Yesterday, Zheng Hong had gone out on a routine supply run. By the time his group came back, they had been badly beaten — the injuries were severe.

Jingzhe had heard about it only this morning. When he went to the Office of Miscellaneous Purchases, he found that Zheng Hong had developed a high fever.

His injuries had been serious enough that he had vomited blood twice, which had frightened his roommate badly.

Once Jingzhe heard, he went back for his money, went straight to the imperial pharmacy, and spent a frustrating amount acquiring what was needed. He arranged for someone to prepare and boil the medicine. By evening, the fever had come down a little.

Zheng Hong was a second-rank eunuch and lived two to a room — the space was considerably larger than a junior eunuch’s quarters, which at least made it possible to move around him.

Of the whole group who had gone out that day, Zheng Hong had the worst injuries. When the others were asked what had happened, the ones who were coherent said it was a misunderstanding — probably some wealthy family’s attendants who had gotten into a scuffle with them.

For something framed that way, even a second-rank eunuch had almost no recourse.

At least the money Jingzhe spent hadn’t gone to waste. Just before he left, Zheng Hong had surfaced briefly from the fever, managed a few words — not many, but enough to confirm he was still there.

Jingzhe rubbed his face and stayed bent over his knees, not moving.

When he had arrived at the Office of Miscellaneous Purchases earlier, the faint smell of blood had still been in the room. The dried blood at the corner of Zheng Hong’s mouth had made something contract in his chest.

Zheng Hong was a dedicated miser.

His deepest pleasure in life was accumulating money, and his greatest reluctance was spending it. Jingzhe still didn’t know what he was saving it all for — but the inner layer of his clothing had been patched so many times it was more patch than original cloth, and he never seemed to replace anything unless forced.

After Jingzhe moved to the north wing, he and Zheng Hong didn’t see each other as often. But the connection was real.

They had started out sharing the same large bunk room — Jingzhe, Zheng Hong, and a handful of other new arrivals.

Jingzhe understood the man. Zheng Hong cared only about money, and yet, in a particular way, he had a sense of principle. Whatever he’d been paid to do, he would do properly.

The handful of times Jingzhe had needed someone to run an errand that required money, Zheng Hong was always the first name that came to mind.

Over time, without either of them quite deciding to, the transactional relationship had become something else.

Jingzhe rubbed absentmindedly at his own hair and pulled himself tighter, as if that could drive out the chill that had nothing to do with temperature.

Anything could happen to anyone. He knew this. He had always known this.

And yet he still hoped that the people he cared about would be the exception.

Inside the Bureau of Foreign Affairs, several of the courtyard’s rooms still had their lamps burning, though inside there was silence, as if no one were present.

Ayé San sat in one of the rooms with a few attendants beside him. No one spoke, and the stillness was peculiar.

The attack on Héyīn had been beyond what they had expected.

The Hèlián dynasty had been declining for decades. Once, perhaps, it had been a genuinely formidable power — but even the largest creatures had their end. They had records of this, even as nomadic people living beyond the Central Plains.

Cycles of division and unity on this continent were as reliable as the seasons. And every time, it was the best opportunity for those outside the borders to draw strength from the chaos.

They felt no shame in this.

Raiding neighboring peoples was preferable to starving every winter.

Their curved blades were always sharp, always ready, prepared at any moment to pierce through an enemy’s chest, to use their blood as a battle cry of victory.

Food, women, wealth — this land had everything they wanted.

How could they ever walk away willingly from a prize like this?

When the late Emperor came to power and began weakening military spending while promoting civil officials and suppressing military ones, it was clear to them that the moment they had been waiting for was approaching.

Year by year, the border regions had grown familiar with outside raids.

Spring and winter were the most dangerous seasons — the colder and more desperate the winter, the more likely the raids. Back and forth for over a decade, until both sides were exhausted but still locked together.

The nomadic forces grew stronger, but not yet strong enough to swallow the Central Plains whole. The Hèlián dynasty was aging toward collapse, still capable of struggling, but no longer strong enough to drive out the outsiders or to hold itself together easily.

And so the negotiations between Gaonán, Yuèyù, and Héyīn had quietly taken shape. What appeared to be Héyīn’s initiative was also, genuinely, something the others had wanted.

None of them had expected Hūyíng Húdǎ to be killed.

The man was cunning and meticulous, and had always been careful. What kind of stratagem could the commanding officer at Yùshí Pass have possibly used to lure him out into the open?

The news had kept the capital’s citizens celebrating for three days and three nights — and simultaneously left all the foreign envoys in the Bureau of Foreign Affairs deeply unsettled.

For envoys like Shānyòu’s representative, who had come to file a grievance, this was excellent news. But along with the shock of pleasant surprise came fear.

The Hèlián Emperor had completely caught them off guard.

Héyīn was not finished. They had more than Hūyíng Húdǎ, and one defeat would not break them.

But losing Hūyíng Húdǎ meant they would never again be what they were today.

And if the Hèlián Emperor could strike Héyīn, he could strike anyone.

For all these years, smaller states like Shānyòu had been neglecting their tribute obligations. If the Emperor decided to make an issue of it, they would be next.

These smaller states were all thinking along similar lines. As for the larger ones like Gaonán and Yuèyù — they had gone very quiet. The arrogance of recent weeks had been thoroughly suppressed by the swiftness of what had happened.

The capital had only just received the news, but the nomadic peoples beyond the frontier had certainly learned of it even sooner.

Every envoy here was desperate to leave.

“Sir — didn’t you say we needed to leave the capital by the tenth month? But it’s well past that now. Why haven’t we moved?”

In the nameless silence, someone finally couldn’t hold it in, and the words broke the strange stillness.

The day Hūyíng Húdǎ’s head went up on the city wall, the Emperor had granted the other foreign envoys permission to depart. Some had left immediately — Shānyòu and Yuèyù among them. Others had lingered without making a move. Gaonán was one of these.

Without Ayé San’s word, none of them could go.

“This afternoon, I received a message.” Ayé San spoke quietly in the Gaonán language. “The Shānyòu delegation was ambushed by bandits on the road. Nearly all of them were killed.”

Nearly all — meaning only one person survived.

The Shānyòu envoy himself had lived.

The others in the room were startled. Someone immediately asked: “Bandits? Are there really bandits this ruthless inside Hèlián borders?”

Foreign delegations traveled with sizable escort parties, many of them skilled fighters. Even Shānyòu, as easily bullied a small state as it was, would have brought substantial protection. How could they have been reduced to one survivor?

“Apparently the bandits were very fierce,” Ayé San said mildly. “I hear the Shānyòu envoy nearly lost his mind.”

The weight behind his words was unmistakable.

“Did anything happen to the Yuèyù delegation?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

Yuèyù, who had been the most aggressive of them all, had come to no harm. So why was it Shānyòu?

Ayé San’s deputy said quietly: “Do you think — are you saying — this was the Hèlián Emperor’s doing?”

Ayé San sighed. “Who knows.”

The situation was not good.

When Héyīn had run into trouble, he had suspected that their delegation had been played. Now Shānyòu’s delegation had been ambushed — and that made the suspicion near-certain.

Perhaps Shānyòu had used the Héyīn envoys to “attempt” an assassination of the Emperor — not intending to actually succeed, but hoping to provoke him into turning his wrath on Héyīn.

Any delegation could have been used the same way — Gaonán’s, Yuèyù’s.

But Shānyòu, that small and unfortunate state, was sandwiched among several powerful neighbors. It made a convenient instrument.

The Hèlián Emperor had kept all the foreign envoys in the capital without permitting them to depart, while also not restricting their movement — maintaining an ambiguous posture, never quite reaching a verdict.

He hadn’t seemed particularly concerned with finding the actual truth.

He had used the pretext Shānyòu offered to strike Héyīn, kill Hūyíng Húdǎ, and deal their confidence a heavy blow. On the day the news reached the capital, he had the remaining Héyīn envoys publicly executed.

The blood and the victory had lit a fire in the people of the capital. Public sentiment was alive with it.

If Hèlián was going to war, this was the essential foundation.

And then, almost as an afterthought, once the other delegations were permitted to leave — he had quietly ensured that the Shānyòu delegation was reduced to one survivor.

Bandits.

Ordinary bandits — capable of slaughtering an envoy’s full escort?

The Emperor had accepted the pretext Shānyòu handed him, and so he had left their envoy alive. But the assassination attempt was real, the scheming was real, and someone had to pay for it.

It looked, in a certain light, very fair.

Ayé San closed his eyes. Perhaps this was all just his own guesswork. But guesswork had a way of being right.

“We have no intention of assassinating the Hèlián Emperor. There has been no movement from beyond the frontier. If the Yuèyù delegation can leave safely, so should we.” His deputy kept his voice low. “So why have you kept us here? Is there another reason?”

Ayé San pressed his fingers to his brow. After a long pause, he exhaled slowly.

His voice came out rough. “Over the past several years, we have maintained intelligence contacts in this capital.”

He held out his hand. In his palm was a small object that looked almost like a pill.

He crushed it. Inside was a tiny strip of paper.

“Leaving may not keep us safe either.”

From the Office of Miscellaneous Purchases, the sound of coughing came and went.

Zheng Hong was still quite ill.

But he was considerably better than those first days of high fever. The medicine Jingzhe had obtained was doing its work. The vomiting of blood had stopped, and consecutive days of doses had managed to keep the fever in check. Over the past two days, the coughing aside, he had been able to sit up.

Inside the Office, people said only that Zheng Hong had been unlucky.

A few second-rank eunuchs had begun maneuvering, trying to use the situation to cause trouble — but Yunkui and Huli had stepped in to cover most of Zheng Hong’s responsibilities, and they all knew Yunkui had some backing. The maneuvering was quietly abandoned.

Jingzhe came every day. In the beginning he had brought medicine; he had also brought five or six jade bottles, all of them useful.

Between those things, Zheng Hong had made it through.

“Zheng Hong, you really are lucky,” said Lai Tie, his roommate, unable to hold back. “Everything Jingzhe’s brought you is good stuff.”

The medicine salves alone had dealt with those badly swollen bruises — but the jade bottles themselves were something else. They had both seen enough valuable things passing through the palace to recognize quality. Those bottles, sold outside, would fetch a hundred taels at minimum.

And Jingzhe had given them to Zheng Hong without a second thought.

Zheng Hong coughed into his hand and said flatly, “He received some imperial gifts a while back. Naturally that kind of thing is good quality.”

Lai Tie accepted this and let it go.