In the deserted bedchamber, Yu Weiming continued to gaze greedily at his gift.
Beneath the moonlight, the honey colored body resembled amber melting in the warmth.
On the thin face were mottled tear tracks, left behind by suffering and torment, or perhaps by some unbearable pleasure. An electronic shackle encircled the twitching throat, its indicator flashing once every few seconds, while the golden chain around the waist swayed gently with each faint breath.
Yu Weiming narrowed his eyes, desire churning in their depths.
Punishment, humiliation… The honey colored skin was covered in whip marks and burn scars.
The mere thought of how the Federation’s hero had been treated was enough to make Yu Weiming’s breathing grow instantly rapid and feverish.
He lowered his eyes and bent forward, allowing his silver white hair to fall into the hollow of Gu Yuanze’s collarbone.
The new emperor lost himself in his imagination.
He imagined gathering that mutilated body into his arms, feeling its warm yet fragile temperature against his own skin. He imagined kissing the tear tracks and tasting their salty bitterness as they trembled beneath his lips.
His heart pounded violently, as though it were about to burst through his chest.
“This really is an excellent gift…”
No wonder that sinister, emaciated Councilor Wu had been so confident. This was indeed the most beloved gift Yu Weiming had ever received in his life.
In the end, the emperor’s fingertips touched the skin he had longed to feel.
Although Gu Yuanze had grown considerably thinner after enduring torture and punishment, the muscles that remained beneath his skin still possessed distinct, powerful contours. His body felt exactly as Yu Weiming had imagined it would: soft and smooth, like cream ice cream.
His fingertips traced the lines of the mermaid muscles along Gu Yuanze’s lower abdomen, and the mutilated body tensed beneath his touch.
The new emperor could not suppress a shudder. He simply closed his eyes and allowed himself to indulge in the exquisite sensation.
The rich fragrance of rose essential oil, tinged with the smell of blood, spread through the chamber, transforming into a web of tangled desires that ensnared everything within its reach.
Eventually, he gathered the terribly broken body into his arms and pulled it tightly against his chest.
Their skin touched, and the heavy fragrance of roses enveloped them. He went mad with the need to rub his cheeks against that scarred body, pressing the tip of his nose close to the faint heartbeat. The metallic smell of blood, the natural fragrance of skin, and the uniquely cold scent that belonged only to Gu Yuanze flooded his lungs.
The body in his arms was even lighter than he had imagined.
It was as though the weight that had been carved away was not limited to his limbs, but included the weight of his very soul.
Yet Yu Weiming had no desire to concern himself with any of that now. He was completely immersed in his satisfaction, like someone on the verge of starving to death who had finally been given a full meal. He could do nothing but hold the person in his arms even tighter, greedily and unrestrainedly drawing in his scent.
This was a gift someone else had given him.
“So, you’re mine…”
“You’re mine now.”
Gu Yuanze was still alive, and from this moment onward, he would belong to Yu Weiming alone.
The emperor was utterly satisfied.
Even if the gift appeared to have been completely ruined, it did not matter.
After all, he had never been particularly attached to the idea that a gift must have all four limbs intact and be perfectly healthy.
Yes, his clever and cunning nemesis, the Federation Fleet Commander, had certainly been fascinating on the battlefield. But perhaps a broken version of him would suit Yu Weiming even better.
After all, only a Gu Yuanze who was battered and broken, suffering unbearable pain and on the verge of mental collapse, could allow Yu Weiming to do whatever he pleased, couldn’t he?
Even if Gu Yuanze hated him… he no longer had hands or feet with which to fight back.
How wonderful.
That night, amid the intoxicating fragrance of roses, Yu Weiming tenderly and greedily kissed his gift.
Every inch of skin, every single burn mark, he cherished them all, unable to bear the thought of drawing away.
When the moonlight shifted, he even caught the fragile stretch of Gu Yuanze’s neck between his teeth. Gu Yuanze’s head tilted back unconsciously, his Adam’s apple rolling beneath the emperor’s lips in an arc of utter despair. That silent spasm finally drove the emperor beyond the point of control. He tore open his silk shirt, pressing his burning chest even more tightly against the battered, scarred body.
In the darkest hour before dawn, Yu Weiming finally fell asleep with his spoils of war held securely in his arms.
The emperor was exceptionally pleased with his gift.
Nevertheless, the following day, he still showed no mercy when he ordered Councilor Wu thrown into prison. The councilor was subjected to brutal interrogation and torture, repeatedly wailing and begging for mercy amid his agony.
A mad emperor did not need a reason for anything he did, and no one dared to plead for mercy on the councilor’s behalf.
As long as His Majesty was happy, that was all that mattered.
……
The new emperor, Yu Weiming, had suffered from chronic insomnia for years.
After acquiring Gu Yuanze, he finally experienced a sense of restful satisfaction in sleep that he had never known before.
His most hated, most admired, most beloved, and most treasured nemesis had now become his private possession. Even though Gu Yuanze had already suffered a mental collapse and was barely clinging to life, he was still a living corpse, a living specimen with a warm body and a chest that continued to rise and fall in Yu Weiming’s arms.
Yet, even as he held him tightly, Yu Weiming felt an overwhelming sense of satisfaction.
Caressing that silky black hair never failed to draw him into a state of blissful contentment, allowing him to sink into sleep with a sense of profound peace. He slept deeply and soundly, his dreams sweet and undisturbed, until daylight filled the room.
After waking, he would feel reassured simply by the warmth of the body in his arms.
He could never resist kissing him.
The corners of his lips, the corners of his eyes, his neck, Yu Weiming kissed them all without caring whether Gu Yuanze showed any response whatsoever.
He did not need Gu Yuanze to respond.
It was like a mad, fanatical believer repeatedly kissing and worshipping the statue of a deity. The believer did not need the statue to return his devotion with any sort of response.
The only difference was that his deity still possessed a warm, beating heart.
And so, the new emperor of the Empire continued to immerse himself in this relentless act of sacrilege, indulging in his devotion to the point that, for several consecutive days, he could hardly bear to leave his bedchamber even for a single step.
….
During that same period, Qi Shaozhou, Natalie, and Ludwig remained remarkably composed.
After all, the Yu family’s traditions ran deep. Compared with the previous emperor before the last, who had indulged in extravagant feasts of debauchery and even staged human sacrifices, and compared with the previous emperor’s own madness and depravity, Yu Weiming’s temporary obsession with a man was hardly anything particularly outrageous.
Besides, he had not completely abandoned the affairs of state as those earlier emperors had done.
Although he was deeply engrossed in the enemy commander, he still dealt with the documents requiring his attention from within his bedchamber.
Outside the palace, the Empire’s war against the Federation continued to advance, with the front lines steadily moving forward.
Within the Empire, the turbulent undercurrents of political intrigue and struggles for power continued to flow silently beneath the surface.
The sun was exceptionally bright that day.
The three young Imperial officials sat together in the garden, basking in the sunlight for a while. Without saying a word, they all found themselves recalling the seventy two sleepless hours six months earlier, when they had followed Yu Weiming in staging a coup.
It had been a desperate struggle in which life and death hung by a thread, a world of flashing blades and deadly confrontations. Everyone had been utterly exhausted, yet none of them had felt the slightest trace of sleepiness.
The blood vessels at their temples had throbbed violently as they became consumed by a tense, feverish frenzy.
As time passed, the opposition fell one by one, while the Northern, Western, and Eastern Territories successively declared their allegiance.
In the end, even the Aristocratic Council had been forced to compromise, requesting that the crown prince appear immediately for the coronation deliberations.
Finally, the three of them followed closely behind Yu Weiming as he entered the Imperial Palace. They walked beneath the vaulted ceilings of the long corridors, the crown prince’s embroidered dark red cloak billowing behind him as his military boots crossed the scarlet carpet.
The soles of his boots were still stained with the blood of the Fourth and Fifth Princes, which had yet to dry completely.
The smell of blood mingled with the fragrance of incense, creating a strangely sweet scent.
Inside the bedchamber, the dying former ruler lay connected to a mechanical life support system.
The crown prince approached him and took his withered hand in his own.
The former emperor was actually only in his forties, yet years of debauchery and unrestrained indulgence had reduced him to something resembling a skeleton wrapped in silk. His cloudy eyeballs shifted in their sockets, while a malicious, mocking cloud of white mist gathered against his breathing mask.
“You think… you’ve won…? You think… that sitting on that throne… will allow you to change the Empire?”
The old emperor broke into a violent fit of coughing. Blackish red blood bubbled at the corners of his mouth, and a hoarse, almost curse like chant escaped his throat. “Naive… So naive…”
“That throne is a curse. It will only change you! Yu Weiming, my son… you, too, will be changed by it. You will become as miserable and mad as I am, and in the end, you will become… the very thing you hate most.”
“I’ll be waiting for you in hell.”
The mechanical life support system emitted a continuous, meaningless tone. At last, the old emperor’s fingers loosened, and his hand fell limply over the edge of the bed.
Yet his eyes remained open, frozen in an expression of some twisted sense of victory.
…….
It was not only Qi Shaozhou whose father had once followed the previous emperor. Natalie’s and Ludwig’s fathers had also served under him.
In his youth, the former emperor had been an ambitious monarch, determined to govern diligently and bring prosperity to his country.
Yet this talented and idealistic ruler had inherited an Empire that was little more than a decaying, dilapidated machine, held together by countless patches and already teetering on the brink of total collapse.
The rigid class hierarchy within the Empire had become deeply entrenched centuries ago.
From that point onward, the same cycle had repeated itself endlessly: the corrupt nobility exploited and oppressed the common people; the common people, unable to endure their suffering any longer, rose up in rebellion; the nobility suppressed the people on behalf of the Imperial Family; and the Imperial Family rewarded the nobility with even greater privileges.
It was a vicious cycle, riddled with flaws and festering with corruption.
Yet, somehow, within this unhealthy and rotting equilibrium, everyone had found a place for themselves, allowing the precarious machinery of the Empire to continue functioning.
The result was that any reform intended to improve the situation might instead accelerate the collapse of everything.
Once, the former emperor had believed that his ambition and abilities would surely enable him to discover the key to breaking these chains.
But he had been wrong.
The idealistic monarch, who had genuinely wished to serve his country and its people, soon came to understand the terrifying resilience of the system he had inherited. Any sweeping, radical reform would provoke fierce resistance from the nobility. Even if he managed to prevail against them at an enormous cost, the Empire would only end up like a patient who had undergone the removal of an excessively large malignant tumor, bleeding to death because too much of its blood had been lost.
Yet if he chose to maintain the status quo, he would be nothing more than another powerless, helpless maggot, a puppet watching the Empire march toward its inevitable destruction without being able to do anything about it.
Caught between these two impossible choices, the former emperor, once possessed of grand ambitions and lofty aspirations, gradually fell apart under the pain and absurdity of his predicament.
Therefore, when he cursed the new emperor with such bitter hatred in his final moments, it was not necessarily his son whom he truly hated.
What he hated, above all else, was his own life: a lifetime spent standing at the very pinnacle of power, only to discover that he was utterly powerless to change anything.
And Yu Weiming’s fate would most likely be no different from his own. In the end, he, too, would probably become isolated, lonely, and mad.
Natalie lowered her blue eyes and sighed.
“So, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that His Majesty has something to devote himself to now.”
At least he had something to hold on to. Whether it was a person or an object hardly mattered, as long as it kept him from going mad too quickly.
As long as that happened, there would still be a sliver of hope.
Natalie, Qi Shaozhou, and Ludwig were all prepared for what lay ahead. Their parents and grandparents had once dreamed of changing the corrupt mechanisms that governed the Empire.
In the end, however, they had all been consumed by their own dreams, suffering persecution and suppression for their efforts.
Natalie’s mother had died while treading that difficult path toward glory, while Qi Shaozhou’s and Ludwig’s parents had spent half their lives enduring hardship and instability.
And now, the next generation had emerged as the Empire’s new force, standing in their place.
Even if they were no more than faint candle flames in the darkness, they were determined to try once again.
The Empire was teetering on the brink of collapse. Only by remaining at the side of Yu Weiming, who was halfway between sanity and madness, did they have even the slightest hope of saving it.
The ten year war between the Empire and the Federation had begun because the Empire, sinking ever deeper into corruption and decay, had needed to redirect its internal conflicts outward.
Throughout those ten years, this god of war like crown prince had repeatedly mobilized the full strength of the Empire to attack the Federation, prolonging the life of an empire in its twilight years through plunder and exploitation.
Although external aggression was unjust, there was another way to look at the situation.
Rather than allowing both the Empire and the Federation to continue rotting until they eventually collapsed together, perhaps it was better for the stronger side to annex the weaker one.
At least then, even if the resulting peace and prosperity were built upon the blood and tears of the defeated, one side might still enjoy several decades of illusory stability and prosperity.
Yu Weiming might have been somewhat abnormal, but he was by no means insane.
At present, he was the only person in the entire Empire who still possessed genuine foresight and continued struggling to find a way forward for its future. The young generation, the last remaining sparks of hope, would continue to stand firmly by his side.
The three of them rose to their feet and exchanged farewells.
Although they all knew that the road ahead would be dark and treacherous, and that they might at any moment suffer the same fate as their parents’ generation, sacrificing their families, their honor, and even their lives, they were still willing to continue.
For the sake of restoring the Empire to its former glory.