“B-Bixia!
Forgive this slave’s wretched intrusion!
Grand Marshal Meng Kai demands an immediate emergency audience!
He refuses to wait for the afternoon council—”
The doors slid open with a panicked, uncoordinated crash.
Pang scrambled inside, his head already dropping toward the floor to perform his mandatory kowtow.
But he wasn’t fast enough.
Before his forehead hit the carpet, his eyes caught the scandalous tableau behind the massive ironwood desk.
The absolute ruler of the Jing Dynasty was leaning down from his imperial chair.
The foreign woman was on her knees beside him.
Their hands were tightly interlocked, and their faces were so close their breaths were actively mingling.
Eunuch Pang froze.
He froze mid-kowtow, his hands locked against the floor, his jaw dropping so wide his chin practically hit the carpet.
In forty years of Wenzong’s hyper-efficient reign, the Emperor had treated women like bureaucratic checkboxes.
He followed a strict, clinical royal rotation schedule solely to produce heirs for the state registry.
A consort would be brought to his bedchamber in the dead of night, the encounter was entirely mechanical, devoid of a single hug, kiss, or whisper of tenderness, and she was escorted out the moment her duty was complete.
Wenzong had never displayed a single shred of human affection toward a female in his entire life.
Yet here, in broad daylight, in the middle of the sacred, forbidden Imperial Study where state laws were written, the sixty-year-old sovereign was actively trying to tenderly kiss a wild barbarian captive.
Pang felt the literal hand of death gripping his heart.
He had just inadvertently interrupted the most powerful tyrant in the world from his romantic advances.
He realized with a jolt of pure terror that if Wenzong decided to execute him to preserve his imperial dignity, no one would ever find his body.
He frantically smashed his forehead against the stone floor, his voice cracking into a high-pitched, hysterical squeak,
“Mercy, Wansui Ye!
This slave is blind!
This slave saw nothing!
My eyes are rotten wood!
I tremble before Bixia’s supreme wrath!
Mercy!”
The romantic spell broke instantly.
Wenzong didn’t panic or blush; instead, a wave of freezing, absolute imperial authority slammed back into his features.
The gentle tutor vanished, replaced by the lethal sovereign.He didn’t let go of Katya’s hand immediately.
He gave her fingers one final, firm, and deeply possessive squeeze before slowly releasing her.
He looked down at the shivering, hysterical eunuch with a gaze cold enough to freeze a river.
“Silence your sniveling, Pang.
If one word of what your eyes witnessed leaves this room, Zhen will have your tongue pulled out through the back of your neck.”
“Zhaoban!
Zhaoban!
My tongue is yours, Lord of Ten Thousand Years!” Pang cried out in a muffled voice.
Wenzong stood up, his heavy silk robes rustling as he straightened his spine.
He looked at Katya.
The mask of Bixia was back on, but his eyes gave her a silent, intense command to hide.
Katya, understanding the lethal stakes of General Meng Kai’s arrival, quickly scrambled behind the massive, multi-paneled silk screen that divided his desk from the foreign library archive.
She pressed her back against the wall, her heart hammering from the near-kiss, her breath catching as she prepared to listen.
Wenzong sat back down, picked up his writing brush, and adjusted his posture into a portrait of flawless, unbothered statecraft.
He looked at the trembling eunuch.
“Send the Grand Marshal in.
And Pang?
If your hands shake while you pour his tea, Zhen will find an overseer who can hold a pot steady.”
The doors opened again, and the heavy, metallic clatter of iron-scaled armor filled the study.
General Meng Kai marched inside.
Fresh off his secret, emotional midnight plotting session with Crown Prince Shuren, the general’s face was tight with an arrogant, aggressive confidence.
He believed he finally had the leverage to break the Emperor’s logic.He didn’t drop to his knees immediately; he took three heavy, resounding steps into the room before performing a stiff, perfunctory bow.
“Grand Marshal Meng Kai pays respects to Bixia.
The northern border garrisons require immediate imperial intervention.
The vanguard cannot remain frozen while the court suffers from…
internal administrative paralysis.”
He was testing his boundaries, his voice carrying a sharp, biting edge that bordered on open insubordination.
Behind the translucent silk screen, Katya pressed her back against the wooden shelves of the foreign archive.
Her heart was still racing from the interrupted kiss, her lips still tingling from Wenzong’s proximity.
She couldn’t understand much of the harsh, guttural Chinese syllables pouring from the general’s mouth.
The words were a total mystery to her.
But she didn’t need a translator to recognize the vibration of a threat.
The new man’s voice was loud, raspy, and full of the booming, unearned confidence of a village bully who thought he held all the axes.
It was the exact same tone the raiders used when they stormed her village.
When Wenzong responded, his low baritone voice didn’t rise in anger.
It dropped into a freezing, absolute register that made the paper screens hum.
It was the tone of a winter frost locking over a river.
Katya felt a shiver run down her spine; she could hear the absolute, lethal authority of the sovereign returning to full power.
Katya peeked through a tiny gap in the multi-paneled silk screen, her blue eyes tracking the physical movements of the two men.
She watched General Meng Kai pull a heavy, official scroll from his armor and slam it onto Wenzong’s desk.
The general’s posture was aggressive—shoulders flared, chin tilted upward, eyes locked dead onto the Emperor’s face.
He was trying to bully a sixty-year-old man.
But Wenzong didn’t even look at the scroll.
He sat perfectly still, his large hands folded calmly over his imperial robes.
He let the general stand there in the suffocating silence, exerting total psychological dominance without moving a single muscle.
Katya realized with a jolt of raw admiration that the “old monster” wasn’t just a scholar; he was a master predator.
He was using the quietness of the room like a weapon, slowly suffocating the general’s loud arrogance until Meng Kai’s shoulders visibly stiffened and his hand shifted nervously toward the hilt of his sword.
She looked at her own bandaged fingers, realizing that this loud warrior in iron armor is somehow connected to the poison soup, the executed maid, and her own capture.
She was completely blind to their words, but she knew with absolute certainty that the man sitting behind that desk was currently fighting a silent war to keep her alive.