She kissed him.
It wasn’t a delicate, submissive courtly embrace.
It was the fierce, explosive collision of the Siberian whirlwind meeting imperial steel.
She threw the entire weight of her raw, unpolished passion directly into his lips, her body pressing hard against his.Wenzong’s mind completely shattered.
For sixty years, his encounters with women had been clinical, mechanical, and dead—choreographed duties to produce heirs in the dark.
He had never experienced a woman’s hunger, never felt a fierce, wild tongue mapping his own mouth, and never been claimed with such desperate, possessive fury.
The clinical master strategist died in an instant.
A low, gravelly groan tore from the deep of his chest.
His large, powerful hands locked around her waist, lifting her entirely off her bare feet.
He spun her around, his massive frame driving her backward until her lower back slammed against the edge of his sacred ironwood desk.
State documents scattered like autumn leaves.
Official tax ledgers from the southern provinces tumbled to the floor.
A priceless porcelain water dropper shattered against the leg of the chair.
Wenzong didn’t care.
He pressed his heavy body flat against hers, his lips turning ravenous as he devoured her mouth, his fingers digging deep into her hips through her silk robes.He was sixty years old, and he was finally, fiercely alive.
The desk where he had written the absolute laws of an empire was now the altar of his absolute undoing.
Outside the heavy lacquer doors, the outer corridor was a graveyard of silence.
Eunuch Pang stood guard, his hairless face still the color of wet chalk from his earlier near-death experience.
He was trying to look like a dignified imperial monument, but his knees were actively knocking together beneath his satin robes.Then, the noises began filtering through the thick paper screens of the Imperial Study.
It wasn’t the rhythmic, low drone of statecraft.
It was the sharp thud of heavy timber shifting.
The unmistakable clatter of official ledgers hitting the floorboards.
The crisp shatter of porcelain.
And beneath it all, the deep, ragged, and entirely unmistakable sound of his supreme sovereign groaning with a wild, terrifyingly virile passion.Pang’s eyes went wider than copper coins.
His heart didn’t just skip a beat; it violently tried to escape his chest.In broad daylight?
In the sacred Yushufang?
On the Emperor’s desk?
Pang felt a cold sweat drench his undergarments.
He didn’t just stand there; he took three frantic, tiptoeing steps backward away from the door.
He squeezed his eyes shut until he saw stars, slammed his hands flat over his ears to block out the scandalous, history-altering sounds of the barbarian woman breaking the throne, and practically ran down the corridor to hide behind a pillar.
He prayed to every ancestor in the registry that he would suffer sudden amnesia before the Emperor opened that door.
____________________________________________
While the study was being thoroughly compromised by the northern storm, General Meng Kai was marching through the outer courtyards, his face still twisted into a mottled purple mask of murderous rage.
Wenzong’s threat of a forced retirement to a disease-ridden swamp had cut deep into his pride.He knew he couldn’t bully the Emperor directly.
The old man’s intellect was too sharp, his legal grip too absolute.
But as Meng Kai adjusted his iron-scaled armor, a dark, calculating realization struck him.
The Emperor was sixty years old.
For decades, he had treated the harem like a cold administrative chore.
Yet now, in his twilight years, he was acting like a young, hot-blooded youth—all because of a pale-skinned, blonde barbarian.”If he can be tempted by one young flesh,” Meng Kai muttered, his eyes narrowing into venomous slits, “he can be tempted by another.
We just need a woman who belongs to us.”
Meng Kai didn’t return to his military barracks.
He diverted his steps to the eastern sector of the capital, requesting a covert meeting at the estate of Minister Lin—the Grand Secretary of the Treasury.Minister Lin’s daughter was Consort Shu (Zhao Meifeng).
Unlike the disgraced Consort Xian, Consort Shu was younger, highly cultured, and deeply frustrated.
She was a beautiful piece of courtly clockwork, but she had not yet given birth to a son.
Her position in the harem was stagnant, and her family’s political leverage was fading.
Meng Kai sat across from the elder Minister Lin in a dark tea room, his voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial whisper, “The Emperor has drifted from the path of reason, Minister.
He has locked your daughter’s superior, Consort Xian, in a stone cage.
And for what?
A nameless barbarian captive from the northern wastes.
He spends his nights—and now his days—hoaded up with her.”
Minister Lin frowned and gripped his tea cup.
Such talk could be considered treasonous if the wrong people overheard them.
“Bixia’s personal matters are not for the Grand Council to judge, General.”
General Meng Kai’s eyes gleamed as he said, “But the biology of the throne is our business.
Think carefully, Lin.
The Emperor is sixty, yet his blood has suddenly run hot again.
He is virile.
He is capable of favor.
If he can give his undivided attention to a wild, unrefined savage, why not to your flawless, beautiful daughter?”
Minister Lin’s hand froze.
The political implication hit him with massive force.
“Encourage your daughter to strike now.
Tell her to abandon her polite patience.
Instruct her to intercept the Emperor, to use her youth, and to tempt him into her bedchamber.
If Consort Shu can conceive a new son now—while the Emperor’s mind is soft with desire—your family will control the future of the Jing Dynasty.
And once the barbarian is pushed aside, we can finally cross the river and claim the northern iron mines.” Meng Kai insisted.
The trap was laid.
General Meng Kai was organizing a multi-pronged assault: while Crown Prince Shuren armed the vanguard for a “Righteous Cleansing” coup on the outside, a new, ambitious noble family was preparing to launch a seductive honey-trap on the inside.