Chapter 690 --690
Uprooting the Minister of the Right and his entrenched faction wasn’t a simple matter of kicking down doors and swinging a sword.
While Heena’s grandfather had secured the Vanguard legacy through sheer, terrifying military might, his power was relatively new. The civil factions, on the other hand, were aristocratic nobility. Their families were ancient, operating on hereditary titles with roots deeply embedded in the very foundation of the empire. They were a sophisticated, bureaucratic rot. You couldn’t just execute the entire nobility and throw them out of the imperial court—if you did, the nation’s infrastructure would collapse overnight, leaving the empire defenseless and starved.
To destroy a forest of ancient, poisonous trees, you couldn’t chop them down one by one. Heena needed a catalyst. She needed one massive, catastrophic event to lure every single one of those aristocratic parasites out into the light at the exact same time, forcing them to overplay their hands.
But while her tactical mind flawlessly plotted the destruction of a dynasty, it was quietly, violently betraying her in the dark.
The memory loss was no longer just a vague, dizzying fog. It was actively carving out specific pieces of her reality.
She realized the true extent of the decay on a quiet afternoon, staring blankly at a mirror. She had been trying to recall her mother’s face—or rather, the original Seera’s mother. The face was entirely gone. When Heena searched her mind, there was only a smooth, featureless blur where the woman’s features should have been.
At first, Heena had just scoffed, brushing it off. The original mother had been an absolute, undeniable bitch anyway; forgetting her felt infinitely more like a blessing than a tragedy.
But a few seconds later, the true, chilling horror of the symptom settled into her bones like ice.
Heena never forgot a face. Across all her past lives, across decades of navigating cutthroat timelines, her photographic memory was her ultimate weapon. She could remember the face of a street beggar she passed eleven years ago. She could remember the exact eye color of an assassin she fought in the dark.
Yet, when she actively tried to pull up the image of the original owner’s father to test herself, there was absolutely nothing. The faces of Seera’s parents had been scrubbed from her mind with terrifying precision.
It wasn’t just the original body losing its ties to the world. The blood clot was actively bypassing her transmigrator defenses, erasing the core cognitive abilities she had always relied on to survive.
Despite Heena’s relentless political maneuvering, the System was currently experiencing a profound, digital existential crisis.
It simply could not understand what its Host was doing. She was doing absolutely everything except touching the main objective. She had paralyzed the Prime Minister—great! She was actively terrorizing the corrupt aristocratic nobility—fantastic! But none of this had anything to do with securing the "transmitter" and completing the actual mission. She was playing a massive, bloody side-quest while the main timer ticked down.
To make matters worse, the System was quite literally losing its mind from sheer, unadulterated boredom.
By the laws of transmigration, a System could not wander too far from its bound Host. It was tethered to her side, forced to sit in the quiet, dim bedroom while Heena succumbed to the blood clot’s heavy exhaustion. A System only needed about an hour of standby mode to fully recharge its energy core. Heena, however, was sleeping for two hours, then sixteen hours, and recently, a horrifying, panic-inducing eighteen hours straight. The little golden lion spent most of its days staring at the ceiling, violently kicking its paws in the air, and begging the universe for some stimulation.
Then, one morning, the routine shattered.
Heena woke up before the sun even crested the horizon. She ordered the servants to prepare a bath, dressed in her absolute, most formal Vanguard aristocratic attire, and announced she was going to the Imperial Palace.
The entire estate went into shock. The Vanguard Madam hadn’t left the compound in weeks, and she looked like a stiff breeze could knock her over. But nobody dared to stop her. Or rather, no one possessed the authority to tell the tyrant no.
When it was time to leave, Heena explicitly ordered a carriage instead of her usual warhorse.
It wasn’t out of a desire for luxury. It was pure, cynical pragmatism. Given her sudden bouts of narcolepsy, Heena was genuinely terrified that she would fall asleep in the saddle. If the legendary heir to the Vanguard military dynasty simply nodded off, fell off her horse, and was unceremoniously trampled to death by its hooves, it would be the most humiliating, unheroic end in the history of transmigration. She would be the absolute laughingstock of the Bureau. A cushioned carriage was the only safe option.
When the carriage finally pulled up to the towering gates of the Imperial Palace, she requested an immediate audience.
The palace guards scrambled. They sprinted inside to get the necessary clearance, leaving Heena standing by the carriage in the morning air. It only took ten minutes, but for Heena’s decaying brain, ten minutes standing still was an eternity. By the time the guards returned to escort her in, a heavy, suffocating wave of drowsiness was already crashing over her.
She focused entirely on placing one foot in front of the other, fighting the blinding fog in her head as she was led deep into the palace, finally arriving at the Emperor’s private quarters.
Heena stepped over the heavy wooden threshold. The Emperor was seated casually at the far end of the room, sipping tea.
Relying on sheer muscle memory, Heena stepped forward, placed one hand over her chest, and bowed her head in a flawless, aristocratic greeting.
"I greet Your Majesty," Heena began, her voice steady and respectful. "Long..."
And then, the blood clot struck.
The rest of the sentence simply vanished. It was as if someone had taken a wet cloth and wiped the chalkboard of her mind completely clean. She stood there, bowed halfway, staring at the polished floorboards in absolute, dead silence.
She paused for a long time. A very long time.
The silence in the room stretched until it became agonizing. Beside the Emperor, the head eunuch was sweating profusely. The poor man’s eyes were practically bulging out of his skull as he desperately, violently telegraphed signals at her with his face. Say it! his wide, panicked eyes screamed. Say the rest of the words!
Heena’s mind was entirely blank. She had no idea what she was supposed to say next.
"Host!" the System shrieked in her mind, its digital voice spiking with panic. "The greeting! Long live the Emperor! Say ’Long live the Emperor’!"
Ah, Heena thought, the foggy gears in her brain slowly grinding forward. Right.
She opened her mouth to finish the grand, traditional imperial blessing, but the fatigue heavily slurred her internal filter.
"Long live the Emperor," Heena finally said aloud, her voice echoing in the dead-silent room, "for a thousand... two thousand... two thousand... two thousand years."
The Emperor was genuinely startled. He stared at the frail, aristocratic warlord standing before his throne, blinking as her bizarrely repetitive blessing echoed in the grand hall.