Chapter 691 --691
Slowly, the Emperor lifted a wide, silk-draped sleeve to cover the lower half of his face, his shoulders shaking with a quiet, highly amused chuckle. "It is fine, My Lady Vanguard," he said, his eyes curving into sharp crescents. "And here I thought you had simply forgotten how to greet Us."
"Never, Your Majesty," Heena replied, her tone perfectly flat and serious, though it was taking every ounce of her willpower just to keep her spine straight. "How could I? Even as your subject draws her final breath, she would never forget to bow to her Emperor."
The Emperor’s amusement cooled a fraction at the stark, unapologetic reminder of her impending death. He lowered his sleeve, leaning back into his golden throne with a calculating gaze. "So. Why are you here today?"
Heena didn’t waste another ounce of her fading energy on pleasantries. She reached into her robes, pulled out a thick, heavy stack of bound reports gathered by Kyle and her shadow network, and handed them to the trembling head eunuch.
The eunuch hastily carried the documents up the dais, placing them on the Emperor’s desk.
"Your Majesty," Heena said calmly, "those are detailed reports regarding several prominent noble factions. Specifically, those who have been aggressively tampering with the Imperial Examinations."
The head eunuch gasped loudly. The Emperor froze, his relaxed posture instantly snapping into lethal rigidity.
"Excuse me?" the Emperor’s voice dropped into a dangerous, icy octave. "Which exams did you just say?"
"The Imperial Exams, Your Majesty," Heena answered smoothly. "Many of the candidates selected for prime civil posts in the last cycle were the untalented, incompetent sons of the aristocratic factions. Meanwhile, the brilliant, impoverished commoner scholars who genuinely passed the examinations had their scores erased. Their rightful postings were sold off to the nobility."
The Emperor’s face darkened with absolute, unadulterated fury. The Imperial Examination was sacred. It was the throne’s one and only mechanism to bypass the ancient, entrenched nobility and inject fresh, loyal, common-born blood into the court. If the aristocratic factions were rigging the exams, it meant they literally had their hands wrapped around the throat of his government.
Before the Emperor could erupt, Heena kept the devastating blows coming.
"If you turn the page, Your Majesty," she continued, "you will also find documented proof of severe grain embezzlement from the eastern reserves over the past three years. Furthermore, I have provided a comprehensive roster of the secret agents and informants currently planted inside this very palace, keeping a watchful eye on you."
The Emperor raised a sharp eyebrow. The existence of spies was an open secret—everyone knew the palace was a viper’s nest of servants loyal to different noble houses. But to have an outsider walk in and hand him a crystal-clear, verified list of exactly who those spies were and who held their leashes? It was a terrifying, monumental breach of the capital’s shadow economy.
"There are also," Heena went on, her momentum driving her forward as she prepared to deliver the final nail in the coffin, "several noble factions who are deeply connected to the..."
She stopped.
The sentence simply vanished into thin air. Heena stared at the Emperor, her mouth slightly parted, but the words were gone. She reached into her mind to grab the damning crime—rebellion? arms smuggling? treason?—but the blood clot had already severed the bridge. The concept was entirely, flawlessly erased from her memory.
The silence in the throne room stretched. The Emperor narrowed his eyes, waiting for the climax of her political assassination. The head eunuch held his breath.
Inside her mind, the System was screaming in sheer panic.
But Heena was a seasoned transmigrator. Her physical brain was melting, but her survival instincts were razor-sharp. Without missing a single beat, she forcefully smoothed her blank expression into a mask of chilling, calculated mystery.
She offered the Emperor a faint, knowing smile and gestured gracefully toward the stack of paper on his desk.
"Your Majesty," Heena said smoothly, seamlessly covering the catastrophic misfire of her brain, "you should simply look at the documents. You will understand everything."
The Emperor definitely noticed the bizarre, abrupt halt in her presentation. But his suspicion was instantly hijacked the moment he turned to the final page of the dossier.
All the color drained from the Emperor’s face, instantly replaced by a dark, murderous purple.
BANG.
The Emperor violently slammed his open palm against the heavy, solid wood of the imperial desk.
"These treasonous bastards!" he roared, the raw fury of the Son of Heaven echoing through the grand hall.
To the Emperor and the eunuch, the sound of the table slam was just a loud thud. But to Heena’s actively hemorrhaging brain, the sudden, sharp acoustic shockwave hit her skull like a physical sledgehammer.
A blinding, agonizing spike of pain violently impaled her right behind her eyes. Her vision instantly whited out for a fraction of a second. A cold, clammy sweat immediately broke out across her forehead and the back of her neck as her failing nervous system screamed in protest.
But Heena was a warlord. She ruthlessly swallowed the groan of agony building in her throat, digging her fingernails so deeply into her palms that they nearly drew blood. By the time her vision cleared a second later, her face was a flawless, terrifying mask of absolute calm.
"Your Majesty," Heena said, her voice impossibly steady, though a thin sheen of sweat now glistened at her temples. "As you can see from those documents, this conspiracy involves nearly half of the capital’s aristocratic nobility. They are ancient, hereditary families. And currently... we cannot touch them."
The Emperor’s head snapped up. His eyes narrowed into dangerous, freezing slits as his wounded imperial pride flared.
"Cannot touch them?" the Emperor repeated softly, rising slowly from his golden throne. "So you mean to tell me that I—the Son of Heaven, the absolute sovereign and father of this nation—cannot touch a pack of thieving bureaucrats in my own court?"
"Your Majesty, you can absolutely touch them," Heena corrected calmly, meeting the Emperor’s lethal gaze without a flinch. "You have the military authority to drag every single one of them into the public square and execute them today. You can bathe the palace steps in their blood."
She paused, letting the violent image settle before ruthlessly tearing it down.
"But if you do," Heena continued, her voice dropping into cold, pragmatic calculation, "the empire will completely shatter. The foreign enemy forces my grandfather just bled to subdue on the borders will instantly sense the internal collapse and march on the capital before the noble blood even dries."
The Emperor’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t interrupt her.
"Furthermore, Your Majesty, executing them outright will not strengthen the throne; it will cripple it," Heena explained, gesturing faintly toward the damning documents. "These factions are not just idle aristocrats sitting in their courtyards drinking tea and writing poetry. They are the arteries of the empire. They control the grain distribution, the merchant guilds, the trade routes, and more than half of the empire’s economic livelihood."
Heena took a slow, carefully measured breath to push back the throbbing in her skull.
"If you blindly swing the executioner’s sword at half the nobility," Heena warned softly, "it will not just be the remaining aristocrats who rebel against you. The commoners will starve, the economy will halt, and the very people you rule will tear this palace apart stone by stone."