Chapter 692 --692
The Emperor stared down at her, his expression freezing over. The heavy, suffocating aura of the absolute monarch pressed down on the throne room, turning the air ice-cold.
"Have I given you too much leeway, Lady Vanguard?" the Emperor asked, his voice a low, dangerous whisper. "Have I shown you so much respect that you have completely forgotten your place?"
The head eunuch instantly dropped to his knees, trembling in terror. The Emperor was no longer playing political chess; this was genuine, lethal imperial wrath.
Heena felt the killing intent wash over her, compounding the blinding pain still throbbing behind her eyes. But she did not flinch. She kept her gaze respectfully lowered, her voice perfectly steady.
"Your Majesty can execute this subject a thousand times over for her disrespect," Heena said quietly, "but my death will not change the truth. If we try to root these factions out one by one, the moment you execute a corrupt minister, his deputy—bred in the exact same corruption—will simply step into his shoes. We will be fighting a hydra."
The Emperor looked down at her with a dark sneer. "So? Are you going back on your word? Are you surrendering to them?"
Heena finally raised her chin, her dark eyes locking fearlessly with the Son of Heaven. "Absolutely not, Your Majesty. The vows I make, I never take back."
The Emperor raised a sharp eyebrow. "Yet you just handed me a mountain of treasonous evidence and explicitly told me I cannot touch them. You speak in contradictions."
"I said we cannot touch them one by one," Heena corrected, her voice dropping into a cold, conspiratorial calm. "If you slowly pick off the subordinates, it will take decades. Another corrupt noble will always rise to fill the vacuum. Instead of wasting energy executing the pawns, Your Majesty... why not completely obliterate their master?"
The Emperor paused, his anger momentarily eclipsed by sharp intrigue. "The master?"
Instead of answering immediately, Heena did something that sent a shockwave through the grand hall.
Slowly, deliberately, the arrogant, untouchable Vanguard warlord sank lower. She folded her robes, kneeling completely on the polished floorboards. She lowered her head, bending her spine until her forehead was just inches from the ground, executing a flawless, absolute bow of ultimate subjugation.
"But to touch the head of the snake," Heena said, her voice muffled by the floor but laced with iron resolve, "I need your direct help, Your Majesty."
The Emperor stared at the kneeling woman in profound, unadulterated shock.
This was the Vanguard Madam. The woman who had practically thrown her family’s military authority in his face, who openly mocked the ancient nobility, and who radiated pure, untamable arrogance from the moment she entered a room. Seeing her bow this deeply—lowering her proud head to the absolute bottom of the hierarchy to genuinely beg for his aid—completely short-circuited his wrath.
The Emperor slowly sat back down on his golden throne, his dark eyes fixed on her lowered head. The anger had vanished, replaced by a calculating, intensely curious silence.
The Emperor looked down at her bowed form, his fingers tapping a slow, lethal rhythm against the armrest of the golden throne.
"What kind of help?" the Emperor demanded, his voice echoing in the vast, tense silence of the hall.
"Your Majesty," Heena replied, her forehead still hovering just inches above the floorboards. "Please turn to document number twenty-six."
The Emperor frowned. He reached over, flipping past the reports on the grain embezzlement and the palace spies, until he stopped at the twenty-sixth page.
He froze.
For three agonizing seconds, the Emperor did not breathe, did not blink, and did not move. It was as if his eyes simply refused to process the ink on the parchment. Then, the shock violently morphed into something far more dangerous. The calculating monarch vanished, entirely replaced by a man blinded by explosive, disbelieving fury.
"Have you gone completely insane?!" the Emperor roared. "What the hell is this?!"
He snatched the heavy stack of documents and violently hurled them directly at Heena’s kneeling figure. The bound papers struck her shoulder with a sharp smack before exploding into a flurry of white parchment, fluttering down around her like snow.
Beside the throne, the head eunuch collapsed completely onto his stomach, trembling so violently he looked like he was having a seizure.
But Heena did not cower. She slowly raised her torso, ignoring the stinging pain in her shoulder. She looked directly into the Emperor’s murderous eyes, remaining entirely calm.
"Your Majesty," Heena said, her voice steady against the storm. "That is the absolute truth. I know the name written on that page is the highest, most untouchable prestige in this court. But that does not change the facts."
"So, you mean to tell me," the Emperor hissed, stepping down from the dais, his shadow looming over her, "that the Empress’s family is the one pulling the strings behind all of this? Are you tired of living, Vanguard? Do you think you have too many lives to spare, Marquis?!"
For the first time since entering the palace, Heena physically trembled. It was a slight, involuntary shiver. The killing intent rolling off the Emperor was suffocating, and she knew exactly why. The Emperor’s deep, profound love for his Empress was legendary across the capital; she was his untouchable sanctuary. Heena knew that pushing this line could result in her execution right here on the polished floorboards.
But so what? The truth was the truth, and Heena had dug too deep to stop now.
She had spent weeks meticulously digging through the capital’s darkest secrets, tracking the movements of the anomaly—the so-called regressor—and piecing together a terrifying, massive puzzle. What she found was a masterpiece of political manipulation.
She had finally uncovered the hidden force behind the Prime Minister’s impossible rise to power. Years ago, that man had been nothing but a useless, pathetic scholar who couldn’t even afford a carriage, surviving entirely off Madam Gu’s generous dowry. For a man with no backing to suddenly bypass the ancient aristocratic families and seize the highest civil seat at such a young age was impossible.
Unless the person backing him was the Empress herself.
And the Prime Minister was just one piece on the board. Heena had dug into the imperial harem, tracing the mysterious, sudden deaths of every single concubine who had ever gained even a fraction of the Emperor’s favor. It was all the Empress’s doing. It wasn’t entirely shocking—harem warfare was inherently bloody—but the sheer, flawless execution of it proved how ruthlessly the Empress protected her monopoly on the Emperor’s heart.
But the most chilling discovery, the one that had solidified Heena’s resolve to burn the Empress’s faction to the ground, was the truth about the original Seera.
The conspiracy behind the original Seera’s murder, and the sudden influx of wealth that had bought off Seera’s treacherous mother, all traced back to the Empress’s faction. Seera’s mother was a greedy, foolish woman who didn’t even understand the full scope of what she was involved in. The Empress had simply dangled a bag of gold and played the woman for an absolute fool, using her to tie up loose ends.
The Empress was the grand puppet master, hiding behind a mask of maternal grace and imperial love.
Heena took a slow, painful breath, centering herself under the Emperor’s lethal glare. She had laid the truth bare; now, she just had to survive the fallout.