The return to sensation was not a gentle awakening. It was a brutal, violent collision. One moment, he was a disembodied god wrestling with the very fabric of time; the next, he was drowning in the mundane.
The first thing to assault him was the smell. Not the clean, sharp scents of ozone and hot metal from his ritual chamber, but a thick, cloying sweetness of sandalwood incense, so heavy it felt like a blanket smothering his face. It was the scent of decadence, of stagnation.
Then came the feeling. Heavy, ornate silk, embroidered with patterns so intricate they felt like a dozen tiny weights pressing down on his small frame. The material was soft, luxurious, yet it felt like a shroud. Beneath the clothes, his body was possessed by a profound, humiliating weakness. His limbs felt like leaden things disconnected from his will, his head throbbed with a dull ache, and a wave of nausea rolled through his stomach. He felt… small. Fragile. Powerless.
With an effort that felt Herculean, he forced his eyelids open.
The world swam into focus, a dizzying kaleidoscope of color and light. He was in a hall, but it was nothing like the stark, imposing, and brutalist grandeur of his own palaces in Xianyang. This place was a riot of ornamentation. Every surface was carved, lacquered, or gilded. Yellow silk, the imperial color, was draped everywhere, but it was a sickly, pale yellow, not the rich, earthy yellow of the Loess Plateau. The pillars were a garish vermillion red, carved with coiling dragons that looked more like decorative serpents than symbols of divine power. The air was hazy with incense smoke, catching the light from ornate lanterns and making everything shimmer with an unreal, dream-like quality.
He was sitting, not on a throne of black iron and stark authority, but on a soft, cushioned chair of carved mahogany that felt more like a bed. And standing before him, dominating the room, were two figures.
The first was a woman. She could not have been much older than forty, but her face, under a mask of white powder and perfectly painted red lips, held a deep, soul-crushing weariness, the look of someone who had fought and won a thousand silent, vicious battles in the confines of the palace. She wore magnificent robes of state, embroidered with a stunningly detailed phoenix, and her hair was a marvel of engineering, a complex structure of black lacquer, gold, and pearls, crowned by a phoenix tiara that trembled slightly with her every breath. This was a woman who wielded immense power. But her eyes… her eyes were chips of cold, dark jade. They held no warmth, no affection, only appraisal. It was the look a merchant gives a promising but unproven piece of merchandise.
Beside her, standing half a step behind in a posture of perpetual deference, was a man with a smooth, hairless face and a watchful, intelligent gaze. He was older than the woman, his face a web of fine lines, but his eyes were sharp and missed nothing. He was a eunuch, one of the vipers of the inner court that Ying Zheng had always despised and kept on a brutally short leash. This one, however, radiated an aura of quiet confidence. He was no mere servant. He was a player in the game.
The woman spoke, her voice soft, almost musical, yet it possessed a core of unbreakable steel. It was the voice of someone for whom obedience was not a request, but the natural order of the universe.
"Zaitian. The auspicious hour is upon us. The court has assembled. The ancestors are watching from their tablets in the temple. The Dragon Throne awaits."
Ying Zheng's mind, a tempest of two thousand years of history and cosmic power, reeled from the impact of that simple name. Zaitian? Who is Zaitian? The name meant nothing to him. It was the name of a stranger, a child. His name was Ying Zheng. He was the First Emperor.
Where is Mount Tai? he tried to think. Where is Li Si? Xu Fu? My guards?
He tried to act. The instinct, honed over a lifetime of absolute command, was to rise, to roar, to demand answers. He tried to surge to his feet and seize this impertinent woman by the throat. But the body he inhabited refused to cooperate. It was a pathetic, frail thing, the body of a boy no older than four years of age. The sheer mental effort of commanding it to stand sent a wave of dizziness through him and left him trembling. The disconnect between his iron will and this porcelain vessel was staggering. It was infuriating.
He forced his new eyes downward. He saw small, pale hands resting on his silk-covered knees. They were delicate, almost translucent. The hands of a pampered child who had never held a sword, never signed an edict of execution, never pointed to a map and ordered a million men to their deaths. He was not in his own body. He was a prisoner. A prisoner in the body of a child.
The woman—the Empress Dowager—narrowed her eyes almost imperceptibly at his prolonged silence and the strange, vacant look on his face. She likely mistook it for childish fear or confusion.
"You are nervous. That is to be expected," she continued, her tone softening slightly, a calculated move. "You will be the Guangxu Emperor. The Son of Heaven. A glorious title. A great destiny. But you will remember who has placed you upon that throne. Your cousin, the Tongzhi Emperor, has ascended to join the dragon. With no heir, the duty fell to us, to the Dowager Empresses, to secure the succession. You are my sister's son. You are my blood."
She took a step closer, the scent of her perfume intensifying. "You will honor me, and you will honor the Empress Dowager Ci'an. But it is I who will guide you. It is I who will teach you the ways of the court. In all matters, public and private, you will look to me. To ensure there is no confusion in the line of authority, you will not refer to me as 'Aunt.' You will refer to me as Huang A Ma."
The eunuch, whose name he would later learn was Li Lianying, allowed a ghost of a smile to touch his thin lips.
The words slammed into Ying Zheng's consciousness with the force of a physical blow. Huang A Ma.
Imperial. Father.
This woman… this concubine from some forgotten corner of the harem, this relic of a fallen emperor, dared to demand that he—Ying Zheng, the man who had forged the very title of Emperor, the patriarch of the entire unified world—call her, a female, father?
The rage that boiled up within him was volcanic. It was a pure, primal fury that had leveled cities and buried armies. It was the incandescent rage of a celestial dragon finding itself trapped, not just in a cage, but in the body of a songbird. For a terrifying second, he felt his immense will straining against the confines of the child's skull, a pressure so intense he thought the boy's head might rupture.
But he was Ying Zheng. And Ying Zheng was more than just a conqueror; he was a master strategist. He had survived countless assassination attempts, navigated the treacherous politics of the warring states, and outmaneuvered every enemy he had ever faced. He had just survived the dissolution of his own soul in the river of time. He would survive this.
In that single, incandescent moment of rage, absolute clarity dawned. He understood everything. The cloying opulence. The woman's condescending tone. The eunuch's knowing smirk. The pathetic weakness of his new body. This was not his dynasty. This was a rotting edifice, a theater of power, not the seat of it. This was a gilded cage. And he, the new Emperor, was to be its most prized, most powerless occupant. He was a puppet.
He calmed the inferno within his mind, banking the fires of his rage behind a wall of cold, calculating ice. He had to play the part. For now. He was in a foreign land, a foreign time, surrounded by enemies he did not yet know. He needed to learn the rules of this new, decadent game before he inevitably smashed the board to pieces and rewrote them himself.
Slowly, deliberately, he lifted his head. The face he presented to them was the pale, timid face of the four-year-old boy, Zaitian. But the eyes that looked out from that face were two thousand years old. They were ancient, they were cold, and they were utterly, terrifyingly devoid of fear. They were the eyes of a man who had stared into the abyss and made the abyss blink first. They were the eyes of a man weighing the worth of the souls standing before him, judging them, and finding them wanting.
The Empress Dowager Cixi, for the first time in many years, felt a sensation she could not name. It was not fear—she had crushed men far greater than this child. It was a flicker of profound unease. A cold prickle on the back of her neck. The boy was not looking at her with the awe or terror she expected. He was looking at her as if she were a line of text in a history book he was about to burn.
He gave a small, slow, almost regal nod. When he spoke, his voice was the high, reedy instrument of a child, yet it carried an impossible, unnatural weight, a resonance that seemed to come from the very depths of the earth.
"I understand."
The two words were simple, obedient. But the tone… the tone was not. It was the sound of a king humoring his jesters. Cixi's brow furrowed for a fraction of a second before her mask of serene authority snapped back into place. She dismissed it as a trick of the light, an echo in the vast hall.
The hours that followed were a torturous ordeal. The ceremonies of enthronement were an endless pageant of suffocating rituals, kowtows, and incantations that made his own grand ceremonies seemmodels of brutal efficiency. He was carried, dressed, and positioned like a doll, the object of ten thousand pairs of eyes, yet he felt utterly alone.
Finally, long after night had fallen, he was escorted to his new residence, the Palace of Mental Cultivation. He dismissed the attending eunuchs and maids with a single, sharp gesture that brooked no argument. Alone at last, he stumbled through the ornate, cluttered chambers, his small legs unsteady. He found what he was looking for in the main chamber: a large, full-length mirror, its frame of polished bronze cast in the shape of intertwining dragons.
He stood before it, and his reflection stared back.
He saw the boy, Zaitian. A small, frightened child in oversized imperial robes. A face with delicate features, large dark eyes filled with a softness he found repulsive, and a body so frail it looked as though a strong wind could break it. A puppet on a string. An offering on an altar.
But looking deeper, past the reflection of the child, he saw his own eyes. They burned in the boy's face like embers in a dying fire, glowing with the cold, hard light of an ancient, primordial fury.
He reached out a small, trembling hand and touched the cold surface of the mirror.
Ying Zheng (Internal Monologue): "They scoured the imperial clan for the weakest, most pliable child to place upon this crumbling throne. A puppet to dance while they pull the strings and feast on the carcass of a dying empire. They have no inkling of what they have truly summoned into their midst."
His gaze drifted past his own reflection, to the gilded, decadent room behind him.
"This dynasty… this court of conniving women and scheming eunuchs… this so-called empire that bows its head to foreign barbarians and poisons its own people… It is an insult to the very concept of power. It is a disgrace to the Dragon Throne."
A slow, cold smile spread across the child's face in the mirror, a smile that did not belong there, a smile of terrible, ancient promise.
"Zhen tore the world apart to build an empire from dust and bloody clay. Rebuilding this one from its ashes will be a triviality. Let them have their games. Let them believe they have their puppet. Let them think the Son of Heaven is a frightened little boy."
He clenched his small hand into a fist, the knuckles white.
"The Dragon has awakened in a new nest. And this time… this time, Zhen will forge a dynasty that will truly last for ten thousand years. This will be my Second Reign."