The vast bedchamber was a universe of shadows and silence. Long after the last eunuch had bowed his way out of the room, after the last lamp had been extinguished in the corridors of the Palace of Mental Cultivation, Ying Zheng sat on the edge of his enormous bed. Sleep was a distant country he had no desire to visit. His mind, a raging furnace of thought and fury, was too alive, too alert.
He was a prisoner in this room, in this palace, in this century. The bed itself was a symbol of his confinement. It was a monstrous piece of furniture, a bed of carved lacquer and gilded panels, surrounded by heavy silk curtains that, when drawn, would create a small, suffocating room within a room. It was larger and more ornate than the campaign cot he had used while conquering the state of Chu. And he, the new Emperor of the Great Qing, was dwarfed by it, a tiny figure lost in a sea of opulent bedding.
He sat there, his small bare feet dangling above the cold stone floor, and replayed the day's events with the cold, methodical precision of a general reviewing a battle plan. He dissected every conversation, every glance, every subtle shift in tone.
The lesson with Weng Tonghe. An exercise in patronizing indoctrination, but it had yielded critical intelligence. The empire was weak, its armies defeated, its sovereignty sold off in pieces through documents they called 'unequal treaties.' The shame of it was a physical weight in his chest.
The dinner with the two Empress Dowagers. An ordeal of suffocating control, a masterclass in the soft, feminine tyranny Cixi wielded like a silken garrote. Her casual willingness to sacrifice her own officials to appease foreign barbarians was not merely a political calculation; it was a symptom of a deep, spiritual rot that had infested the very core of this dynasty.
And then, there were the anomalies. The two strange incidents that defied logical explanation.
He raised his right hand in the faint moonlight filtering through the window. The pads of his fingers were still a faint, angry pink. He remembered the searing heat that had flooded the silver chopsticks. He replayed the earlier memory from the study: the wisp of smoke, the impossible, smoldering line that had momentarily appeared on the ancient calligraphy scroll.
He analyzed the phenomena with the ruthless logic that had once allowed him to organize the logistics for an army of half a million men.
Fact one: Both incidents occurred during moments of extreme, focused emotional distress. Not just anger, but a very specific vintage of rage—the cold, absolute fury of a god whose divine creation has been defiled by insects.
Fact two: The first incident, with the scroll, happened at a distance. His rage had seemingly projected itself across the room. The second, with the chopsticks, involved a physical object in his direct contact. This suggested the effect could be both projected and conducted.
Fact three: In both cases, the result was intense, unnatural heat. The heat that had scorched the scroll and superheated the chopsticks was not the mundane heat of a nearby brazier or hot soup. It was something purer, more elemental.
His mind, a repository of ancient lore and mystical inquiry, flew back across two thousand years. It landed in the thrumming, subterranean cavern beneath Mount Tai. He saw the violet flames, the churning river of mercury, the face of his alchemist, Xu Fu, pale with terror and fanaticism. He heard Xu Fu's final, desperate warning ringing in his ears, clearer now than it had been when he first heard it.
"…it could grant you the body of a living god, immune to age and ailment, or… or it could unmake you… shatter your very soul and scatter the pieces like dust across the infinite river of time!"
And the final, critical ingredient, the catalyst for the entire ritual: "…now it must be infused with a spark of the celestial dragon's own lifeblood!"
He had always considered the poetics of alchemy to be just that—flowery language to dignify a chemical process. The 'dragon's blood' was liquid mercury, the 'phoenix tears' were distilled morning dew. Metaphors. But now, sitting in the silent darkness of a future he could never have imagined, a new, terrifying hypothesis began to form.
Ying Zheng (Internal Monologue): "The elixir… its effect was not what I was promised. It was a catastrophic failure. It did not make my body immortal; it annihilated it. It cast my soul, my shen, adrift on the river of time. But what if it was not a complete failure? What if Xu Fu, in his fumbling ambition, succeeded in a way neither of us could have foreseen? What if that 'dragon's spark' wasn't just a metaphor for the power of mercury? What if the ritual truly did distill a tiny, infinitesimal spark of… something else? Some raw, elemental power? And what if, when my soul was shattered and reformed, that spark was not lost? What if it bound itself to the very core of my being?"
It was a staggering, insane thought. But it was the only hypothesis that fit the facts. And a hypothesis, like an enemy army, must be tested. Its strengths and weaknesses must be understood. Failure must be analyzed and success must be replicated. This was the core principle of his life.
He slipped off the massive bed. His small, bare feet made no sound on the cold, polished stone floor. The chill of it helped to focus his mind. He walked to the center of the vast, dark room, a tiny, determined figure in a simple silk sleeping robe. Across the chamber, on a low table, sat a single, unlit candle in a bronze holder. That would be his target.
He needed to recreate the emotional state. It wasn't enough to simply be angry. He had learned that from a lifetime of wielding his own temper as a political tool. This was different. It required a purity of rage, a focus so absolute it bordered on a meditative state. The rage of a god, not a man.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the unfamiliar room. He began to build the pyre in his mind. He summoned the memories, the betrayals that still felt as fresh as yesterday. He saw the face of his eldest son, Fusu, noble and trusting, holding the forged edict that commanded his death. He felt the phantom sting of that ultimate betrayal by his most trusted chancellor, Li Si, and the smirking, triumphant face of the eunuch Zhao Gao. He watched again, in his mind's eye, as his ten-thousand-year dynasty, his life's work, crumbled to dust in less than a generation.
He felt the deep, abiding humiliation of his perfect, eternal tomb being desecrated by common thieves. The sanctity of his afterlife, violated.
Then, he layered the new humiliations on top of the old, feeding the fire. He heard the patronizing, gentle voice of Weng Tonghe, trying to teach him how to write the number 'one.' He saw the cloying, suffocating smile of the woman who dared to command him to call her father. He heard her voice again, dripping with casual arrogance as she spoke of appeasing the British barbarians, of punishing her own officials to placate the foreign parasites. He felt the utter, crushing powerlessness of this frail, four-year-old body, a prison of weak bones and undeveloped muscles.
The rage built. It was a familiar fire, but this time he did not let it consume him. He contained it. He molded it with the force of his indomitable will. He took the chaotic, burning mass of his fury and compressed it, turning it from a wildfire into a white-hot, singular point of energy. He was no longer just feeling the rage; he was wielding it.
He opened his eyes. In the dim moonlight, they would have seemed to glow with a cold, internal fire. He extended his right hand, the small, childish limb trembling slightly not from fear, but from the sheer concentration of will. He pointed a single, small finger directly at the candle, twenty feet away across the room.
He focused. He pushed. He imagined his will as a physical force, a spear of intangible energy, surging from his mind, down his arm, out through his fingertip, and across the empty space towards that single, tiny, wax-and-wick target.
For a long, agonizing moment, nothing happened. The candle remained dark and inert. The silence in the room was absolute. Doubt, a feeling he despised, flickered at the edge of his concentration. Was he a fool? Was it all just a series of bizarre coincidences? The flicker of doubt sparked a new wave of frustration, which in turn fed the core of his rage.
"Obey!" the command screamed through his mind, not as a word, but as a pure, focused intent. "Ignite!"
The wick of the candle began to glow.
It was faint at first, a tiny, cherry-red spot at its very tip, a pinprick of light in the vast darkness. He pushed harder, pouring more of his will into it, refusing to let his focus waver. The red spot brightened, turning a brilliant orange. A tiny curl of smoke, smelling of hot wax, rose from it.
With a soft, yet distinctly audible fwoomp, the candle erupted into a clean, steady flame.
The fire danced, casting a warm, golden light across the room, illuminating the boy's face. It threw his shadow, long and distorted, against the far wall.
Ying Zheng lowered his hand, his breathing heavy, a fine sheen of sweat on his brow. The mental exertion was immense. He stared at the flame. A flame he had created from nothing. A flame he had ignited with his mind. His will. His rage.
He looked down at his small, pale hands. The hands of a puppet emperor. The hands of a prisoner in a gilded cage. But they were not powerless.
A slow, terrible smile spread across the four-year-old Emperor's face. It was a smile that did not belong on the face of a child. It was a smile of pure, predatory delight. The alchemist's elixir had given him a gift after all. Not the simple immortality of the flesh that he had sought. It had given him something far more potent. It had given him a weapon. A secret. A power that no one in this new, decadent world—not the Empress Dowager, not her web of spies, not the foreign barbarians with their fire-spitting rifles—could possibly anticipate.
Ying Zheng (Internal Monologue): "So, this is the power of a dragon's spark. The fire of the heavens, bound to my will. They think me a child. They think me a pawn in their pathetic games. My body may be a cage, but they have locked a dragon inside, not a songbird. Let them continue to think they have their puppet. Let them teach me to write and lecture me on the proper placement of rocks. I will play their game. And while I do, I will learn. I will master this new, unfamiliar flame. And with it, I swear on my name as the First Emperor, I will burn their paper throne to cinders and from the ashes forge a new one of iron and fire."