“Let us determine the fate of Minister of Revenue, Shang Qitai.”
The three cabinet heavyweights, who had been silently calculating the gains and losses of the imperial court, all drew in a sharp breath of cold air, their faces unable to hide their shock.
Zheng Boyong’s index finger, which had been tapping his knee, froze mid-air. His brows furrowed. “This night’s setup reeks of a bloodless evil.”
Vice Grand Secretary Xie Miheng’s brows were twisted into a knot as his mind raced like a sieve, trying to extract some unfathomable political conspiracy from the Grand Secretary’s earth-shattering trump card.
“Grand Secretary!”
Cui Heng, head of the Cui clan of Chen Commandery and a Grand Secretary with a hint of a hot-tempered military man, abandoned all decorum in his urgency.
“Preposterous! Shang Qitai is the sharpest blade we’ve planted in the Six Ministries! Just yesterday, I accepted the jade lion he presented as tribute, and today you want to strip him of his rank? The Ministry of Revenue controls the empire’s grain and wealth—it’s our faction’s moneybag, our lifeline! The situation is so tense right now—why would you cut off one of our own arms and discard such a powerful Minister?”
Cui Heng’s words were laced with confusion and the barely restrained fury of a protector guarding his food.
Xu Jie did not rush.
He turned around with agonizing slowness, walked to the long table, and swept his gaze over the three men like a winter ice spike.
“A useful blade?” Xu Jie curled his lips into a barely concealed sneer. “That’s a scrap of rusted iron that couldn’t even split a rotten stick of firewood.”
His tone was bone-chillingly cold. “Open your eyes and see what he did at court today! A first-rank high official, ruling the Ministry of Revenue for decades, and he was hounded like a mangy cur in the Golden Throne Hall by Xu Youde, a common merchant’s family member from a military background!”
Xu Jie extended a withered finger and tapped it heavily on the table.
“On the battlefield, the worst sin is losing your composure. But Shang Qitai? To cover up those paltry account deficits, his addled brain actually used a lowly warehouse clerk’s murder case to stage a factional trap! Such crude, childish tactics—no better than a street thug screaming curses like a fishwife in the market!”
Xu Jie’s eyes were glacial.
“He thought he was cornering the emperor, but Xu Youde had him by the throat, twisting it until he handed over the knife handle. A fool who can’t even suss out his opponent’s true strength and gets his throat torn out instead—he no longer deserves the Revenue Minister’s seat.”
“He’s nothing but mud that won’t stick to the wall!”
“But Grand Secretary!” Cui Heng argued desperately, leaning forward another inch. “Shang Qitai may have played a rotten move this time, but he’s still the pillar of the Revenue Ministry! If we abandon him and the Ministry falls into another’s hands, our faction will be crippled!”
“Crippled?”
Xu Jie straightened up. His eyes in that moment turned into sharpened blades, locking onto Cui Heng’s gaze.
“Do you truly believe I want him dead merely because he’s incompetent?”
Xu Jie let out a cold snort, clasping his hands behind his back as he paced slowly.
His voice, drifting through the dim smoke of sinking incense, sounded eerily distant, ruthless, and devoid of emotion. “The ‘Four-Seal Joint Audit’ that Xu Youde proposed today—have you truly not tasted the venom in it? Though that method is a deadly poison aimed at Shang Qitai, for the Great Qian Empire’s riddled treasury, it’s a powerful medicine to scrape the poison from the marrow!”
These words struck Xie Miheng, Cui Heng, and Zheng Boyong like lightning, freezing them in place.
Their eyes widened.
They could never have imagined that this Grand Secretary, who had spent his life scheming for the interests of the aristocratic factions and guarding the orthodox path of civil officials, would actually praise his mortal enemy’s policy!
He actually agreed to a vicious rule that would strip away their own self-interests!
“Grand Secretary!” Cui Heng finally could no longer suppress the terror in his heart and leaped up from his cushion.
His body trembled slightly as he pointed toward the door, his voice harsh.
“If the Four-Seal Joint Audit is implemented, it will choke the Revenue Ministry with an iron chain! It won’t just cut off Shang Qitai’s income—it will sever the entire aristocratic faction’s millions of piculs in revenue! By tolerating this, have you abandoned the centuries-old foundation of our noble houses?!”
The words fell, and the Hidden Strategy Pavilion fell into a deadlock.
Only the white smoke from the mouth of the bronze crane at the corner writhed and twisted in the moonlight.
Xie Miheng and Zheng Boyong both lowered their eyes, not daring to breathe audibly, their held breaths a clear sign that they awaited Xu Jie’s explanation.
Xu Jie stared expressionlessly at Cui Heng, who was like a trapped beast.
An overwhelming pressure, the authority of a man long seated at the pinnacle of power who held the power of life and death, descended like a tidal wave.
He looked down upon Cui Heng, his eyes drained of all warmth.
“Consider the interests of the aristocratic houses?”
“Do I need to take you into account?”
Before Cui Heng could recover, Xu Jie stepped forward half a pace. His graying hair and beard lifted slightly in the cold breeze—the awe-inspiring presence of a powerbroker who had served three emperors.
“I am the greatest aristocratic house in all of Great Qian.”
This declaration of supreme arrogance crashed down upon the three men like a sledgehammer.
Cui Heng felt a suffocating terror split the air. All his fury was shattered by the weight of this unparalleled Minister’s might.
His face turned pale, his legs gave way, and with a “thud,” he collapsed back onto his hard wooden cushion, his back drenched in a cold sweat.
Xie Miheng barely suppressed the wild pounding of his heart and drew in a deep breath of incense-laced air. He knew Xu Jie’s words were no empty threat.
“Grand Secretary, calm your anger,” Xie Miheng said, clasping his hands in a deep bow, his voice tinged with caution and inquiry. “His Majesty gave his tacit approval to the Four-Seal Joint Audit in court today. Anyone with eyes can see that the emperor is using the Xu family’s blade to slice flesh from our faction. If we concede today and sacrifice Shang Qitai, we’ll indeed comply with His Majesty’s wishes. But over time, as the knife cuts slowly, where will our faction’s path to survival lie?”
Xu Jie looked at Xie Miheng, the sharpness in his eyes receding slightly, replaced by a terrifyingly cold laugh.
“Short-sighted!” Four words, like daggers, effortlessly pierced the self-respect of the three ministers.
“Do you truly believe that a centuries-old aristocratic house relies on the petty embezzlements and waste at Tongzhou Dock?” Xu Jie stood with his hands behind his back, his murky gaze piercing the wooden walls of the pavilion toward the endless flow of time.
This speech was nothing less than a brutal redefinition of power for the three ministers.
“Dynasties are fleeting; aristocratic houses are eternal.”
“Our foundation lies in the endless fertile fields, the academies that monopolize education, and more than that, the orthodox Neo-Confucian doctrine that all scholar-officials revere!” Xu Jie’s words were like pearls, dissecting the true lifeline of power.
“The grain the Revenue Ministry embezzles each year is nothing but the dregs leaking from the cracks of a great ship! Now the northern borders are ablaze with war. If the Great Qian treasury runs dry and His Majesty falls, and this great tree crashes down—where will we, the sparrows nesting in its branches, find another home?”
Xu Jie turned abruptly, his gaze like a hawk’s, piercing them as he spoke with deliberate slowness: “Use Shang Qitai’s life. Use the tainted silver that should have been disgorged. Cater to the imperial authority. Fill the treasury. Exchange it for His Majesty’s peace of mind, and for another hundred years of the Great Qian dynasty’s mandate! As long as the Great Qian banner still stands, our fertile fields will remain, our protégés will remain, and our Confucian orthodoxy—will remain!”
“To willingly cast aside this spoiled meal, to preserve the roots of the great tree—that is the path of unending survival we must take. To reinforce the fence, lest the tiger in our courtyard turn and bite us—that is the true logic. Do you all understand?”
Silence.
In the Hidden Pivot Pavilion, there was only a scalp-crawling silence. Xu Jie’s lofty, cold-blooded analysis had ripped open the rawest skin of power struggle, reducing their petty factional interests, which they had haggled over for so long, to dust.
The first to come to his senses was Zheng Boyong.
He stopped all movement, placed his hands neatly on his knees, and bowed his head deeply: “The Grand Secretary’s vision is farsighted. Boyong has been enlightened.”
Xie Miheng and Cui Heng turned to each other, their eyes meeting cautiously in the dim light.
The last trace of reluctance and unwillingness in Cui Heng’s gaze—born of the pain of loss—was utterly annihilated before Xu Jie’s bottomless political vision.
He was forced, though grudgingly, to admit that, compared to the Grand Secretary’s ambition that spanned a century, his own stubborn defense of Shang Qitai now seemed like the petty clinging of a wretched beggar unwilling to let go of two broken copper coins.
“We await the Grand Secretary’s final decision.”
Xie Miheng and Cui Heng both bowed in unison.
In that moment, the three paramount leaders of the Great Qian’s most powerful families reached absolute consensus.
They agreed to use the Minister of Revenue, Shang Qitai, as a stepping stone—a perfect sacrificial lamb to placate imperial suspicion and sustain the Great Qian’s fate.
Beyond the Hidden Pivot Pavilion, the night was still impenetrably black. A few mournful cries of autumn insects echoed faintly beneath the long corridors, as if nothing had happened.
But within that room, untouched by the flash of blades or the clash of swords, four old men who held the fate of the nine provinces in their hands had, in a few brief exchanges of interests, coldly sentenced a first-rank minister to death without a shred of warmth.
This bloodless confrontation was far more chilling than the clashing of spears and horses beyond the passes.
The incense in the burner burned down to a pile of pale ash.
In the grand, merciless chess game between imperial power and aristocratic families, even if you stood at the pinnacle of officialdom, once you blocked the rules, you were ultimately nothing more than a discarded pawn, crumbled at a touch.
