Several days had passed since the night he had first commanded flame into existence. Days in which Ying Zheng had settled into a new, bifurcated reality. Publicly, he was Zaitian, the four-year-old Guangxu Emperor, a quiet, docile, and perhaps slightly slow student. Privately, in the silent fortress of his own mind, he was Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, a spymaster gathering intelligence on a failing state, a sorcerer beginning to probe the terrifying and exhilarating depths of a newfound power.
The routine of his lessons in the Imperial Study had become the primary battlefield for this secret war. Weng Tonghe, his Imperial Tutor, was an unwitting pawn, a gatekeeper to the knowledge Ying Zheng so desperately craved.
The morning began, as it always did, with calligraphy. Weng Tonghe was guiding him through the flowing, graceful characters of a famous poem by Li Bai. The tutor's patience was a thing of near-supernatural endurance.
"…and so the poet raises his cup," Weng Tonghe explained, his voice a gentle murmur, "and invites the bright moon to join him, forming a party of three with his shadow. A beautiful, yet profoundly melancholic image, Your Majesty. It speaks to the heart of the lonely scholar, finding companionship in nature itself."
Ying Zheng stared at the characters on the page. Wine. Moon. Shadow. The trifles of a drunken poet who had never built an empire, never commanded a million men, never felt the weight of all under Heaven on his shoulders. The sentiment was pathetic to him, but the opportunity was not. He looked up from the rice paper, his face a carefully constructed mask of innocent, childish curiosity.
"Grand Tutor," he said, his voice small and high-pitched. "Do emperors get lonely?"
The question, so personal and so unexpected, caught Weng Tonghe entirely off guard. The tutor blinked, his hand pausing mid-air. He glanced at the two eunuchs standing sentinel by the door, their faces impassive.
"The Son of Heaven is never truly alone, Majesty," he answered, recovering with the smooth polish of a seasoned courtier. "For he has the unwavering support of his loyal officials, the love of his countless subjects, and the wisdom of the ancestors to guide him. He is the center of the world, and the world is always with him."
It was a beautiful, hollow platitude. Ying Zheng pressed his advantage, his strategy unfolding precisely as he had planned it in the darkness of his bedchamber the night before.
"But the great emperors of the past… like the Kangxi Emperor, or the Qianlong Emperor… did they study poems about the moon all day? Or did they study the empire?" He let a note of earnest confusion enter his voice. "You told me I must learn to become a wise ruler like them. I want to learn what they learned, not just what the poets wrote."
This was his opening gambit. He would frame his insatiable thirst for critical intelligence—for troop numbers, for treasury reports, for provincial politics—as a simple, childish desire to emulate the celebrated "sage emperors" of this Qing dynasty. It was an ambition that a devout Confucian scholar like Weng Tonghe could not possibly deny or discourage. It was the perfect camouflage.
A pleased, genuine smile spread across Weng Tonghe's face. He was clearly delighted by what he perceived as a sudden spark of scholarly ambition in his young charge.
"An excellent question, Your Majesty! Truly, a sign of a keen and inquisitive mind!" he exclaimed. "You are quite right. The great emperors, especially the glorious Kangxi Emperor, were masters of both the literary arts and the martial way, of both poetry and statecraft. They studied the classics to cultivate their virtue, of course. But every single day, without fail, they would rise before the sun to read the memorials sent from every province of the empire."
"Memorials?" Ying Zheng asked, feigning ignorance of the term. "Are those like letters from the governors?"
"Indeed, Your Majesty. Much more than letters," Weng Tonghe elaborated, warming to his topic. "They are detailed reports on everything imaginable: the state of the harvests, the collection of taxes, movements of bandits or local unrest, the condition of the roads and canals, activities along the borders… they are the very eyes and ears of the Dragon Throne. They are the lifeblood of the empire's administration. To read the memorials is to feel the pulse of the nation itself."
This was it. The motherlode. The raw, unfiltered data he needed to begin formulating a true strategy for reclamation.
"I want to read them," Ying Zheng stated, his voice flat with childish desire.
Weng Tonghe chuckled softly, a gentle, condescending sound. "Majesty, your ambition is laudable, truly. But one must learn to walk before one can run. The script used in official memorials is exceedingly complex, a specialized form filled with technical language and honorifics. It would take many, many years of dedicated study before you could hope to decipher them. For now, we must remain focused on our foundations. Let us look at the next verse…"
Ying Zheng's face fell. He executed a brilliant, calculated imitation of a child's crestfallen disappointment. His shoulders slumped. He looked down at his small hands, a picture of pathetic dejection.
"Then… I will never be like the Kangxi Emperor," he mumbled, his voice barely a whisper. "I am too slow. I am too stupid. I will still be learning to write my own name while the empire… waits for me." He put a heartbreaking tremor into that final word.
The subtle emotional manipulation, a tactic he had honed to a razor's edge in the courts of the Warring States, hit its mark perfectly. Weng Tonghe, a fundamentally decent and compassionate man, felt a sudden pang of deep sympathy for the small, lonely boy who carried such an impossible weight on his shoulders. He saw not a manipulative emperor, but a sad child, desperate to live up to the legacy of his ancestors.
"Not at all, Your Majesty! No, no, you must not think that!" the tutor said quickly, his voice full of reassurance. "Your progress is remarkable for your age! Truly! Your desire to learn is a virtue in itself." He paused, wrestling with his duty as a teacher and his sympathy as a man. He made a fateful decision. "Perhaps… perhaps, as a reward for your diligence today, I could… I could read one or two of the less complex memorials to you. So that you may begin to understand the sound and the rhythm of the official language. A small taste of the duties to come."
Ying Zheng looked up, his large eyes wide with perfectly feigned excitement and gratitude. "You would? Truly, Grand Tutor?"
"Of course, Your Majesty," Weng Tonghe said, basking in the boy's apparent happiness. "Let me see what has come in from the Grand Secretariat this morning. I will find something appropriate."
Ying Zheng had won. The gate was open.
As Weng Tonghe bustled over to a series of chests where daily communiques were stored and began sorting through bamboo scrolls and folded paper documents, Ying Zheng's gaze shifted. His eyes fell upon a heavy, bronze incense burner sitting on a low table near the window. It was his private moment, a chance to continue his other, secret lessons.
He focused his mind, recalling the cold, pure rage he had felt at dinner with Cixi. He tried to summon it, but it was difficult to do on command, like trying to start a fire with damp wood. Still, he managed to gather a flicker of that icy fury. He pointed a small, discreet finger at the burner. He didn't want a flame, not here, not now. He just wanted a spark, a test of his control. He pushed his will outwards.
A tiny, almost invisible shimmer, like a heat haze on a summer road, emanated from his fingertip. The fine, gray incense powder inside the bronze bowl darkened in a small patch, as if a single drop of water had fallen on it. A tiny, insignificant puff of smoke, smelling faintly of scorched sandalwood, rose and dissipated instantly.
It was weak. Pathetic, even. But it had worked. The effort, however, left him feeling strangely drained, a dull, throbbing ache blooming behind his eyes. A wave of dizziness washed over him. He gripped the edge of his chair. He was learning a critical lesson: this power had a cost. It was not free. It consumed something within him, some vital energy he did not yet understand.
"Ah, here we are," Weng Tonghe announced, returning with a thick scroll. "A report from the governor of Henan. It concerns some recent flooding along the lower Yellow River. The language is quite direct. Now, listen closely, Your Majesty, to the formality of the opening address…"
The tutor sat down and began to read aloud in a sonorous, formal tone. The text was dense, filled with official titles, geographical specifics, and technical jargon about water levels and dike construction. "…the waters have risen three chi above the warning markers at the Kaifeng bend… the southern dikes, reinforced last spring, are under considerable strain… several outlying villages have been submerged… we have requested emergency relief funds from the Board of Revenue to purchase rice and distribute it amongst the displaced…"
Ying Zheng listened with an absolute, predatory focus. He was not listening to a story about a flood. He was absorbing raw data. He cross-referenced the plea for relief funds with the information he had gleaned about the massive indemnities being paid to the British and French.
The state has no money for its own dikes, the arteries of the nation, but has endless silver to pay the foreign parasites who bleed it dry?
The familiar, cold rage began to build again, but this time it was different. It was not just an emotion; it was fuel. As the anger grew, cold and sharp within his chest, he felt the power inside him stir. The dull headache began to recede. The dizziness vanished. The feeling of weakness was replaced by a sense of vitality, of strength. The rage was not just the trigger for his power.
It was the very thing that fed it.