Forty Millenniums of Cultivation, page 1474
"Even if I were indeed crazy enough to completely annihilate all of you with violence, I would've certainly planned out everything. Once the incident of the Blood Oath Alliance was activated, there would've been incessant thunderous strangles that would've suffocated all the reformists, young officers, and peripheral warlords. You wouldn't have stood any chance at all!
"But what about the reality? The reality was that I was running and fighting here and there. Did I seem to have planned everything out at all? Do you think that the enormous scheme of the prime minister of the Imperium was so flawed that it had no backup moves at all?
"If you want evidence, the greatest evidence is my misery right now. Is my current situation not enough to suggest that I truly did not know anything about the matter, and I was simply hit when I was not prepared at all?"
Dongfang Wang couldn't have sounded more depressed and heartfelt.
Even Li Yao was somewhat convinced by him.
He continued roaring in fury, "After the incident of the Blood Oath Alliance, the reformists seemed to be hit heavily in the emergency. A lot of people were caught, and your organization suffered heavy losses, but you regrouped very soon and even admitted Lei Chenghu, the Astounding Thunder Fleet and its tremendous young officers, peripheral warlords, and the ambitious, unstable factors within the four Kurfürst families. Your capability soared more than ten times!
"Then, you initiated the overwhelming, incessant, and seamless counterattacks, bulldozing all my forces to the ground without any stop. Let me ask you, could such powerful and fierce counterattacks really have been made in a haste?
"Vulture Li Yao, I don't know if you are Li Linghai's accomplice or if you are aware of the whole thing, but if you are, then you have my admiration for your self-control, your planning, and your acting skills. This is really almost a perfect scheme. I did not have any chance to counterattack at all. Whatever I did, I was simply dead for sure!
"If you are unaware of the truth, that will be very pathetic, because you were manipulated by Li Linghai too, as her pawn, her hound, and her dagger!
"Trust me, Queen Li Linghai knew that an elder of the Imperium was going to be assassinated before the incident of the Blood Oath Alliance. She calculated all the chain reactions that followed and planned the coping strategies in every step. It was not a counterattack in a haste at all but a long-prepared aggression!
"Haha. Impressive, Li Linghai. I have underestimated you again and again. I never realized that you were so dreadful that everybody—from the four Kurfürst families to the reformists, from the soldiers in the frontline to the warlords in the rear, and from a prime minister like me to the seasoned generals like Lei Chenghu—was manipulated by you like a puppet!"
Dongfang Wang laughed in the most devastating way. His dangling skin and his hideous smile made him truly like a scary ghost.
"Wait, there is still the most critical question."
Frowning hard, Li Yao pondered carefully for a long time before he asked, "Prime Minister Dongfang, you claim that the queen was the mastermind who came up with all the schemes because she gained the most from them. But I'm confused. What exactly has she gained?
"In terms of commandership, she does not have any troops. The Deep Sea Fleet is commanded by General Dongfang Sheng, and the Astounding Thunder Fleet is managed by General Lei Chenghu. The elite troops of the four Kurfürst families are not her place to control at all either.
"In terms of prestige, while she is the leader of the reformists, she has done nothing except for calling for the supporters and facilitating the communication. Except for her performance in the 'crying event' in the capital, where she won the favor of the surplus generals and the disabled veterans, she has been keeping a low profile and barely left a deep impression. If we are being completely honest, she has appeared on the battlefield even less often than me. Right now, everybody knows Vulture Li Yao and the Gold Vulture, but not everybody knows the queen's role in the revival of the Imperium!
"In terms of the situation, after the fall of Prime Minister Dongfang, the Dongfang family will certainly be greatly weakened, but the other three families and the reformists are very likely to settle everything peacefully. We are about to welcome the return of Emperor Shenwu and rebuild the Council of Elders. The queen's position and influence will only be further lowered.
"From the perspective that the interests of the Imperium should be above everything else, her so-called 'schemes' do not carry many disadvantages or bring many returns to the queen herself! If you insist that the queen lurked and secretly operated for decades planning the traps carefully for no selfish reasons at all but the revival and rise of the Imperium, then I… will have nothing to say."
"For no selfish reasons at all? Hehehehe! You are about to welcome the return of Emperor Shenwu? Hahahaha!"
Dongfang Wang laughed so hard that he almost choked himself. He suddenly bulged his eyes and shrieked, "Then come on and welcome His Majesty now!"
Since the very beginning, he had been clutching a human-shaped package the size of a dog. There was no telling what the package was made of, but it had a high blockage ability. Li Yao peeped at it many times with his telepathic thoughts but never penetrated in successfully.
At this moment, Dongfang Wang shook the package and opened it. From inside the package, an object that was as dark as charcoal flew out with a pungent smell. It fell right before Li Yao into pieces.
Slightly dazed, Li Yao activated his spiritual shield before the pieces splashed to his body. He then observed the charcoal-like object carefully.
At first look, it was like a burnt monkey.
But the limbs and the face were apparently a human's, except that they had been reduced multiple times proportionally.
Although it was as dark as charcoal, it did not seem to have just been burnt in a fire. Instead, the water inside the body seemed to have been entirely vaporized, and the blood and the soul were sucked up by certain secret techniques before the body shriveled to such an extent.
"Well—"
Staring at the blackened head the size of a fist for a long time, Li Yao tried to locate some traces from the grimacing, painful face, only to find nothing. "What is this?"
He was confused about why Dongfang Wang was holding such a terribly burnt body in his arms when he was about to die.
"Don't you see? As I have said just now—"
Dongfang Wang's smile was both bitter and hideous. "This is the dominator of the universe, the sovereign of the Imperium of True Human Beings, and Li Linghai's husband—His Majesty Emperor Shenwu that you have been trying to rescue!"
Li Yao's eyes were immediately frozen and did not move again until half a minute later. "Wow… You are truly… audacious and unrestrained. You were crazy enough to turn His Majesty into this?"
With a bitter smile, Dongfang Wang said, "If I say I wasn't the one who did this, would you believe me?"
"I… would."
Thinking for a moment, Li Yao nodded his head. "You can only coerce the other people into obeying you with a living emperor, not a dead one. But speaking of which, when you kidnapped His Majesty, he couldn't have looked so… sorry back then, right? Therefore, His Majesty died under your watch, and you certainly can't get away from it. How exactly did it happen?"
"Intoxication."
Intense confusion surfaced in Dongfang Wang's eyes as he said, "By a very uncanny but strong poison. I asked the best doctors to examine His Majesty's body every day to ensure his safety, but nothing had been found at all! Also, I'm highly suspicious that the poison was injected into His Majesty's body a long time ago and could be activated indirectly through timing or remote control, just so that His Majesty would die in my hands!"
Chapter 2311: Underground Palace! |
Li Yao stared closely at the blackened body again, but he still couldn't tell whether it was poisoned or had been drained up by a certain extremely dominating art. He couldn't help but frown. "Why do you say that it was intoxicated by a poison that was planted a long time ago?"
After a brief hesitation, Dongfang Wang said, "Everybody in the world knows that His Majesty is heisted by me, and that I am coercing other people into following me with the help of His Majesty's authority. But if I say that His Majesty actually trusted me very much, and because he was concerned that somebody was going to murder him, he acted together with me to fool everyone, and he in fact came to my place to seek protection, would you believe me?"
"Wow. So, that is the truth. Of course I will believe it!"
Li Yao said, "As it turns out, Prime Minister Dongfang is truly selfless and devoted to the country. You are a loyal subject to His Majesty, as pure as a lotus flower!"
Dongfang Wang coughed and said, "Fine. That might be an exaggeration. But His Majesty and I were truly not entirely opposite. In many cases, the two of us had to cooperate. He needed to suppress the other three Kurfürst families with my power as well as the unstable factors within the court, including Li Linghai!"
Li Yao asked, "Was His Majesty dissatisfied about the queen?"
"Not dissatisfied, but intimidated!"
Dongfang Wang said, "His Majesty had the deepest fear for Li Linghai. According to him, in recent decades, especially after the outbreak of the Imperium's counterattack, Li Linghai had been changing more and more significantly. Sometimes, she was completely like somebody else, one that creeped him out and made him barely able to stand on his feet.
"Not worrying that he might be laughed at, His Majesty said that he and Li Linghai hadn't slept on the same bed for almost thirty years. He was even physically incapable as a man whenever he met Li Linghai. However, he was still as vigorous as before when he was with his other concubines, and it was not difficult for him to do it ten times a night.
"Also, His Majesty said that Li Linghai often wandered in the royal palace late at night stealthily. There was no telling what she was up to at all. His Majesty was of a mind to investigate, but Li Linghai sometimes just vanished into thin air."
"Wait."
Li Yao raised his hands and asked, "Vanished into thin air? What do you mean by that?"
"Nobody knew how Li Linghai did it. The royal palace was an important focus of the four Kurfürst families' surveillance, with cameras and our spies everywhere. By logic, nobody should be able to sneak around inside the royal palace."
Dongfang Wang said, "However, it is said that the royal palace of the Imperium of True Human Beings was established on the relic of the royal palace of the Star Ocean Imperium from ten thousand years ago. Although the world has changed significantly, it is possible that a lot of secrets are still buried below the ground.
"Years ago, when Blackstar the Great supervised the construction of the royal palace, he regarded the place as the last base of resistance for the Imperium of True Human Beings. Therefore, the underground part of the royal palace is very spacious, with abundant mazes, arsenals, and entrances to world fragments, connected by secret tunnels and teleportation arrays. There are also astonishing defense arrays and complicated traps that can stop the experts in the Nascent Soul Stage or even the Divinity Transformation Stage.
"It is said that Blackstar the Great summoned hundreds of thousands of Cultivators for the construction of the 'underground palace'. Those Cultivators were mostly the war captives during the collapse of the Star Ocean Republic. Blackstar the Great promised that they would be pardoned as long as they built the 'underground palace', and that they could live a new life in the Imperium of True Human Beings as Immortal Cultivators.
"But out of their expectation, after the 'underground palace' was really established, Blackstar the Great simply killed the hundreds of thousands of Cultivators in the underground palace and transformed their unrested souls into extremely powerful defense arrays. Ever since then, hundreds of thousands of restless ghosts have been haunting the underground world of the royal palace, whose secrets are only known by the emperors of every generation. Then, after a few emperors died abruptly while they were on the throne, the secrets of the underground palace were known by none.
"The four Kurfürst families are naturally intrigued by the secrets of the underground palace too, but our four families have been checking and balancing each other. Nobody wants any other family to get the secrets ahead of themselves. Also, it was simply too difficult to excavate the entire underground palace. One moment of carelessness and the crust of the entire planet might experience drastic changes. The ecological equilibrium will be gone. The environment will be too harsh for the survival of mankind. Since the consequences are severe and the returns are few, the issue has been put on hold for a long time.
"According to Emperor Shenwu, Li Linghai seemed to have grasped a way to travel freely in the underground palace, which was highly suspicious. Naturally, I conducted investigations in secret. It was not until then that I discovered the traces of the 'reformists' and realized the tip of the iceberg of Li Linghai's ambitions.
"But at that time, I still did not know that Li Linghai's goal was so huge and her methods would be so seamless and brutal. I thought that she was just another woman who intended to bring disasters to the palace and the court, like many other women did in the past five hundred years.
"Therefore, I only made use of regular approaches and wanted her to 'die of diseases' in order to maintain the dignity of the Imperium, while I captured her in secret to interrogate her for the secrets of the underground palace.
"As for His Majesty, since he came to seek my protection, it would have certainly been impolite of me to turn him down when he walked into my trap voluntarily.
"I meant no harm to His Majesty. However, his head was overwhelmed by the victories in the Imperium's counterattack, and he had grown too egoistic, with ambitions that he could not bear at all. As the prime minister of the Imperium, I was naturally obliged to teach him a lesson, calm him down, and make him realize the reality, in case he was taken advantage of by the malicious guys.
"However, the arrest operation targeting Li Linghai did not go well. What we caught was just a stand-in. The real Li Linghai had long escaped.
"Having no other choices, we could only poison the stand-in and plan to announce the demise of the queen, trying to lower the threat of Li Linghai to the minimum in such a way. But little did we know that we still underestimated her tremendously.
"His Majesty, on the other hand, had been well ever since he received my protection. But after the outbreaks of the 'cannibal training incident' and the 'incident of the Blood Oath Alliance', when I was most anxious and caught unprepared, all the liquids in his entire body were vaporized in only half an hour without any sign, reducing him into such conditions. Not even the slightest soul remained.
"At that time, several doctors and Meditation Healers were with His Majesty and performed first aid immediately. They injected a hundred dosages of medical drugs into His Majesty's body, but none helped. There seemed to be a mini black hole inside His Majesty's body that sucked him up!
"Not earlier, and not later, His Majesty died such an uncanny death right in the middle of my most troubled time. It was obvious that somebody set me up and wanted me to take the blame! It's true that I can't explain His Majesty's death even if I have tongues all over my body. There's nothing I can do except to wait to die now!
"Such carefully-arranged schemes and such vicious drugs couldn't have been prepared by anybody other than Li Linghai, could they?"
"However—"
Li Yao asked, "Why did the queen do that? Why did she kill her sovereign and husband?"
"Perhaps it was because His Majesty knew too many of her secrets and was even considering abolishing the queen. Or perhaps it was simply because she wanted the four Kurfürst families and even the entire Imperium to fall into mayhem!"
Dongfang Wang said, "Like you said just now, as long as the Dongfang family gives away tremendous interests and welcomes Emperor Shenwu back, it will still be possible for the four Kurfürst families and the reformists to strike a balance, which is perhaps not what Li Linghai wants to see. What if her purpose is exactly to cast the Imperium into chaos?
"Emperor Shenwu had been on the throne for sixty years, which was a long time even among all the emperors of the Imperium. He was emperor for sixty years in peace naturally because the four Kurfürst families were all relatively satisfied with the current distribution of interests, and there was no need to replace him with somebody else.
"It was also for that reason, and because the focus of the Imperium in the past twenty years was war, that not even a crown prince had been nominated.
"Before, the four Kurfürst families were all thinking to postpone the nomination of the crown prince until the war was over. By then, the crown prince would be a condition in the deals regarding the distribution of the interests in the postwar reconstruction.
"But with the emergency right now, after the demise of the emperor, the four Kurfürst families and the reformists are immediately at loggerheads.
"For the reformists, your slogan is 'Honor the Majesty and Settle the Rebellion'. Now, even His Majesty himself has been murdered by the rebellions. It is impossible for you to let go of the culprits, and you wouldn't consider your cause accomplished until you annihilate the entire Dongfang family, right?
"For the Dongfang family, many secondary branches could've shown up and cleaned the mess. As long as my branch is sacrificed, it is possible to sustain the whole family. But everything is unknown now that such a terrible thing has happened. Chances are that all the remaining forces of the Dongfang family will jump out for a desperate counterattack!
"For the other three Kurfürst families, they naturally all have their candidates for the crown prince, and they will support the spokespersons of their interests.
"We are in the unprecedented changes in the history of the Imperium now. In both the frontline and the rear, the interests of all fields are being reshuffled. If one family's puppet becomes the emperor, they will certainly hold great advantages and even replace the Dongfang family as 'First Family'!
