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The representative continued, "Your role in this is simple but essential. You will each carry these rumors through your own networks. You will pressure local officials to support tax increases. You will ensure that when bandit raids happen, your people shout the emperor's name in anger."
One merchant raised a hand. "And what of the army? Will they not move to defend the people?"
The representative shook his head.
"All of the imperial troops answer to the Three Masters now, as General Yan Yan and Zhang Ren have sided with us. As for the small numbers of provincial and border troops who do not… will soon find themselves unable to act and have to choose whether to live or die."
There was no pride in his tone, only certainty.
"This plan cannot fail."
He stepped back, giving them all one last sweeping glance.
"You all sought the rising sun," he said quietly, "and it is rising. But suns do not rise gently. They burn away the night."
The lamps flickered. The silence tightened.
"Understand this, Han will fall. Emperor Xian will fall. And Yi Province will become the foothold from which Emperor Hongyi transforms the world."
He placed both palms on the table.
"Now… return to your estates. Begin your tasks. Within two months, the dynasty that has ruled for four centuries will crumble. And history will record that you were the ones who helped drag it down."
The clan heads rose slowly, each bowing in solemn agreement.
"When you leave this room," he said, "you are no longer neutral."
"From tonight on, you are participants. You are instruments. You are architects of the new era."
One by one, the clan heads approached. They pressed their seals onto the scroll, committing their families, bloodlines stretching generations, into treason cloaked as patriotism.
Then they filed out of the Serenity Inn, one by one, slipping into alleyways, vanishing into the crowd, each man carried the knowledge of what was about to unfold.
Outside, the bustling market district continued unknowing, unbothered, unaware that inside an unremarkable inn, history had just been bent toward a darker path.
A path dripping in quiet ambition, calculated cruelty, and the cold hands of men who believed they were shaping destiny, never realizing destiny would, one day, demand payment.
None yet knew that the world they lived in was already set to burn. Inside the shuttered room, the representative extinguished the final lamp.
The shadows swallowed the chamber.
And the fall of Han began.
The three days following the clandestine meeting at the Serenity Inn passed with a deceptive normalcy over Chengdu. The sun rose and set on a city that went about its business, oblivious to the poison being introduced into its veins. Then, almost imperceptibly at first, the air began to change.
It started as a whisper in the sprawling Eastern Market, where a fishmonger, haggling over the price of carp, leaned toward a customer and muttered, "Heard it from my cousin who serves in the palace. The Emperor… he doesn't even read the petitions anymore. Just locks himself away. They say he's broken over giving the princess away. A coward, more worried about his own heart than his people."
By midday, the whisper had sprouted legs. In a cramped, smoke filled teahouse near the temple district, a scholar nursing cheap wine slurred to his companions, "A friend of a friend in the Ministry of Rites says the royal chambers are… busy. Night and day. Music, feasts, while the treasury empties. He abandons his duty for the comfort of the harem. Is this the behavior of a Son of Heaven?"
By evening, the whispers had become a chorus, echoing under the arches of taverns and in the communal wells of residential wards. "They say he's already packed his treasures… has a secret route mapped west… the moment Hengyuan looks the other way, he'll flee and leave us to face the music."
"I heard he only agreed to the marriage because he was too scared to fight… sacrificed his own flesh and blood to buy his own safety." The rumors were varied, vicious, and perfectly tailored.
They attacked Emperor Xian's courage, his diligence, his loyalty, and his paternal instincts. They painted a picture of a man who was selfish, weak, decadent, and prepared to abandon his people.
Markets. Temples. Inns. Ferries crossing the rivers. Even funerals were not spared; mourners whispered accusations between bowed heads and burning incense.
The most dangerous part was not the content of the rumors.
It was how believable they sounded.
Life had been hard for many in Yi Province for years. Not unbearable, but tight. Margins thin. Hope fragile. When people already carried dissatisfaction in their hearts, they did not question stories that gave that dissatisfaction a face.
And Emperor Xian became that face.
Those who had once defended him began to hesitate.
Those who had always doubted him found confirmation.
And those who had nothing left to lose embraced the rumors eagerly, spreading them with righteous fury.
When the news of these swirling calumnies finally reached Emperor Xian through the hushed reports of the few eunuchs still loyal to his person rather than his office, he felt a chill that had nothing to do with the autumn air. He sat in his study, the words of the report blurring before his eyes.
Coward. Debauched. Fleeing. He wanted to rage, to issue edicts condemning the lies, to send magistrates to root out the source. But the terrible, hollow truth stared back at him and that he had no one to send.
The magistrates answered to Fa Zheng. The city guards answered to Meng Da. The court scribes answered to Zhang Song. He was a voice shouting into a sealed jar. The echoes were his own.
His isolation was made physically manifest the very next day in the imperial court. As the morning rituals concluded, the head of a powerful silk merchant guild, a man whose family had grown fat on imperial contracts for generations, stepped forward.
With a face of grave concern, he bowed and launched into a rehearsed speech about the "dire state of the province's defenses" and the "pressing need to fund the restoration of Zitong's fortifications," heavily damaged in earlier conflicts. He proposed an "emergency defense tax."
Before the emperor could draw breath to respond, a scholarly clan head added his voice, lamenting the "impoverished state of the imperial treasury" and suggesting not just the emergency tax, but across the board increases on existing levies for grain, salt, and transport.
Then, like vultures descending, others joined. A proposal for a new tax on market stalls. Another on riverboat cargo. One particularly brazen minor official, his eyes darting nervously toward the impassive faces of Fa Zheng and Zhang Song, even suggested a "cultural levy" on public theaters and storytelling performances.
The chamber, usually a place of stifled silence or orchestrated praise, erupted in a shocking chorus of unanimous greed. It was a landslide of avarice disguised as fiscal responsibility.
Emperor Xian shot to his feet, his voice trembling with a mixture of fury and desperate reason. "Have you all lost your minds?!" he cried, the words echoing in the suddenly quiet hall.
"The people are already whispering against this court! Their trust is brittle as winter ice! To heap these burdens upon them now is to take a hammer to that ice! You will not fill the treasury, you will ignite a rebellion!"
His plea, born of stark political reality, was met with a wall of bland indifference. Fa Zheng stepped forward, his tone soothing yet utterly immovable. "Your Majesty's concern for the people is touching. But a state cannot run on sympathy alone. Zitong's walls must be repaired. The betrothal gifts for Princess Liu Jie must be commensurate with her station and the dignity of Han. These are expenses of state, unavoidable. The people will understand the necessity in time."
Zhang Song nodded sagely. "Indeed. Temporary hardship for long term stability. A ruler must sometimes make difficult choices for the greater good."
Meng Da simply crossed his arms, his silence more intimidating than any speech. The message was clear, the court had spoken. The unified front of nobles, merchants, and scholars, orchestrated by the three of them, was absolute.
Emperor Xian looked from one implacable face to another. The sense of powerlessness was a physical weight, crushing his lungs. He sank back onto his throne, the fight draining out of him. With a voice barely above a whisper, heavy with defeat, he uttered the only words left to him. "Do as you will."
The imperial decrees were stamped with his seal and dispatched by swift riders to every commandery and county in Yi Province. They arrived not as missives, but as thunderbolts.
In the farming villages, families who had scraped together a modest surplus after the harvest saw it demanded in full as an "emergency defense grain levy."
In the market towns, stall owners were presented with staggering new fee schedules. Salt, the precious preservative of life, now carried a tax that doubled its price. Boatmen on the rivers found their cargoes subject to brutal new tolls.
The reaction was not mere grumbling. It was a wave of cold, terrifying panic that washed over the province. The rumors, once whispered, now seemed to be confirmed by brutal, official decree. He is enriching himself! He is stealing from us to fund his harem and his escape! The tolerable hardship of life under a weak emperor curdled into the bitter certainty of exploitation by a corrupt one.
Then came the tax collectors. These were not the usual, somewhat corruptible local clerks. These were new faces, or familiar faces hardened with a new, cruel purpose. They moved in groups, accompanied by unsmiling guards.
They showed no pity. An elderly couple's life savings of copper coins, hidden in a clay pot beneath their bed for a daughter's dowry, was emptied onto a cloth and swept away. A potter's small stock of finished wares, his capital for the next season, was confiscated as "payment in kind." Refusal was met with broken doors, threats of imprisonment, or casual, brutal violence.
The spark hit the tinderbox. In Ba Commandery, a crowd surrounded a tax collector's office, their shouts turning from pleas to curses against the "thieving emperor." In Chengdu itself, the unrest was most acute.
A protest formed outside the prefect's office, not of radicals, but of butchers, weavers, and shopkeepers, the backbone of the city. Their banners were simple. "Unbearable Burdens!" and "Where Does Our Silver Go?". The mood was volatile, a mixture of fear and a new, raw anger directed squarely at the distant, cloistered figure in the palace.
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Name: Lie Fan
Title: Founding Emperor Of Hengyuan Dynasty
Age: 35 (202 AD)
Level: 16
Next Level: 462,000
Renown: 2325
Cultivation: Yin Yang Separation (level 9)
SP: 1,121,700
ATTRIBUTE POINTS
STR: 966 (+20)
VIT: 623 (+20)
AGI: 623 (+10)
INT: 667
CHR: 98
WIS: 549
WILL: 432
ATR Points: 0