In Yonghe Palace, Maid Yuchan handed Concubine Uya a pair of pruning shears.
"Our informant in Zhongcui Palace sent word," Yuchan reported softly, assisting Uya with the bonsai tree. "The First Prince, Yinshi, met privately with his mother, Concubine Hui, today. They dismissed all servants and spoke behind closed doors for thirty minutes. However, earlier, the First Prince was heard complaining that the Crown Prince is building a glass house while the rest of the palaces are still waiting for glass windows."
Concubine Uya snipped a stray branch, her expression indifferent. "Concubine Hui is a veteran of the inner court; of course she runs a tight ship. It is natural our informant could not get close. As for the boy's complaints, they are irrelevant. Hui will ensure those words never reach the Emperor's ears. And even if they did, who isn't envious of the glass? The Emperor understands human nature."
"Are you envious, Your Ladyship?" Yuchan asked with a smile.
"The Emperor has already decreed that the main palaces will receive windows," Uya replied calmly. "I will get mine eventually. There is no strategic value in impatience."
She set down the shears and pointed to the two potted orange trees by the window. "Harvest a basket of those oranges and deliver them personally to the Crown Prince at Yuqing Palace. Tell him I planted these trees two years ago, and the palace soil has made them exceptionally sweet. Ask him to enjoy the first harvest."
Context: The two trees yielded very little fruit. After paying obligatory respects by sending portions to the Emperor and the Dowagers, giving the rest to the Crown Prince meant Uya would have none for herself.
Yuchan obeyed without question. Uya washed her hands and moved to the side chamber to check on her infant son, Yinzuo.
Looking at the sleeping baby, Uya engaged in cold political calculus. She knew exactly what Concubine Hui and the First Prince were planning. Yinshi was the eldest, backed by a powerful maternal clan. Yinreng was the Crown Prince, the legitimate heir. The friction was inevitable.
Analysis: The throne was the ultimate prize. However, Emperor Kangxi was in his prime. Her own sons, Yinzuo and Yinzhen, were mere toddlers. Meanwhile, the Crown Prince's current political momentum was absolute. Engaging in factional warfare now was suicidal.
Conclusion: The most rational path was to align with the dominant force. She would build goodwill with the Crown Prince now and reassess the political landscape in a decade.
***
At Yuqing Palace, Yinreng peeled one of Uya's oranges. He took a bite and nodded in approval.
Observation: Without modern chemical fertilizers or artificial sweeteners, achieving this level of balanced, rich sweetness required meticulous horticultural skill. Concubine Uya's culinary and agricultural gifts were consistently impressive.
He threw the peel away, completely ignoring the political olive branch the fruit represented. He had more immediate observations to process.
Recently, First Prince Yinshi's behavior had drastically altered. The boy had stopped glaring at him. Instead, Yinshi had transformed into a mirror. If Yinreng hugged Kangxi, Yinshi hugged Kangxi. If Yinreng fed the Emperor a pastry, Yinshi did the same. Yinshi was even adopting Yinreng's specific vocabulary when asking for favors.
Analysis: Concubine Hui had clearly instructed her son to abandon open hostility and adopt a strategy of mimicry to siphon the Emperor's affection.
Emperor Kangxi had noticed this sudden shift but chose to encourage it, simply pleased that his eldest son was acting affectionate.
Conclusion: Yinreng decided to let it play out. He had no intention of escalating a rivalry with a child. History dictated that Kangxi would rule for decades. Engaging in a hyper-competitive succession war at age six was a massive waste of cognitive resources. Let Yinshi play the obedient son; Yinreng had actual work to do.
***
By late October, the glass greenhouse was operational. It was behind schedule for standard winter planting, but the structural integrity and thermal retention were satisfactory.
Yinreng immediately initiated a recruitment drive for agricultural labor.
Logistical Assessment: He could not use palace maids. Maids were drafted from the 'Booi' (bondservant) class—families that, while legally bound to the imperial household, were often wealthy administrators. They knew nothing of farming. Eunuchs, however, were frequently sold into the palace by destitute peasant families to pay off debts. They possessed the necessary foundational skills.
Word spread, and dozens of eunuchs volunteered. Yinreng, requiring technical precision, designed a written and oral agricultural examination. After rigorous screening by his head eunuch, Xiaozhu, he selected four men.
The most valuable asset among them was a young eunuch named Meng Jixiang.
Meng's backstory was a standard tragedy: a declining farming family, a manipulative stepmother, and a father who accrued massive debts through failed business ventures. To save the family land from creditors and protect her biological son, the stepmother sold Meng into castration and palace servitude.
Yinreng felt brief pity, but his attention was entirely captured by Meng's intellect.
Because Meng was ostracized by his family, he had spent his childhood hiding in the rice paddies, simply observing nature. Through conversations with local beekeepers, Meng learned the fundamental mechanics of pollination—that flowers possessed male and female components, and required external agents like bees to transfer pollen for fruit production.
Taking this knowledge, Meng spent years observing rice plants. He deduced that rice flowers were hermaphroditic (containing both stamens and pistils within the same flower) and began experimenting with manual cross-pollination. When he tried to explain this to his village, they called him insane.
Yinreng was astounded.
Evaluation: He hadn't just hired a farmer; he had accidentally recruited a prodigy with an innate understanding of plant biology and artificial pollination. Meng Jixiang was an invaluable scientific resource.
With his team assembled, Yinreng ordered the soil tilled. The four eunuchs quickly planted a variety of winter-resistant vegetables.
However, Yinreng cordoned off a highly secured, specialized section of the soil just for himself. Into this premium earth, he carefully sowed the diverse regional grain and rice seeds he had secretly acquired through Songgotu's network.
The True Objective: The vegetables were merely a political smokescreen to satisfy Kangxi. Yinreng's actual goal was high-yield grain cultivation.
If he waited until the standard spring planting season to test these seeds, he would only acquire seedlings by summer. Testing cross-breeding and yield would take an entire year, delaying nationwide implementation by at least two years.
By utilizing the greenhouse to force a winter growth cycle, Yinreng was accelerating his agricultural research and development by a full year.
Food security was the bedrock of national stability and, by extension, his future political authority.
After burying the final seed, Yinreng stood up, brushing the dirt from his hands. He looked down at the dark soil, his mind calculating the germination timeline.
Internal Monologue: 'Grow efficiently. The margin for error is zero. The empire's logistical foundation, and my tech-tree progression, depends entirely on this harvest.'