Lu Tianyang woke up face-down on a table, covered in pastry crumbs.
He lifted his head slowly and surveyed the damage.
"I see," he said. "I have regained control of my life."
A maid made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a prayer. "Your Highness! You fell asleep while eating!"
He regarded the half-eaten jade-lotus cake with the gravity it deserved.
"I call it strategic resting."
He stretched, rolled his neck, and looked out through the carved windows. Morning sunlight poured across the palace garden beyond, which looked almost offensively peaceful. Birds singing. Guards rotating shifts. Servants moving in careful, nervous patterns across the courtyard.
This place was alive. And he needed to understand it.
He walked outside barefoot.
Two guards snapped to attention instantly.
"Your Highness!"
He looked at them. "Do I usually look this good in the morning?"
The taller one blinked. "You usually look… horizontal, Your Highness."
"Ah." He considered this. "Progress."
He moved through the inner courtyard without any particular destination, simply watching. Palace children were training with wooden swords near the eastern pavilion, their small arms working through forms with varying degrees of commitment. A chubby boy at the back caught sight of him and pointed with zero hesitation.
"Look! The lazy prince!"
Lu Tianyang crouched down to the child's eye level.
"Confidence is a virtue," he said pleasantly. "But survival is a skill. You might consider developing both."
The child gulped. The instructor was already bowing frantically. "Your Highness, please forgive him, he doesn't understand—"
He waved a hand without looking up. "Relax. If I took offense at honesty, I would have executed half the palace by now."
The instructor had no idea how to respond to that. His expression cycled through four emotions in rapid succession and landed somewhere between laughter and grief.
Good. Fear mixed with confusion was a useful combination.
He continued on. Kitchen. Servant quarters. Training grounds. The long archive hallway with its shelves of lacquered records. He moved slowly, observing everything. Who avoided eye contact. Who whispered to their neighbors as he passed. Who looked nervous, who looked ambitious, who looked at him like they were already calculating something.
This empire was not simple. It was layered, folded over itself like silk, each surface concealing something beneath.
Then his brain caught up to something he had been quietly ignoring.
Court.
His father.
"If you embarrass me again, I will personally send you to the border army."
He stopped walking in the middle of an empty corridor.
"Border army sounds like exercise," he said to no one.
The system voice answered, unhurried. "Probability of survival at the border: acceptable. Probability of comfort: zero."
"I dislike both those words."
He turned to a passing eunuch. "What time is court?"
The eunuch stopped so suddenly he nearly tripped over his own robes. "Y-Your Highness… it has already begun."
Lu Tianyang checked the angle of the sun. Then shrugged.
"Then it has begun without me. That's initiative."
He started to walk away. The eunuch made a sound like a man watching a carriage roll slowly off a cliff. "Your Highness, His Majesty specifically ordered your attendance—"
Lu Tianyang stopped.
Ordered. Not requested. Not suggested.
Ordered.
That changed the calculus.
He exhaled with great theatrical suffering. "Fine. Let us go attend democracy."
He adjusted his robes, smoothed his sleeve, and then paused as a thought settled into place.
If he arrived rushing and apologetic, they would expect incompetence. If he walked in stiff and prepared, they would be defensive before he opened his mouth. But if he walked in late, calm, smiling, completely unbothered by the fact that several hundred officials had been waiting for him, that was a different thing entirely.
That was a statement.
He smirked faintly and started toward the grand hall.
Servants whispered as he passed through the corridors.
"Is he actually going?"
"He looks different today."
"Did he lose money again?"
He heard all of it. He let none of it show on his face. Not reacting was its own kind of power, he was learning. The stillness made people nervous in ways that anger never could.
He stopped at the bronze doors of the court hall and stood there for a moment. Not hesitating. Just listening to the murmur of voices on the other side, the weight of the room beyond, all those officials assembled, the Emperor waiting, Minister Zhou almost certainly mid-sentence on something tedious.
He was not nervous.
He was not angry.
He was curious, which felt like the most dangerous thing he had been in a long time.
He pushed the doors open.
The sound rolled through the hall like a wave. Hundreds of officials turned in unison. The Emperor sat at the throne, expression unreadable. Minister Zhou stood at the center with his mouth still open, mid-word, his speech interrupted so thoroughly that he seemed to have forgotten what language it was in.
The Third Prince walked in like the delay had been everyone else's fault.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Lu Tianyang smiled, easy and unhurried, and dipped his head in a shallow bow toward the throne.
"Apologies for the delay. I was conducting a structural assessment of the eastern wing." He straightened, glancing briefly around the assembled court. "Everything seems unstable, incidentally."
No one moved.
Somewhere near the back, someone forgot to breathe.
And that, Lu Tianyang thought, settling into his position with the patience of a man who had nowhere else to be, was a perfectly reasonable place to start.