Li Lianying awoke with a strange and unfamiliar sensation: he felt refreshed. The vise-like grip of the migraine that had plagued him for days was gone. The constant, thrumming tension in his shoulders had vanished. He pushed himself up from his desk, his cheek imprinted with the pattern of the documents he had fallen asleep on. He felt a moment of groggy confusion. He remembered sipping the tea the boy Lotus had brought him, and then… nothing. The next thing he knew, sunlight was streaming through his study window. He must have been more exhausted than he realized. The boy's remedy, it seemed, was surprisingly effective.
A flicker of annoyance passed through him. It was unseemly for the great Head Eunuch to be found asleep at his desk like a common, overworked clerk. He straightened his robes, preparing to call for his morning tea and summon his senior aides for the day's business of plotting and paranoia.
But his call was met with silence. Strange. His personal servants were usually waiting just outside his door, ready to respond to his slightest gesture. He called again, his voice sharper this time, laced with irritation. Still nothing. A knot of unease began to form in his stomach. He strode to the door and threw it open.
The scene in his outer office was one of chaos. Junior eunuchs were running back and forth, their faces pale with panic. Two of his senior aides were trying to revive one of his personal bodyguards, who was slumped against a wall, groaning.
"What is the meaning of this?" Li Lianying's voice cut through the panic like a whip. "Where are the night sentries?"
One of his aides rushed forward, his face ashen. "Excellency! It's… it's a disaster! The entire night watch… they were found unconscious at their posts! All of them! They are just now waking up. They remember nothing!"
The head eunuch's blood ran cold. He immediately shoved past the frightened servants and strode into the main courtyard of his residence. The scene was worse than he imagined. His elite personal guards, four of them, were being tended to by physicians. They all had ugly bruises on their heads and necks, and their stories were confused and contradictory. They spoke of a sudden shadow, a feeling of immense pressure, and then blackness.
Li Lianying's mind, a finely honed instrument of suspicion, instantly dismissed the idea of a common intrusion. This was something else. This was professional. He ran, his silk slippers slapping against the stone pavement, towards the one place that truly mattered: his storage pavilion.
His heart sank when he saw the door. It was broken, the thick, iron-reinforced wood torn away from the lock mechanism as if by a giant's hand. He shoved the broken door aside and rushed in.
At first glance, nothing seemed amiss. The priceless scrolls were still on their shelves. The jade carvings were untouched. The racks of silk robes were undisturbed. A common thief would have taken these things. He felt a brief, foolish flicker of relief. Perhaps they had been frightened off before they could steal anything of value.
Then, his eyes fell upon the floor in the rear of the pavilion. The massive stone slab that concealed his secret vault. It was perfectly in place. But around its edges was a faint, fresh line of scraped stone dust that had not been there before.
With a cry of pure dread, he scrambled to the back of the room. He knew he could not lift the slab himself. "Get crowbars!" he shrieked at the guards who had followed him. "Get every man you can find! Now!"
It took six strong guards, straining with thick iron bars, nearly ten minutes to budge the heavy stone and slide it aside, revealing the dark opening to his vault. Li Lianying pushed them aside and scrambled down the stone steps, his heart pounding with a terrible, sick rhythm.
The vault was empty.
The heavy chests had been smashed to pieces, their lids splintered, their iron locks shattered and twisted into grotesque shapes. And the silver, the decades of carefully accumulated wealth, the foundation of his personal power, the fortune he had amassed through bribery, extortion, and skimming from the Empress Dowager herself—it was all gone. Every last ingot.
Li Lianying stared into the empty, violated space. A sound escaped his throat, a sound he had never made before. It was a high, thin, animalistic scream of pure, unadulterated rage and despair.
The Empress Dowager Cixi was on the scene within the hour. She walked through the chaos with a terrifying, glacial calm. She listened to the guards' babbling stories of a silent demon. She examined the torn door, the shattered chests, and the empty vault. She noted what had been taken—only the silver—and what had been left behind.
She stood beside Li Lianying, who was now a trembling, broken wreck. "This was not a common thief, Lianying," she said, her voice devoid of any sympathy. "This was an expert. A ghost who can knock out your best men without a sound, who can tear open a vault with his bare hands, it seems. And a ghost with a very specific target."
"Majesty," Li Lianying stammered, his mind racing to create a plausible lie. He could not admit that this was his personal, stolen fortune. "It… it was reserve funds! For the network! For emergencies! For… for paying our most secret informants!"
Cixi looked at him, her dark eyes cold and utterly devoid of trust. She knew he was lying. She had long been aware of his personal embezzlements, his skimming from her own projects. She had always tolerated it as a necessary cost of his loyalty and usefulness. But this attack, this impossible crime, changed the entire calculation. Her most powerful servant had just been rendered powerless, his personal wealth—the source of his own network of influence—evaporated overnight.
"First, your intelligence records are burned to ash," she said, her voice dangerously soft. "Now, your secret 'reserve funds' have vanished. Our enemies are not just mocking us anymore, Lianying. They are bankrupting us. They are systematically dismantling our power, piece by piece."
She turned and looked out at the courtyard, her gaze distant and filled with a cold fury. "This is the work of Prince Gong. It must be. Only he would have the audacity. Only he could command such… resources. He is no longer content with political victories. He has declared a secret war upon us."
The misdirection was complete. In her mind, the impossible crime could only be the work of her primary political rival. She could not conceive of any other possibility. The thought that the true culprit was the sickly, quiet child in the palace was too fantastic, too absurd to even consider. The attack drove an even deeper wedge of paranoia and mistrust between Cixi's faction and the Prince's, pushing the court closer to an open civil war.
That morning, a representative from the German shipyard's office in Shanghai received a massive, anonymous deposit of silver bullion. It was funneled through a series of private trading houses and banks arranged by Shen Ke, using his knowledge of the financial world, and facilitated by Viceroy Li Hongzhang's people, who were only too happy to help the "Coastal Defense Fund" secure its financing so efficiently. The payment was made. The construction of the first two ironclads of the Northern Fleet could begin immediately.
Ying Zheng, having received the news from his own network, sat in his study, calmly sipping his morning tea. A faint, cold smile played on his lips. He had just successfully funded the first ships of his new, modern navy with his enemy's own stolen treasure.