The next morning, the Imperial Study felt like a conquered territory under new occupation. The familiar, if tense, presence of Weng Tonghe was gone. In his place stood three figures who radiated an aura of cold, unyielding rigidity. Cixi had moved swiftly. Ying Zheng's new educational regime was about to begin.
Li Lianying presided over the transition, his face a mask of smug satisfaction. He had personally vetted and selected these men, and he presented them to the young Emperor as if they were precious gifts.
"Your Majesty," the head eunuch announced, his voice smooth and oily, "Her Imperial Majesty, in her boundless concern for your well-being, has chosen these three esteemed and virtuous scholars to guide you. Their wisdom is as deep as the sea, their principles as firm as the mountains. They will correct the… imbalances in your education and restore harmony and focus to your spirit."
The three new Imperial Tutors were a matched set. They were all elderly, with long, thin beards that were more white than grey, and they wore dark, severe robes devoid of any ornamentation. They were relics from a bygone era, famous in the capital for their rigid adherence to the most conservative and orthodox schools of Neo-Confucian thought. They were not men of intellectual curiosity; they were ideological enforcers.
Their leader, a man named Wo Ren, stepped forward. He was a formidable figure, tall and gaunt, with cold, deeply intelligent eyes that seemed to peer directly into a man's soul and judge it for its moral failings. He was a renowned hardliner, a man who had famously argued that it was better for the empire to fall than to adopt a single piece of Western technology or thought. He bowed stiffly, a gesture of protocol devoid of any warmth.
"Your Majesty," Wo Ren began, his voice a dry, rasping sound like stones grinding together. "By order of the Empress Dowager, your education will henceforth be reformed. Your days will be structured according to the principles of discipline and righteous focus. There will be no more frivolous readings of poetry or history. Such topics are a distraction for a young mind and, it is clear, have led to your current disharmony."
He paused, his cold gaze sweeping over the boy. "We will spend five hours a day in recitation and memorization. We will begin with the Great Learning and proceed through the Four Books and the Five Classics. You will memorize them, and you will recite them, until their wisdom is etched upon your very bones. We will purge the mind to heal the body. There will be no questions, only answers. The answers are in the text."
This was Cixi's counter-attack in its purest, most brutal form. It was a psychological siege. She was attempting to crush his "unnatural" curiosity and his strategic mind under a mountain of rote memorization. She was not just trying to control what he learned; she was trying to control how he thought. She was building a new, stronger ideological cage around his mind, one brick of dogma at a time.
Ying Zheng looked at these three old men, his new jailers. He felt a familiar, hot surge of rage boil in his chest. The sheer, breathtaking arrogance of it! They would treat him, Ying Zheng, the First August Thearch who had burned the useless books of the past to forge a new future, like a common schoolboy. They would force him to chant passages about filial piety and deference to authority—passages written by scholars from dynasties that had only existed because his own had paved the way.
But as the rage built, he felt his power respond. The anger was fuel, but he had learned that it did not need to be used for destruction. It could be channeled into creation, into subtle acts of will. He calmly took in the scene. The three severe tutors. The smug Li Lianying. The starkly re-ordered study, now stripped of any interesting scrolls or maps.
His eyes fell upon the inkstone that had been provided for him on his table. It was not the fine Duan stone he had gifted to Weng Tonghe. It was a plain, utilitarian piece of She stone, serviceable but coarse. An idea, cold and brilliant, sparked in his mind.
He bowed his head in a perfect gesture of childish obedience. "This student is grateful for the wisdom of his new teachers," he said meekly.
The first lesson began immediately. Wo Ren instructed him on the proper, ritualistic way to grind the ink, a lesson in patience and discipline.
"The mind must be calm," the old tutor rasped. "The hand must be steady. The motion must be circular and even. All things in their proper order."
As Ying Zheng obediently picked up the ink stick and began to grind it against the stone, adding water drop by drop, he focused his will. He reached out with his power, not with heat or force, but with a subtle, vibratory command. He targeted a small, specific spot on the surface of the plain inkstone. He did not heat it or move it. He subtly altered its molecular structure, causing the stone's natural pores to open, to become infinitesimally more porous and absorbent in that one small area. The change was invisible to the naked eye.
As he continued the circular grinding motion, he made sure to pass over that specific spot again and again. With each pass, a tiny, microscopic amount of the black ink pigment was absorbed deep into the stone itself, trapped below the surface.
The lesson was a grueling, mind-numbing affair. For hours, he was forced to recite passages, to copy characters, his every move scrutinized by the three old men. He played his part perfectly. He was slow, he made mistakes, he seemed to struggle with the memorization, earning stern rebukes from Wo Ren.
The episode ends with Ying Zheng sitting through the lesson, his face a mask of placid, childish obedience. His new jailers were pleased. They saw a difficult but pliable student, a mind that could be reshaped and controlled.
They had no idea what was truly happening. They did not know that their student was a two-thousand-year-old emperor. And they did not know that the very tools they were using to indoctrinate him were being turned into weapons against them. Cixi thought she was building a cage to contain his mind. She had no idea she had just given him a new, secret laboratory, and that his very desk had become a silent, stone recorder.