The Imperial Proving Ground outside Beijing was a vast, scarred plain, a place where the Emperor's new weapons were birthed in fire and steel. Today, it was the stage for a different kind of test. Yuan Shikai stood beside the Emperor on a raised observation platform, his chest swelled with a proprietary pride. Below them, his creation, the experimental Third Armored Legion, was arrayed in perfect formation.
Ten Type 1 Imperial Dragons, their steel hulls gleaming with fresh oil and polish, stood like slumbering beasts. Beside them, their crews stood at attention. They were not soldiers in the traditional sense. They were factory workers, technicians, and mechanics, drawn from the furnaces and assembly lines of Yuan's industrial empire in Tianjin. They marched with a mechanic's stiff precision, not a soldier's fluid grace, their faces holding a look of awed devotion to the machines they served and the minister who had elevated them.
"Your Majesty," Yuan boomed, his voice filled with a creator's pride. "I present to you the future of your army. Not farmers taught to hold a rifle, but specialists born to the machine. They do not have a soldier's sentimentality, but they possess a technician's skill. Their loyalty is not to an abstract code of honor, but to the engine, the gear, and the gun. They are an extension of your will, forged in steel and fire."
Qin Shi Huang listened, his face impassive, his gaze sweeping over the assembled men and their machines. He gave a slight nod. "They are… impressive, Minister Yuan. A testament to your industrial genius." He turned to a waiting officer. "Let us begin. A simple live-fire exercise to test their readiness. The objective," he said, pointing to a series of heavily reinforced earth-and-timber fortifications at the far end of the plain, "is to advance in formation and obliterate those targets."
Yuan Shikai beamed. This was the moment he had been waiting for, the chance to prove the superiority of his methods. "You heard the Emperor!" he roared at his legion commander. "Advance and show the Son of Heaven the power he has forged!"
With a series of deep, guttural roars, the engines of the ten landships coughed to life. Black smoke plumed into the cold air. The ground began to tremble as the immense machines lurched forward, their massive tracks churning the earth. They moved with a beautiful, terrifying mechanical precision, a perfect, unstoppable wall of steel rolling across the plain.
As the landships began their advance, Qin Shi Huang's placid expression did not change, but his eyes closed for a brief moment. He reached out with his Dragon's Spark, his supernatural perception extending across the field. He was not looking for a grand display of force. He was conducting a far more subtle experiment of his own.
He focused his will not on the entire legion, but on a single, tiny component inside the lead vehicle. He did not seek to break or shatter it. That would be crude, obvious. He used his power with the delicate, infinitesimal precision of a master watchmaker. In his mind's eye, he saw the roaring engine, the flow of fuel, the intricate dance of its internal parts. He focused on a single fuel injector valve, a small, insignificant piece of machined steel. And with a gentle, imperceptible mental "nudge," he altered its alignment by a fraction of a millimeter. It was an act of subtle, undetectable sabotage, a flaw so minor that any mechanic would diagnose it as a simple, random mechanical failure.
The effect was instantaneous.
The engine of the lead landship, the flagship of the column, sputtered violently. It coughed a thick, greasy cloud of black smoke, choked, and then, with a final, grinding groan, died. The ten-ton machine lurched to a halt, its momentum gone.
It had become a sudden, immovable steel island in the path of the nine machines following behind it. The driver of the second landship, seeing his leader stop, did what his training dictated. He slammed on his brakes. The vehicle behind him was forced to do the same. A chain reaction of confusion rippled down the perfect formation. Within seconds, Yuan Shikai's unstoppable wall of steel had degenerated into a chaotic, disorganized traffic jam of stalled, ten-ton war machines.
From the observation platform, Yuan's face turned a pale, sickly white, then flushed a deep, apoplectic red. His perfect demonstration, his moment of triumph, had dissolved into a humiliating farce. "Idiots!" he bellowed at his legion commander through a speaking tube. "Restore the formation! Move around the stalled vehicle! Advance!"
But Qin Shi Huang raised a hand, gesturing for silence. "Patience, Minister," he said, his voice dangerously calm. "Let us observe."
He was not watching the machines. He was watching the men.
Faced with an unexpected problem, the crews of the Armored Legion did exactly what they had been trained to do. They followed procedure. Hatches clanged open. The technicians, their faces etched with concern for their machines, climbed out. They did not post lookouts. They did not form a defensive perimeter. They did not scan the horizon for enemy threats. They opened their toolkits. They consulted their technical manuals. They gathered around the stalled lead vehicle, peering into its engine compartment, beginning to run diagnostics. They were behaving exactly as Yuan had described them: as excellent mechanics. Not as soldiers under fire.
Qin Shi Huang had seen enough. The experiment had been a resounding success, though not in the way Yuan had intended. It had revealed a profound, fundamental truth. Yuan's men were brilliant technicians. They were loyal cogs. But they possessed no initiative, no combat instinct, no ability to adapt to the chaos of a battlefield. They were utterly, completely useless as warriors.
He turned to Yuan Shikai, whose face was now a mask of pure, humiliated fury. The Emperor's voice, when he spoke, was not loud, but it was cold enough to freeze the air, and it carried to every nearby officer.
"Minister Yuan," he said calmly. "Your machines are magnificent. A true testament to the power of our industry. And your men… your men are excellent mechanics. I have no doubt they could repair that engine in record time."
He paused, letting the faint praise twist into a dagger. "But they are not soldiers. You have built me a fine motor pool, Minister. You have not built me an army."
The public rebuke was stunning in its quiet brutality. "This experiment is over," the Emperor continued, his voice leaving no room for argument. "These men will be returned to your factories, where their valuable skills will be of better use to the Empire. The crews for my Imperial Dragons will be drawn from Admiral Meng's veteran marines—men who know how to fight, not just how to fix a stalled engine. They may not understand the workings of a fuel injector, but they understand the workings of fear, and courage, and death."
The Emperor had not just judged the legion; he had judged Yuan Shikai's entire philosophy of power and found it wanting. He had used his own secret power to sabotage Yuan's pet project, delivering a stinging, public humiliation and stripping him of the private army he had been so proud of.
Yuan Shikai stood motionless amidst his stalled, silent war machines, his face a thunderous mask. He did not know how or why the engine had failed so perfectly, so catastrophically. But he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that he had been outmaneuvered. The Emperor had not yet exposed him as a traitor, but he had blunted one of his most dangerous weapons and sent a clear, terrifying message across the political battlefield: I see more than you think.