In the deep, silent heart of the Forbidden City, within the Emperor's most private chambers, the world was serene. Qin Shi Huang sat in quiet meditation, cross-legged on a silk cushion. The air was cool and still, scented with the faint, clean fragrance of sandalwood incense. On a low table before him, a simple celadon bowl held clear, perfectly still water. This was his sanctuary, his place of control. Here, he practiced not the grand, world-altering exertions of his power, but the fine, delicate art of absolute discipline. He was focused on the water, his will a gentle but unbreakable cage, holding every molecule motionless, a simple exercise to calm the turbulent, powerful energies that resided within him.
And then, without warning, the universe screamed.
A lance of pure, unadulterated agony shot through his mind. It was not a physical pain, not a headache or a migraine. It was a psychic shriek, a hostile, invasive frequency that crashed into the core of his being. It was the sound of a billion discordant bells ringing at once, a wave of pure, weaponized chaos. His senses, which could feel the subtle shift of tectonic plates and the flow of sap in a tree, were overloaded, blinded, and torn apart in an instant.
He cried out, a raw, guttural sound torn from his throat, and pitched forward from his cushion, his hands flying to his head as if to physically claw the noise out of his skull. His vision exploded in a nauseating flash of sickly green and buzzing static. The serene chamber vanished, replaced by a blinding, internal storm.
On the table before him, the bowl of water reacted. The placid surface did not ripple; it convulsed. With a violent, explosive hiss, the entire volume of water, without any source of heat, instantly flashed into a cloud of scalding steam. The porcelain bowl, unable to withstand the sudden, impossible thermal shock, cracked with a loud pop, a fissure racing across its ancient glaze.
The Emperor collapsed onto the priceless silk rug, gasping, his body trembling with the aftershocks of the assault. The psychic shriek had vanished as quickly as it had come, but it had left him gutted. A profound, terrifying weakness seeped into his bones. His head throbbed with a dull, echoing pain. He felt a warm wetness and raised a trembling hand to his face. His fingers came away stained dark with blood that was leaking from his nose and his ears.
The doors to the chamber burst open. His personal guards, alarmed by the cry, rushed in with swords drawn, their faces masks of panic. Behind them came his physician, Dr. Gao, his medical kit already in hand.
"Your Majesty!" Dr. Gao cried, rushing to his side, his professional calm shattered by the sight of the Emperor, the Son of Heaven, kneeling and bleeding on the floor.
"Secure the chamber! No one enters or leaves!" one of the guards commanded, his men forming a protective wall around their fallen sovereign.
Dr. Gao gently helped the Emperor to a sitting position, his expert hands already checking his pulse, his breathing. "Your Majesty, what happened? Was it the power again? Did you overextend yourself?"
"No," Qin Shi Huang rasped, his voice a weak, ragged shadow of its usual commanding tone. He pushed the doctor's hands away, forcing himself to sit upright, his pride warring with the debilitating weakness. "This was not… from me."
He struggled to explain the sensation, something for which no words existed. It was not the familiar, draining fatigue that came from using his own power. This was an attack. A hostile, external force. It had felt like another will, a "disharmonious frequency," had deliberately sought him out, latched onto his own innate energy, amplified it into a chaotic, cancerous state, and then turned it back against him. It was a violation.
For the first time since his rebirth, Qin Shi Huang felt a sliver of true, mortal fear. He was not just a god with a physical cost to be managed. He was a god with a specific, identifiable, and exploitable vulnerability. Someone, somewhere, had found a way to hurt him.
The fear, however, was quickly consumed by a wave of cold, absolute rage. This was not espionage. This was not the petty political maneuvering of his court or the clumsy provocations of the West. This was a direct assault on his person. An act of attempted deicide. It was an unforgivable, ultimate blasphemy.
"Find it," he snarled, the word tearing at his raw throat. He fixed his chief eunuch, Li Lianying, who was hovering nearby with a look of pure terror, with a burning glare. "Find the source of this… this disturbance. Find it now!"
Li Lianying bowed so low his head touched the floor and then scurried out of the room to pass on the imperial command.
Moments later, a modern telephone, one of the few anachronisms in the ancient palace, rang with a shrill insistence. An aide answered it. It was Spymaster Shen Ke, calling with an urgent report about the chaos at the bank in Shanghai. The aide, seeing the Emperor's state, was about to send him away, but Qin Shi Huang gestured for the phone.
He took the receiver, his hand still unsteady. "Shen Ke," he growled into the mouthpiece.
"Your Majesty! I must report an incident in Shang…"
"I know," the Emperor cut him off, his voice a venomous whisper. He described what had just happened, the psychic assault, the impossible pain. "It was an attack. I felt its origin. The epicenter… was in Shanghai." He paused, his mind piecing together the nature of the attack. "It felt… wrong. Like a flawed, distorted echo of my own power."
In his dark office in Beijing, Shen Ke went perfectly still. He listened to the Emperor's words, and all the disparate threads of his recent investigations suddenly wove themselves together into a single, terrifying tapestry. The hunt for the American agent. The strange, untraceable funding for the physicist, Dr. Chen. The panicked report he had just received from his Section Chief Ling about a massive, localized power surge in the Shanghai industrial district, followed by sounds of an explosion. The chaos at the bank. And now, a direct, supernatural attack on the Emperor himself, originating from the same city, an attack described as a "flawed echo" of his own power.
Shen Ke understood. He understood with a chilling, absolute certainty. This was not about espionage anymore. This was not about a foreign power trying to steal secrets. Dr. Chen was not just a rogue academic being funded by the Americans.
They had built a weapon. A weapon specifically designed to attack the Emperor.
"Your Majesty," Shen Ke said into the phone, his own voice grim, all traces of bureaucratic deference gone, replaced by the cold certainty of a man who has seen the face of the true enemy. "I believe I know the source. My men are closing in on a private laboratory in the industrial district as we speak. The one belonging to Dr. Chen."
The Emperor, still weak, still bleeding, his body screaming in protest, gave a single, chilling order, his voice the hiss of a striking snake.
"I do not want prisoners, Spymaster. I want answers. And then I want rubble."