The interrogation chambers of the Eastern Depot did not echo with screams. Shen Ke had long considered such displays to be a mark of amateurism, a vulgar waste of energy. His rooms were places of profound and terrifying silence, insulated by thick stone walls that drank sound. The only noises were the quiet rasp of a scribe's brush on paper, the soft clink of metal instruments being cleaned in a basin, and the strained, ragged breathing of men who had been introduced to the true, anatomical limits of their own bodies.
Shen Ke stood observing the work, his hands clasped behind his back. His face was a placid, scholarly mask that betrayed none of the cold, intricate calculations happening behind his eyes. On the chair before him was one of the Wuhan ringleaders, a man whose defiance had evaporated hours ago, replaced by a desperate, animal need to please.
"The press," Shen Ke said, his voice a soft, reasonable murmur. "You did not cast the type yourselves. The font is Western. English, specifically. Where did you acquire it?"
The man, his spirit broken, told him everything. He spoke of a small, hidden printing shop in the city's foreign quarter, run by a disgraced academic named Tong Wen. He was the ideologue, the true believer, the one who translated the poisonous Western pamphlets and gave their struggle a voice. It was Tong Wen who had turned simple grievances over pay and hours into a revolutionary crusade.
Shen Ke nodded, a gesture of finality. He had what he needed from this one. He was not interested in their pathetic justifications for treason. He was a cartographer of conspiracy, and his only goal was to map the entire network before he burned it from the earth. As his guards dragged the broken man away, another of his agents entered the chamber, his movements swift and urgent. He held a small, oilskin-wrapped packet.
"My Lord," the agent reported, his voice a low thrum of excitement. "We intercepted a runner attempting to leave the city. He was not carrying pamphlets. He was carrying this."
Shen Ke took the packet. Inside was a coded message. He recognized the cipher; it was a clumsy, amateurish variant of a diplomatic code used by the Russian consulate in Shanghai. He handed it to a waiting cryptographer, a thin, hunched man who seemed more ghost than human. Within minutes, the man had broken it.
The decoded message was laid on the table before Shen Ke. His placid expression did not change, but a new, cold light entered his eyes. This was no longer a simple matter of domestic sedition. The message was a direct appeal from Tong Wen's radical faction to the Russian military attaché in Shanghai. It offered detailed schematics of the new 150-millimeter artillery pieces being produced at the arsenal, a priceless piece of military intelligence. In exchange, the message requested a shipment of rifles, pistols, and, most damningly, dynamite.
The strikers were not just striking. A core faction was planning an armed insurrection, a full-scale terrorist attack on the heart of the Emperor's war machine. And they had solicited a foreign power as their co-conspirator.
Shen Ke folded the paper and tucked it into his robes. The game had changed.
The main square of the Wuhan Arsenal Complex was a vast, open space, ringed by the towering, smoke-belching foundries and assembly halls. It was a place designed to impress upon the workers their own insignificance in the face of the state's industrial might. Today, it was a stage. Thousands of workers, their faces sullen and grimy, had been herded from their shifts by armed soldiers. They stood in a tense, silent mass, an ocean of blue tunics and simmering resentment.
In the center of the square, a wooden scaffold had been erected. Shen Ke stood upon it, a figure of absolute, unassailable authority. Beside him, a dozen captured ringleaders were forced to their knees, their hands bound, their heads bowed. The charismatic academic, Tong Wen, was among them. Unlike the others, his head was held high. His face was bruised and swollen, but his eyes burned with a defiant, unquenchable fire.
Shen Ke did not give a speech. He did not read a list of crimes. He simply unrolled a scroll—the Emperor's decree—and held it aloft for all to see. The massive, red imperial seal was all the justification that was needed. He gave a single, sharp nod.
The executioners stepped forward. Their movements were practiced and efficient. There were no last words, no final pleas. Only the silent, brutal work of severing heads from bodies. The crowd watched in horrified silence, the rhythmic thud of the executioner's blades the only sound to break the tense quiet.
But as the executioner approached Tong Wen, the academic suddenly threw his head back and found his voice. It was not a scream of fear, but a roar of pure, unadulterated conviction that echoed across the vast square.
"You can kill us!" he bellowed, his voice raw and powerful. "You can silence our mouths and break our bodies! But you cannot kill the idea! You cannot kill the truth that we are men, not beasts of burden! You cannot kill the dream that we deserve a better fate than to be the Emperor's slaves!"
His words struck the crowd like a bolt of lightning. It was as if he had given voice to the secret, burning resentment hidden in every heart. Before the guards could react, before the executioner's blade could fall, a single rock flew from the back of the crowd, arcing high and shattering against the scaffold.
It was the spark.
A second rock followed, then a third. A low growl of anger began to ripple through the thousands of workers. Shen Ke's eyes narrowed. He saw the shift, the precise moment when fear curdled into rage. He had followed the Emperor's orders to the letter, but the Emperor's understanding of his people was flawed. This display of absolute power had not instilled discipline. It had created martyrs.
The growl became a roar. The crowd surged forward, a human tsunami of fury. They were armed with the tools of their trade—heavy hammers, long steel wrenches, sharpened lengths of rebar. The neat lines of garrison soldiers, so imposing just moments before, were instantly overwhelmed, swallowed by the sheer mass and ferocity of the mob.
The square exploded into a full-blown riot. The workers, transformed from a sullen audience into an enraged army, stormed the scaffold. They tore the executioners and guards apart with their bare hands and improvised weapons. They set the administrative buildings alight, sending plumes of thick, black smoke billowing into the sky. The Wuhan Arsenal, the glittering jewel of the Emperor's industrial crown, the very heart of his military power, was in flames, consumed by the fury of the men who had built it.
Hours later, in the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City, Shen Ke stood before the Dragon Throne. His immaculate black uniform was stained with soot and flecked with ash. He had fought his way clear of the maelstrom, but the arsenal was lost to the mob. He reported the events with a cold, brutal, and unvarnished honesty, omitting no detail of his own failure to control the situation.
Qin Shi Huang listened, his face carved from granite. His fingers gripped the dragon heads of his throne so tightly his knuckles were white. His order, his simple, logical solution to a problem of sedition, had backfired catastrophically. He had made a miscalculation, and the price was the burning of his greatest weapon. A cold, silent rage, the likes of which he had not felt since his first life, began to build within him.
But then, Shen Ke produced the final piece of the puzzle. He laid the decoded Russian message on the steps before the throne.
"The riot was the result of our actions, Your Majesty," Shen Ke stated, his voice flat. "But the conspiracy that fueled it was foreign. We have captured the Russian agent who was their contact. A military attaché from the Shanghai consulate. We have him, and we have his decoded correspondence. He was not merely observing. He was actively attempting to arm seditionists and incite insurrection within the borders of the Empire. This was not diplomacy. This was an act of war."
The Emperor looked down at the damning piece of paper. The entire strategic landscape of the world shifted in his mind. His domestic failure, his galling misjudgment, had been transformed. It was no longer a symbol of his vulnerability. It was now a gift. A perfect, undeniable, heaven-sent justification for the war he had long been planning in the abstract. The Russian Bear, distracted and weakened by its foolish war with Japan, had reached out and foolishly, suicidally, poked the Chinese Dragon.
He had his casus belli.
A profound, chilling calm descended over Qin Shi Huang. The fury vanished, replaced by the cold, clear logic of conquest. He rose slowly from his throne, his figure seeming to swell in size, filling the vast, silent hall with an aura of ancient and terrible power.
His voice, when he spoke, was quiet, yet it resonated off the carved pillars, imbued with the weight of an empire about to be unleashed.
"Shen Ke," he commanded. "Assemble the Grand Council. Inform the Ministry of War to place the entire military on high alert. You will mobilize the Northern Army Group to the Siberian border with all haste."
He took a step down from the dais. "And send a dispatch to the Russian ambassador. You will not request a meeting. You will inform him that, effective immediately, his nation's diplomatic immunity on our soil is revoked. Inform him that his attaché's treachery will be answered not with notes of protest, but with fire and steel."
He paused, his eyes looking north, as if he could already see the frozen plains of Siberia.
"We have been patient while the barbarians squabbled on our doorstep. Our patience is now at an end."
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