The Grand Strategy Chamber was a place of ghosts and futures. The meticulously detailed map of Manchuria and Siberia that covered the floor was already a historical document, a testament to a plan that had shattered on contact with reality. Red pins, marking the high-water mark of the Qing advance, were now clustered ignominiously back at the Ussuri River. They were tiny, crimson monuments to failure.
In the center of this vast, cold room, General Duan Qirui knelt. He had been kneeling for over an hour, alone, in absolute silence. The polished floor was merciless, sending a deep, biting ache into his knees, but he did not move a muscle. It was a minor physical pain compared to the inferno of shame that consumed him. He had been recalled from the front, stripped of his sword, and summoned here to await his final judgment. He had led the finest army the Empire had ever produced to its first, humiliating defeat. He knew the price of such failure. He expected nothing less than a swift, clean death.
The heavy doors at the far end of the chamber swung open without a sound, and the Emperor entered. He moved with a predator's grace, circling the kneeling general, his soft silk slippers making no sound on the floor. He did not radiate the volcanic fury Duan had braced himself for. His presence was something far colder, far more unsettling: a detached, analytical calm, like a scholar about to begin a particularly complex dissection.
"Your strategy was sound," Qin Shi Huang began, his voice deceptively mild, almost conversational. Duan flinched, the unexpected praise feeling more like a blow than an insult. "Your deployment was swift. Your troops were brave. Your equipment was superior to that of the enemy in every measurable respect. And yet," the Emperor stopped his circling and stood directly in front of the kneeling man, "you were defeated. Explain to me the logic of it."
Duan Qirui swallowed hard, his throat dry as dust. This was his trial. He had to give the correct answer. "Your Majesty," he began, his voice a hoarse croak, "the logic is simple. My intelligence was fatally flawed. The enemy was not where I was told he would be. He was waiting where I was most vulnerable. I did not walk into a battle. I walked into a perfectly prepared trap."
A long silence followed. Duan kept his eyes fixed on the floor, certain that this confession of incompetence would be his last words.
"Correct," the Emperor said finally. Duan's head snapped up in shock. The Emperor was looking down at him, not with contempt, but with an expression of intense, piercing scrutiny. "Your failure was not a failure of courage on the battlefield. It was a failure of credulity in this very room. You trusted the information you were given. You assumed the maps were true. You did not account for the one variable that can undo any perfect plan: human betrayal."
The Emperor turned away and walked towards the map on the floor, contemplating the red pins of defeat. "Execution is a simple, clean solution. It purges the failure, but it teaches nothing. An army that does not learn from its mistakes is doomed to repeat them. Your death would be a waste, General."
He turned back, and his eyes were chips of black ice. He delivered his stunning, brutal judgment.
"You are hereby stripped of your command of the Northern Army Group. You are stripped of your rank, your titles, and all honors. You will retain only the name your father gave you."
Duan closed his eyes, his world collapsing. This was a fate worse than death. A living disgrace.
"However," the Emperor continued, "I am giving you a new title. From this day forward, you will be known as the Chief Inspector of Military Logistics and Intelligence Verification. A new office, created just for you."
Duan looked up, confused. The title sounded important, but the context felt like a cruel joke.
"Your new, sole duty for the rest of your natural life," Qin Shi Huang explained, spelling out the exquisite cruelty of his sentence, "will be to travel. You will go to every military academy in the Empire. You will go to every officer training school, every NCO course. And you will lecture. You will stand before every cadet class, before every man who aspires to lead our soldiers, and you will tell them the story of your failure. You will use your disastrous campaign, in excruciating detail, as the ultimate object lesson in the critical importance of verifying intelligence, of questioning assumptions, of never, ever trusting the map over the terrain.
"Victory," the Emperor stated, his voice as cold and final as a tombstone, "is said to have a hundred fathers. Failure is an orphan. But your failure, Duan Qirui, will be instructive. It will be the founding myth of our new military doctrine. You will be the living, breathing embodiment of our army's first and most important lesson. It is a far more useful fate for the Empire than a simple, forgettable death."
A pair of imperial guards entered and helped the utterly broken man to his feet. Duan Qirui, no longer a General, stumbled out of the chamber, a ghost condemned to haunt the army he once led, his life's work now reduced to being a cautionary tale.
After he was gone, a shadow detached itself from the far wall. Shen Ke stepped forward, his black robes making him seem like a piece of the darkness given form. The chamber now held only the two of them: the absolute sovereign and his master of secrets.
The Emperor's demeanor shifted instantly. The cold, dispassionate strategist vanished, and in his place was the ancient, paranoid autocrat. The mask of the modernizer fell away to reveal the primal core of Qin Shi Huang.
"A serpent is coiled in my house, Shen Ke," he said, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous whisper that seemed to be physically absorbed by the shadows in the room. "My grand design, the precise details of my army's advance, were given to the Russians. This information did not come from a common soldier or a provincial clerk. It could only have come from the highest levels of my government."
He did not name Yuan Shikai. He did not need to. It was a test. He was assessing his spymaster's acuity, forcing Shen Ke to follow the cold, hard trail of logic to its inevitable, treasonous conclusion.
"The Russians did not simply know where our armies would strike," the Emperor continued, slowly, deliberately, as if teaching a student. "More importantly, they knew precisely when we would strike. An army's movements are not dictated by the will of its general alone. They are dictated by its stomach. By its supply lines. The timing of any major offensive is determined by the arrival of the final shipments of food, munitions, and fodder for the horses. An army attacks when it is ready. Someone with perfect, up-to-the-minute knowledge of our logistical train gave the Russians their timetable. It allowed them to move their own forces into position at the last possible moment, remaining hidden until our vanguard had passed the point of no return."
He was not making an accusation. He was presenting a theorem. An elegant, brutal piece of deductive reasoning. He was pointing Shen Ke, like a loaded pistol, directly at the man he had just placed in charge of the entire logistical network for the war. The Minister-President of the Manchurian-American Railway project. Yuan Shikai.
Shen Ke's face remained an impassive mask, but his mind raced, connecting the Emperor's logic to the thousand small, disparate reports his agents had already filed. Yuan's ruthless efficiency in purging his staff in Mukden. His suspiciously close dealings with the American auditors. The wall of secrecy he had erected around the railway's finances. It all snapped into focus.
He bowed his head, a gesture of absolute comprehension. "I will begin my investigation in Manchuria, Your Majesty," he confirmed, his voice a low, grim whisper. The Emperor had given him the scent of the serpent. It was now his duty to track it to its lair.
Qin Shi Huang gave a single, almost imperceptible nod. The internal war, the war that mattered far more than any border skirmish in Siberia, had just been officially declared.
"Find the serpent's nest," the Emperor commanded, his voice now imbued with a chilling, ancient cold. "Map its tunnels. Count its eggs. Learn its every movement."
He paused, turning to look his spymaster directly in the eye. "And when you find it, do not disturb it. Do not alert the creature that it is being watched. You will merely observe. And you will report everything to me. I, and I alone, will decide when and how to crush its head."
Shen Ke bowed again, lower this time, and retreated back into the shadows. He had been unleashed. His hunt had begun.
To be the first to know about future sequels and new projects, google my official author blog: Waystar Novels.