Li Shi Long’s request for demotion and salary reduction was to prevent the Jin King from being troubled further by the attempted assassiKingdom of the Grand Minister. Li Yuan Fa’s severed legs were mainly to allow the Grand Minister and Princess Han Yue to vent their anger, but under the pretext of disaster relief, he had perfectly managed to boost his reputation among the court officials!
Indeed, Li Prime Minister had not climbed to his current position merely because his daughter had a productive womb.
With this, the covert turmoil in the Jin Kingdom came to an end. The Prime Minister’s manor had lost ground, but Mo Ti Zhun didn’t feel he had gained much advantage either. What comforted him was that Li Shi Long had lost his position as Right Prime Minister, which was taken by the original Left Prime Minister Gu You Qing—effectively a loss of power. At the same time, under the King’s orders, the Li manor secretly made many compensations to Mo Ti Zhun.
The Grand Minister’s demands were like a gaping maw of blood, gnawing Li Shi Long to the bone. Of course, what pained the Prime Minister most was that his son, in whom he had placed great hopes, had become disabled and thus ineligible for an official career.
Naturally, from this point forward, the enmity between the two households deepened further.
“By the way, now that the matter is settled, the Prime Minister’s manor won’t target you anymore,” Mo Ti Zhun stood up after delivering this news in Feng Miao Jun’s residence. “You’re safe now.”
With the truth revealed, there was no point for the Li family to put pressure on her anymore. Feng Miao Jun herself was too insignificant to be worth the Prime Minister’s attention.
This also meant that Feng Miao Jun could safely explore Jin Capital—she had been here for a month and hadn’t even had a chance to walk the streets yet.
Provided her body recovered first.
Before Mo Ti Zhun left, she suddenly asked one final question:
“Why did you vow never to kill children?”
A person’s desires and restrictions could simply be kept in one’s heart. To voice them aloud, and to make them binding oaths, must be due to some unbearable past.
Mo Ti Zhun was silent, motionless.
After who knows how long, when Feng Miao Jun thought he would not speak again, he suddenly opened his mouth:
“I was once ruthless, always completely eradicating my enemies without mercy. Later, when my daughter was in labor, despite all precautions, her first two pregnancies were miscarried, and her health was permanently damaged.” He sighed deeply. “As the Grand Minister, it wasn’t difficult for me to calculate that this was retribution for my excessive bloodshed, the consequences falling upon her instead.”
“My sins should not be borne by her. Therefore, I made this vow to prove my sincerity—any future enemies would not have their misfortune extend to their offspring.” Somehow he had taken a small stone in his hand, and now skipped it across the water surface—”zing, zing, zing”—bouncing five times. “After this, I finally had a grandson.”
“So this world also has the principle of heavenly justice?”
Mo Ti Zhun shrugged without speaking and turned to leave.
Half a month later, a peasant uprising erupted in You Tian Township in the former An Xia territory, attacking the Northern Garrison. The Wei Kingdom’s local administrative offices and border trade stations were bloodily ransacked.
When the news arrived, it shook the Wei court inside and out.
While dispatching troops to suppress the uprising, the Wei King also assigned a Junior Investigator to travel to You Tian Township to ascertain the causes.
The subsequent developments left people dumbfounded: The Junior Investigator had been in You Tian Township for barely three days before his head and body were separated. His body sat upright, with not even a wrinkle in his clothes, but his head had been placed on a nearby table, with one of his hands chopped off and placed over his forehead, covering his eyes.
Was this suggesting that someone could cover the sky with one hand? Upon receiving the news, the Wei King was so angry that he smashed a tiger-shaped paperweight on the floor during court: “Investigate! I want the truth revealed!”
A second Junior Investigator was dispatched, but this time with a skilled bodyguard.
The civilian uprising was no match for the regular army. Within five days, the unrest was suppressed.
However, as the Wei King read the report submitted by the Junior Investigator, his face turned as black as the bottom of a pot.
You Tian Township was known for its mountains, primarily producing iron ore. After the Wei Kingdom invaded An Xia, large numbers of strong war prisoners were transported there to mine the mountains. The living environment was harsh, labor intensity extreme, and prisoner abuse frequent. For a month before the incident, heavy rain had loosened the soil. The supervisors ignored warnings and still forced laborers to enter the mining area, resulting in a cave-in that killed over a thousand people.
Up to this point, the Wei King didn’t find anything particularly alarming. The critical information followed:
The Junior Investigator discovered during his inspection that the iron mine contained a vein of spirit stones!
The spirit stone vein had originally been hidden deeper, but after the mine collapsed, half the mountainside fell away, exposing it in broad daylight. Even though the Junior Investigator was not a cultivator, he could not mistake that green, luminous glow, fresher than jade!
It turned out to be an unreported rich mine.
Most shockingly, there were signs that the spirit stone vein had already been mined. In fact, it was precisely because of the greedy and hasty extraction of spirit stones, without accurate geological surveys or proper reinforcement of the mine, that the tragic collapse had occurred.
According to Wei Kingdom’s laws, the mining rights of all spirit stone veins within its borders belonged to the state and were strictly regulated. Neither local officials nor royal relatives had the right to mine independently. As for individuals, those who discovered spirit stone veins but concealed them would be executed!
So, who had been secretly mining this spirit stone vein?
The answer wasn’t hard to find. Wei Crown Prince Xiao Jing, now thirty-four years old, had been assisting in governing for over five years. More than eighty percent of what happened in the southern part of An Xia was under his administration. Once the hiding and private mining of a spirit stone vein—such a major crime—was exposed, the Wei King would question him first!
The fifty-two-year-old Wei King was furious, his commanding presence no weaker than in his youth. Even after roaring for an hour, his voice remained strong—thanks to the Dragon Tiger Golden Elixir.
Only his Chief Eunuch Chen Xi knew that fearing a heart attack from extreme anger, the Wei King had secretly swallowed two more pills!
Crown Prince Jing, who had been kneeling in front of the King for half a day, felt that the cold sweat he had shed in the past thirty years was not as much as on this day!
That night in the Eastern Palace, he pressed both hands on the table and growled in a low voice to his birth mother: “How many times have I told you not to provoke the Grand Minister! Your tactics are ineffective against him and will only invite more fierce retaliation!”
“Was it him?” Queen Zheng’s face had been deathly pale all day. “Your second brother is close to him. I wanted to help you… What do we do now?”
The Crown Prince remained silent. His mother came from a modest background and had been confined to the palace for a long, with a limited understanding of cultivators. She had used ordinary methods against Yun Yan, only to harm her son.
In the end, he found scapegoats, shifting most of the responsibility. The Wei King naturally understood what had happened, but could not hold a prince to the same standard as commoners—he could not take his life.
Finally, he could only accept this outcome, having those unfortunate scapegoats torn apart by five horses, and then reprimanding the Crown Prince for his lax supervision of subordinates, confining him to quarters for three months of reflection.
But Crown Prince Jing understood that his father’s gaze upon him had changed. While the king himself remained vigorous as a dragon, the Crown Prince was secretly hoarding spirit stones in the shadows, his intentions questionable—a challenge to royal authority.