At 10:00 AM on that seventh morning of the autumn cold snap. Second Prince Qian Ye [Regressor Halo: 65%] rode slowly onto the white marble expanse of Central Imperial Boulevard atop a snow-white warhorse. Wearing a suit of polished golden dragon-scale ceremonial armor and a cape of white ermine fur.
Because Qian Ye had spent the last twelve hours locked inside the inner Eastern Palace meditation chamber soaking his bruised tailbone. Lightning-numbed knees in medicinal baths—and had ordered his palace eunuchs not to disturb him. His morning parade—nobody had dared wake him up at midnight to tell him that Corrupt Censor Ge had confessed to a ladle of stinky-tofu brine.
Or that four hundred golden beetles had stripped Grain-Tycoon Wan naked and teleported all 800,000 sacks of hoarded rice to the South Ward!
In Second Prince Qian Ye’s mind, after seven days of freezing canal frost and fifty-silver grain prices. The five hundred thousand commoners of Sky-Crown City should now be at the absolute breaking point of starvation and despair—exactly as they had been in his past life!
Behind Qian Ye’s white horse marched a hundred-man Royal Brass & Drum Band blowing golden trumpets, followed by ten wooden carts carrying ten cauldrons of thin, watery. Unseasoned rice gruel (made with ten percent moldy chaff and ninety percent water) and twenty clerks holding stacks of Lifelong Indenture & Land-Surrender Contracts.
