The heavy doors groaned inward, admitting two figures who seemed to shrink beneath the cavernous, dragon-carved ceiling of Zhangtai Palace.
Jing Ke led, his posture rigid with a feigned deference that didn't reach his eyes. In his hands, he carried a gruesome offering: the severed head of the traitor general Fan Yuqi.
Behind him, Qin Wuyang faltered. The weight of the Dukang map box in his arms seemed to bow his shoulders.
The pallor of his face was a stark contrast to the vibrant silks and dark woods of the hall, and when he opened his mouth, only a stammering, broken greeting emerged.
"M-me… meet… the King."
Somewhere to his left, Long Su heard a minister mutter under his breath to the man beside him—too low for the dais to catch, but close enough for him. "Look at the second one, shaking. Yan Kingdom sends us children now."
"Or cowards," the other murmured back. "Either way, it insults His Majesty to send a man who can't hold his own tongue steady."
Long Su watched from his place near the throne and felt a cold certainty settle in his gut.
The dagger is on the map. The poisoned blade.
His eyes flicked to the ornate box in Qin Wuyang's trembling grasp, then away. History had to play out. His interference had to be invisible—only then would his chance come.
Jing Ke's voice rang out, clear and bold, cutting through his companion's weakness.
"Jing Ke, envoy of the State of Yan, pays homage to the Qin king."
He held the head aloft. "Your Majesty, behold the fate of the traitor Fan Yuqi. And this"—he gestured to the box—"is the map of Dukang, the richest lands of Yan, offered in our desire for peace."
Upon the dais, Ying Zheng's gaze slid over the grisly head with dismissive contempt.
" Feed it to the dogs."
One sentence . A eunuch scurried forward to take the macabre trophy away. Near the front of the assembly, Long Su caught the shrewd tilt of Li Si's head as he watched the head carried off—his expression unreadable, but his eyes flicking once, briefly, toward the map box rather than the corpse.
He, at least, understood which of the two offerings actually mattered, he also heard a general—a gravel voice, decades spent shouting over battlefields—mutter to a colleague, "I don't like how the small one holds that box. A map doesn't need to be gripped like that."
"You see plots in everything, General," the other replied, though he didn't sound entirely convinced of his own dismissal. "It's only nerves. Even I would shake, bringing tribute before His Majesty."
If only you knew how right the first one was, Long Su thought and said nothing at all.
The King's obsidian eyes remained fixed on the map box, gleaming with a conqueror's hunger. Lands, rivers, fortifications—the promise of another state folded into his growing empire.
"Behold, Son of Heaven!" Jing Ke proclaimed, his tone dripping with a reverence that belied the tension coiling his body. His knuckles were bone-white, where they gripped the carved box. "Every river, every garrison of Yan's heartland—laid bare for your glorious vision."
" A generous gift, if genuine," Li Si said, pitched just loud enough to be heard without presuming to address the throne directly. "Yan has never before opened its ledgers to us."
"Generosity from a dying state is not generosity," Feng Quji said beside him, tone flat with contempt. "It is surrender dressed in silk. Let them hand over the map and be done pretending it is a gift."
However, for Ying Zheng, he leaned forward. With the Tai'e sword at his hip, it seemed to hum—a faint, thirsty vibration felt more in the soul than heard by the ear.
'This was the moment.'
Long Su began to move, edging imperceptibly closer to the throne. His pulse was a war drum in his skull, his breath shallow.
No one noticed his slow advance; every eye in the hall was locked on the exchange between the king and the envoy.
Jing Ke's hands worked at the lacings of the box.
Long Su watched the envoy's knuckles, bone-white where they gripped the carved box. A man at peace did not hold a gift like that.
A man at peace did not blink twice for every breath he took. The reverence in his tone was a sheath, and Long Su had already seen the shadow of the blade beneath it: the fixed stare, the weight distributed on the balls of his feet, the slight turn of the left shoulder that cleared the draw path.
Then—a flick of the wrist. Too sharp. Too sudden and too fast
The lid came free. The map, a lavish scroll of silk, tumbled in slow motion, unfurling as it fell toward the polished floor.
But it was not a map that Jing Ke now held. In his hand, it was a dagger.
The steel was a shard of captured frost, its edge honed to a cruel sharpness, and along its groove, a slick, venomous paste gleamed with a sinister purple sheen. The map had been nothing but a sheath—a deception now cast aside.
"DEATH TO QIN!"
The roar tore from his throat, raw and primal. He became a blur of motion, launching himself across the remaining space toward the throne. His free hand shot out, seizing a handful of the King's black silken sleeve, anchoring himself.
The poisoned dagger arced upward, aimed directly for Ying Zheng's heart.
Time seemed to fracture.
Somewhere behind Long Su a minister's voice cracked in half mid-word—"ASSASS—"—the rest of it lost as the entire hall lurched into motion at once, robes and bodies colliding in a chaos that had no shape yet, only noise.
With a desperate, instinctual lurch, the King threw his weight backward. The deadly point missed its mark—but the force of the movement and the assassin's grip produced a loud, tearing RIIIP as the royal sleeve was shredded.
It was the signal he had been waiting for.
Propelled by a surge of adrenaline that was both Fusu's filial duty and his own desperate gambit, Long Su accelerated forward. His mind was a vortex of fear and calculation, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps.
He did not go for the dagger. He did not try to grapple the assassin directly.
Instead, as Jing Ke—eyes wild and fixed solely on the recovering king—prepared for another thrust, Long Su drove his foot in a sweeping kick against his leading leg.
He did not think.
The body—Fusu's, or Long Su's, or some terrified alloy of both—simply moved. His foot caught Jing Ke's ankle not with technique but with the clumsy, brutal physics of a man throwing himself down a staircase.
The assassin's balance shattered. With a grunt of surprise and pain, Jing Ke crashed to the cold obsidian floor, the venomous dagger skittering from his grasp.
The window for a clean kill had lasted only a heartbeat, and now it was closed.
Long Su threw his body over the King of Qin, becoming a living shield.
The opulent hall erupted into pandemonium. Ministers and generals stood frozen—ornamental and utterly useless.
The iron law of the Qin court, meant to ensure the king's absolute security, had become his greatest vulnerability: no official, not even the most decorated general, could bear arms within the palace precincts. Only Ying Zheng wore the legendary sword Tai'e.
A cacophony of shouts tore through the air.
"Assassin!"
"Guards! To the king!"
"Someone open the gate—the king is unguarded!" That was Li Si's voice, unmistakably, stripped of its earlier composure and gone ragged with something close to panic. "Where are the palace guards? WHERE ARE THEY?"
"They cannot enter without an edict, you fool, there is no time to—" Feng Quji's voice broke off entirely, swallowed by the roar of the room.
The cries echoed off the vaulted ceilings, bouncing meaninglessly off the carved dragons. The elite guards of Xianyang Palace were stationed beyond these walls, forbidden from entering without a direct imperial edict—an edict no one could issue in the heartbeats of this chaos.
Beneath him, Long Su felt the solid muscle of Ying Zheng tense—a tiger preparing to throw off a restraint. The king began to shove him away, his movement powerful and instinctual.
Desperation clawed at his throat.
His fingers, concealed by the tangle of bodies and torn silk, frantically patrolled the King's sash and robes, searching for the hard, cool shape of the personal jade.
"Imperial Father, do not move!" he hissed, the words a frantic whisper meant for his ear alone. "There is blood—I fear the blade found your body."
It was a lie. A gamble woven from thin air. But it worked.
The king's struggle ceased momentarily, the instinct to assess the claimed wound overriding his fury. He stilled—allowing his son to "protect" him—buying Long Su precious seconds.
It was then that Jing Ke found his feet. Holding the poisoned dagger aloft, his eyes burned with fanatical fire.
"Ying Zheng! Enemy of the Six Kingdoms! Today, I, Jing Ke, bring peace to the land by ending your tyranny!"
He lunged.
Somewhere in the chaos behind him, Long Su heard one last fragment of a general's voice, hoarse with helpless fury at his own uselessness in a hall where even he could carry no blade: "Not the king—not while I still draw breath—"
It didn't matter. He was too far. Everyone was too far. There was only Long Su, and the Ying Zheng beneath him, and the frost-white dagger closing the last of its distance.
BOOM.
The sound was not heard—it was felt, a concussion of reality itself that struck the bones before it reached the ears.
A white light detonated through the hall, not illuminating but unmaking. It bleached color from silk, detail from stone, thought from mind.
For a single, terrifying instant, the world was nothing but blinding, warm white light that covered everything.
In the silence after the light that came quickly and vanished quicker, for seconds, no one moved first.
Not the ministers, still frozen in postures of half-flight. Not the generals, hands twitching uselessly at hips that carried no swords.
It was Ying Zheng himself who broke it—rising from where he'd been thrown clear, robes torn, one sleeve hanging in ruins from his shoulder, his face utterly without expression.
He did not look shaken. He looked, if anything, colder than before, as though the attempt on his life had simply confirmed something he'd already suspected about the world and found no particular reason to be surprised by.
"Bind him." Two words, and nothing more—but the hall moved at once, as if his voice alone had cut the strings holding everyone still.
Guards who had arrived too late to matter now fell upon Jing Ke with the ferocity of men eager to prove they hadn't failed twice in one afternoon. He did not resist.
Whatever fire had carried him across that floor with a poisoned blade in his hand had burned itself out the moment the throw went wide; he let them drag him upright, let them wrench his arms behind his back, and said nothing at all—no final curse, no last cry of Death to Qin.
Only silence and a stare fixed somewhere past all of them, on some point in the middle distance no one else could see.
"To the dungeons," Ying Zheng said. "Alive. I would know everything Yan told him before I decide how he dies."
It was Li Si, ashen and visibly shaking though his voice had already steadied into something almost businesslike, who asked the question that mattered more to the room than the assassin ever would.
"Your Majesty. Where is the eldest son?"
Only then, apparently, did the hall seem to notice the empty space where Fusu the eldest son had stood a moment before—a space with no body in it, living or otherwise, as though the eldest son of Qin had simply been a detail in someone's memory and nothing more.
Servants were sent running down every corridor. Guards fanned out through the palace grounds.
And the king, Li Si would remember later, said nothing about it at all—not confusion, not grief, not even a question—only stood very still for a long moment, staring at the torn silk of his own sleeve, before turning and walking from the hall as though he had already decided what conclusion to draw and saw no use in speaking it aloud.
------------------
Long Su's fingers had closed around the jade disc. It was cold against his palm, its surface traced with veins of gold—and the instant his skin made contact, reality tore itself open.
The magnificent pillars of Zhangtai Palace bled into streaks of meaningless color. The terrified shouts of ministers frayed into a silent, high-pitched whine. The stone beneath him lost its substance.
He was untethered.
A soul adrift in a formless, soundless void, severed from the river of time he had been flung into.
Then—BOOM.
The sound was his own heart. But it was also the heart of a world being born.
It hammered through the nothingness, a primordial beat that shook the atoms of his being and announced a brutal genesis.
The void receded, replaced by a jarring impact as his knees met solid ground.
He found himself kneeling on a plain of absolute blackness—a soil that seemed to devour light, stretching into a flat, featureless horizon beneath a starless, sourceless gloom.
This was his dominion.
This was his Seed World.
A dry, grating rustle broke the silence.
Before him, the dark earth cracked and parted. From the fissures, ten figures clawed their way into existence, pulling themselves upward with a sound of clattering bones.
They stood, uneven and swaying—a pathetic assembly of bleached white skeletons.
Their empty sockets stared into nothingness. Their limbs clicked together like dice tossed by a bored god.
As his eyes focused on them, their essence imprinted itself on his mind—a cold, clinical readout.
[Skeleton Slave]
Level: 0
Strength: 1 — Grasping a tool is a struggle.
Defense: 1 — Brittle bones shatter at a stiff breeze.
Speed: 1 — A shambling, lurching gait.
Will: 0.5 — Mindless automatons, barely capable of following a single direct order.
Skills: ———
For a single breath, Long Su saw the ghost of a face he hadn't given that skeleton—a boy, maybe, from some village that had never existed—before the cold text wiped it away.
"Pathetic."
The word was a curse, bitter and hollow in the sterile air. His fists clenched at his sides.
This was the legacy of the original Long Su—a fool who had squandered a human-type universe seed for the corrupting promise of a Death Crystal.
He had traded infinite potential of the human seed world for this desolate wasteland and ten wretched, feeble slaves. Undead units.
The weakest category in existence. Even the most basic human militia would crush them without breaking a sweat.
"You idiot," he seethed at the ghost of the boy whose body he now wore. "You had a human seed in your grasp and threw it away for this."
The skeletal slaves, sensing the roiling anger of their master—the core of their existence—dropped to their bony knees in a synchronized, mindless act of submission.
The sight of their utter subservience, their complete lack of will, quelled his fury with a cold wave of resignation.
Anger was a luxury he could not afford.
"No matter," he whispered. The vow was quiet, iron-hard, spoken to the oppressive darkness around him. "With this, I will build my path. I will never give up."
As the last word left his lips, something ignited within him.
His eyes flared with an internal light, and a sound—both a cry and a command—tore through the silence of the nascent world: the fierce, echoing cry of a black bird.
Where there had been nothing, a structure imposed itself. It did not form or grow; it simply was, as if it had always existed and had only now decided to reveal itself.
A small, stark palace of unadorned black stone, its lines severe and imposing. Above it, on a pole of jet, a banner stirred in a wind that did not blow—black silk embroidered with a formidable black bird, its talons clutching a sphere, the characters for 'Daqin' picked out beside it in thread of gold.
He knew this place.
A perfect, scaled replica of Xianyang Palace's core. A piece of history made manifest.
With it came more memories—not just his own as a student, but Fusu's: the weight of a royal upbringing, a son's duty, settling into his mind as naturally as breathing.
' I carry the memories of original Long Su,' he thought. ' It is no burden to carry those of Fusu as well.'
He walked toward the structure, each step echoing in the profound silence. As he drew nearer, the details resolved. The palace was modest—a foundation rather than a monument. A single main hall for judgment and command. One side chamber for rest.
It was a new era.
It was his own beginning.