While the new China celebrated its strength with naval reviews and industrial progress, the old China festered in the gilded cage of the Summer Palace. The Empress Dowager Cixi, now a woman in her mid-fifties, was a ghost haunting the beautiful pavilions she had built with stolen silver. Her political power was gone, her network of spies shattered, her allies broken or co-opted. But her hatred, a poison she had been sipping daily for nearly a decade, had only grown more concentrated, more potent.
The slow-acting toxins she had once sent to the Emperor's chambers had yielded no results. The reports she received from her few remaining loyalists spoke of a young man of infuriating vitality and intelligence. The boy had not weakened; he had thrived. The failure had driven her to the edge of madness. Her own health, ironically, had declined. The returned poisons, so subtly administered by the Emperor's agents in her flowers and incense, had taken their toll. Her hands trembled, her sleep was plagued by nightmares, and her thoughts were often clouded by a paranoid fog. She was a cornered, dying serpent, and she was ready for one last, desperate strike.
The news that the regency was preparing to dissolve, that the Guangxu Emperor was soon to take the throne and rule in his own name, was the final catalyst. This was her last chance. The slow, patient war of attrition was over. She needed a weapon that was swift, decisive, and absolute.
She summoned the two men who were all that remained of her clandestine power: the terrified Li Lianying, and the quiet, withered poison master, Old Wu.
"He is about to become a true emperor," she hissed, her voice a dry rasp. "Our time is running out. Your subtle methods have failed, Wu. The boy's constitution is unnaturally strong. We need something else. Something final."
Old Wu, his face a mask of grim understanding, knelt before her. For years, he had been working on his masterpiece, a biological weapon of terrifying ingenuity, a contingency for a day just like this one.
"There is a way, Your Highness," he said, his voice like the rustle of dry leaves. "It is not a poison to be ingested. It is a sickness that rides upon the very air."
He explained his creation. He had taken the spores of a rare, aggressive fungus that grew on a specific type of wild orchid in the humid jungles of Yunnan. Through years of careful cultivation and mutation in his hidden laboratories within the Summer Palace gardens, he had created a new, hyper-virulent strain. The spores themselves were invisible, lighter than dust. When inhaled, they would lie dormant in the warm, moist environment of the lungs.
They were, however, designed with a specific trigger. They would remain inert until activated by a precise set of atmospheric conditions: a sudden drop in temperature combined with a spike in humidity. When those conditions were met, the spores would germinate with explosive speed, spreading through the lung tissue and causing a rapid, unstoppable hemorrhagic pneumonia. The symptoms would mimic a natural, if shockingly aggressive, illness. There was no known cure. It was the perfect, untraceable assassination.
"How is it to be delivered?" Cixi asked, a feverish light in her eyes.
"It is already prepared, Your Highness," Old Wu explained. He presented a small, intricately carved box. Inside, nestled on a bed of silk, was a fine, silken tassel, its threads dyed a deep, imperial purple. "The dormant spores have been woven into the very fabric of these threads. It is a gift."
The plan was simple. The tassel would be attached to a new, beautiful silk screen, which would be sent to the Emperor as a gift from Cixi to congratulate him on his coming ascension. It was a gesture she was expected to make. The screen would be placed in his bedchamber, and the tassel, laden with its invisible cargo of death, would hang just a few feet from where he slept. Then, all they had to do was wait for the weather to turn.
The gift was sent. It was, as expected, meticulously inspected by the Emperor's paranoid household staff. Ying and Lotus examined every inch of the screen. They found no hidden needles, no contact poisons, no suspicious scents. The tassel seemed to be nothing more than colored silk. It was declared safe and placed in the Emperor's bedchamber, a beautiful, deadly Trojan horse.
Weeks passed. The day of the Emperor's formal enthronement grew closer. Cixi waited, her patience worn thin, her mind consumed by her final, desperate gamble.
Then, one night, the weather changed. A storm front, born in the cold plains of Siberia, rolled down over northern China. The temperature in Beijing plummeted, and a heavy, humid rain began to fall, soaking the city.
In his bedchamber, Ying Zheng slept. The air grew thick and moist. The dormant spores, woven into the silken tassel hanging by his bed, reacted to the sudden shift in humidity and temperature. They awakened. Silently, invisibly, they were released into the air, carried on the damp currents of the room.
As he slept, he inhaled them.
He awoke near midnight with a gasp. A fiery, searing pain was spreading through his chest, as if he had swallowed hot coals. His first thought was poison, but this was different from anything he had ever countered before. This was not a foreign chemical he could purge with his energy. This was something alive. Something that was growing inside him.
His body was wracked with a violent, uncontrollable fever. A deep, hacking cough tore from his lungs, and he tasted blood. He tried to focus his will, to summon the "dragon's spark" to fight the invader, but his concentration was shattered by the pain and the raging fever. The fortress of his body had been breached by an enemy he could not see and did not understand.
Lotus and Ying, alerted by the sounds from his chamber, burst into the room. They found their master thrashing on his bed, his face flushed with a deathly fever, gasping for breath. The final, most desperate strike of the serpent had landed. The Emperor was dying.