The Blade Within the Heart
With the Imperial Guards' paralysis points sealed behind him, Ouyang Qiangang kicked open the door to the Crown Prince's bedchamber and strode inside.
The room met him with heavy silence, the thick scent of medicinal herbs, and the shadow of death hanging over it all. His face hardened as his eyes fell upon the bed. The Crown Prince lying there was waxen pale, cold sweat beading on his forehead. His breathing was so faint it seemed it could stop at any moment, and his tightly shut eyelids twitched with fine tremors. Nothing about him would have made it surprising if his breath simply failed then and there.
"Damn it!"
The curse tore out of him before he knew it, and he threw himself toward the bed. Every second counted. The Prince's pale chest rose and fell in shallow flickers, sweat glistening on his brow.
'Akasha, how long do you think he can hold on?'
[Ten minutes at the shortest. Thirty at most.]
Even time had turned against him.
'Damn it all... so this time, I'm the one racing the clock.'
[I'm afraid so, Doctor.]
If he could have treated Princess Myeonghwa first and then turned to the Crown Prince with time to spare, he could have kept the variables to a minimum. A full recovery would have been all but guaranteed. Ouyang Qiangang swallowed dryly. His own hands were damp and clammy with sweat.
He steadied himself with a deep breath and gently laid his hand over the Crown Prince's chest. The true qi of the Transcendent Formless Divine Art flowed out from his palm, riding the heart meridian inward until it struck the foreign object lodged in the Prince's heart.
But—
Ting!
Instead of a dull burst of force, a faint metallic rebound rang through his skull, like a hammer striking steel. Far from destroying the object, his qi bounced off it as helplessly as if it had hit an invisible wall. The recoil twisted Ouyang Qiangang's face. It was now proven: shattering the thing with the internal heavy-hand method was impossible.
Only one option remained. Surgery.
But this was no sterile twenty-first-century operating theater. There was no proper blade to be had, and the moment he pressed any random edge to the Prince's flesh, the risk of infection alone could steal his life.
'Akasha, hardened qi is the only way.'
[I agree. But at your current level of mastery, Doctor, the risk is far too great.]
'If I fail, the Crown Prince dies. His life—no, the fate of this entire empire—rests in my hands.'
And he would not be the only one to die if the surgery failed. In this era, wounding the Crown Prince's body without sanction was high treason. The one who harmed him would face death by slow dismemberment as a matter of course, and under guilt by association, his entire clan would be put to the sword or sold into slavery. Killing the palace maids and eunuchs could at least be excused as the price of saving the Prince, but if the man died on the operating table, it was plain as day that no excuse in the world would hold. Ouyang Qiangang forced the weight of it all from his shoulders. What he needed now was cold reason and absolute focus. There was no time to hesitate.
[Doctor, the Crown Prince's blood pressure is dropping. The foreign object must be removed immediately!]
Eyes closed, Ouyang Qiangang circulated the Transcendent Formless Divine Art and began gathering the power of his dantian into a single point at the tip of his right index finger. Before he could finish a single breath, the density of his qi crossed the critical threshold. At that enormous drain of internal energy, the yin force of the five great acupoints he had yet to dissolve stirred as though it had been waiting for exactly this. A cold, awl-like pain bored through his bones from head to toe.
[Doctor, your internal energy consumption has exceeded the critical threshold. The yin energy of the Nine Yin Severed Meridians is activating.]
'I know it's dangerous. You don't have to tell me.'
For an instant, the fingertips guiding his hardened qi trembled ever so slightly. But he could not stop. If he stopped, the Crown Prince would die. He honed the energy gathered at his fingertip into the sharpest edge his imagination could conceive.
Vreeee—
A thread-thin blade of hardened qi, six inches long, rose from his fingertip, humming with a faint high-frequency whine that chilled the air around it. Every nerve in his body sharpened to a needle's point. From this moment on, not a single mistake would be forgiven.
'I have to save him. No matter what.'
This was not simply about saving the Crown Prince. It was a counterstrike against the hands that had woven a vast conspiracy, a fight for everyone who had believed in him—and a battle with his own fate riding on the outcome.
With the thread of hardened qi, Ouyang Qiangang sliced away the Crown Prince's upper garment, then carefully opened the skin beneath.
Shrrk—
[Doctor, I will now execute the cryogenic hemostasis protocol using the pure yin true qi of the Transcendent Formless Divine Art. This operates on a principle similar to 'rapid freezing' in modern medicine. Unlike ordinary freezing, which destroys blood vessels, pure yin true qi forms 'vitreous ice' that minimizes cellular damage, sealing the vessel walls completely and temporarily. A perfectly bloodless surgery is possible.]
The moment the hardened qi extending from his fingertip parted the skin of the Crown Prince's chest, a strange sight unfolded. Not a single drop of blood rose from the incision. Instead, trailing right behind the qi blade's path, a filament of pure yin true qi bloomed white frost, flash-freezing and sealing every vessel in its wake. Soon the last layer of the sternum opened, and the Crown Prince's heart lay bare.
It was not the vivid red of a heart surging with life. It was pallid and bloodless overall, parts of it tinged a bluish hue from oxygen starvation. Its beat was weak and feeble, irregular, as though it might simply quit at any moment. It was the pitiful face of a heart plundered for decades by an enemy it could not see. And there, on the surface of the left atrium, sat the source of it all: the foreign object. Like some living thing, it pulsed with an ominous violet glow, greedily drinking down the Crown Prince's life force.
The crash and screams that had torn through the palace's quiet night did not last long. But that brief burst of noise was more than enough to freeze the footsteps of the Imperial Guards on patrol.
"That sound—it came from Jaseondang!"
They sprinted for the source: Jaseondang, the Crown Prince's residence. What met their eyes on arrival was a scene out of hell. The courtyard before the hall reeked of fresh blood, and corpses still warm sprawled grotesquely across the ground. The faces of the guard soldiers hardened to stone. A bloody massacre at the Crown Prince's own residence. It was a direct challenge to the authority of the imperial family—and quite possibly the opening act of a terrible coup.
The head of the patrol snapped out his orders at once.
"Seal this place and report to His Majesty!"
The first to come running at the news was Jang Mu-yeol, a Thousand Commander of the Imperial Guards. A distant relative of the Empress, he had led his troops over under the banner of protecting the Crown Prince the moment word of the emergency reached him.
"Surround the hall!"
At his shout, a hundred-odd Imperial Guards came storming into Jaseondang. The moment Jang Mu-yeol stepped into the bedchamber, his face drained corpse-pale—because an unbelievable scene was unfolding before him. The Crown Prince lay with his heart laid open, and an unidentified man, soaked in enough sweat to raise steam, stood with his hand pressed to the Prince's chest.
"You insolent cur! How dare you lay hands on His Highness's sacred body!"
Jang Mu-yeol's eyes blazed with fury. Convinced that Ouyang Qiangang had come to murder the Crown Prince, he roared to his men without a moment's thought.
"Seize that man, now!"
The Imperial Guards charged into the bedchamber with a roar. But Ouyang Qiangang had no room to answer them. Every nerve he possessed was fixed on the foreign object embedded in the Crown Prince's heart.
'Akasha, I'm focusing on the surgery. External threats are yours. Neutralize them. Don't kill them.'
[Understood, Doctor. I am now assuming partial control of your body. Securing the muscles and neural pathways of your left side, which are not in use for the surgery, I am forcibly allocating ten percent of your currently circulating internal energy—everything beyond the minimum required for the operation and life support—to the defense protocol.]
With Akasha's mechanical voice, a bizarre spectacle began. Ouyang Qiangang's right hand, deep in the surgery, never wavered a hair's breadth from the Crown Prince's heart—but his left hand had started to move on its own, like a separate living thing.
> Automatic defense protocol engaged.
> Calculating vital points of all approaching threats...
> Directing finger-wind along shortest path.
Ouyang Qiangang's left index and middle fingers flicked softly through the empty air.
Shweeeeak—!
Invisible finger-wind cleaved the air and struck the paralysis points of the first two guards to lunge at him, with perfect precision.
"Kghk!"
The two soldiers went rigid as stone without a sound and dropped where they stood. While the Imperial Guards faltered, stunned by their comrades' sudden deaths, Ouyang Qiangang's finger-wind never paused, slicing through the air.
Shwe-shwe-shwe-shwe-shweeeak—!
"Kghak!"
"Ughhh..."
One after another, the soldiers struck by the finger-wind fell. Every one of them still breathed, but with the paralysis points across their bodies sealed, not one could so much as twitch a finger.
A thread of red ran down the bridge of Ouyang Qiangang's nose. Conducting surgery with one half of his mind while fighting a life-and-death battle with the other—this feat of divided consciousness was driving his spirit to its very limit.
When ten soldiers had dropped without a sound, Jang Mu-yeol's face froze in disbelief. He could no longer bring himself to order a charge. Instead, sword regripped in white-knuckled hands, he could only watch Ouyang Qiangang's fingertips and the Crown Prince's open chest in turn, hunting for an opening in a silence strung tight as a tripwire. Before long, Jaseondang was ringed layer upon layer by soldiers pouring in at the news.
Despite the dead of night, the news spilling out of Jaseondang swallowed the palace whole. The patrols froze in their tracks, and the maids and eunuchs who could not sleep traded pale, wary glances. Bloodshed before the Crown Prince's bedchamber, and the whisper that the Life-and-Death Divine Doctor was inside—it all bred every manner of speculation. Unverified tales drifted through the dark: an assassin had tried to cut the Crown Prince down; the Divine Doctor had taken him hostage. The palace felt like the eye of a vast storm, swollen with a dread that could burst at any moment.
In the Emperor's bedchamber, the air turned to ice with the report from Jaseondang. No expression crossed the Changsung Emperor's face as he received the Imperial Guards' account. But his eyes smoldered with a cold fury that looked ready to swallow the world. He had grasped the essence of the situation at once: the Empress had finally begun her last convulsion to claim the Crown Prince's life, and Ouyang Qiangang was throwing everything he had into standing in her way.
"Sang On."
The Emperor called the name quietly. The chill in his voice turned the spines of every eunuch prostrate before him to ice.
"Bring Us the imperial seal. We shall issue Our edict this instant."
The Emperor's first move was the restoration of order. By imperial decree, he declared the entire quarter mile around Jaseondang, the Crown Prince's residence, a restricted zone of the imperial household. Eunuchs bearing golden tablets stamped with the Emperor's own seal raced for Jaseondang like arrows loosed from a bow. From that moment, without the Emperor's leave, no one—not the Empress, not even the other Imperial Guards—could set a single foot inside.
"Commander of the Royal Guard. Hear Us."
With his son's life at stake, he trusted no one. The Emperor ordered every Imperial Guard soldier surrounding Jaseondang to withdraw, and dispatched a thousand men of the Royal Guard—his most elite household troops, sworn to him alone—to lock down the perimeter like an iron barrel. It was a declaration of iron will: every external threat would be severed at the root until Ouyang Qiangang finished the surgery.
When every measure was complete, the Emperor stood alone in the empty hall, quietly gazing toward Jaseondang. His strategy was plain. He knew the outcome of this struggle rested solely in Ouyang Qiangang's hands. Through his decree, the Emperor had set in motion an enormous gamble—buying the man the time to finish what he had started. However hard the Empress and her ministers tried to shake him politically, Ouyang Qiangang would remain untouchable inside the absolute shield of the imperial restricted zone. Of course, he knew full well that this entire gamble would be settled before tomorrow came. The success or failure of the surgery Ouyang Qiangang was performing, even now, would decide everything.