For ten years, Yang Shen has served as the crown prince's personal companion reader, entrusted with grounding young Zhu Houzhao in the Confucian classics. But Yang Shen's pedagogy is anything but orthodox. When the prince asks, "What does it mean to win over others with virtue?" Yang Shen replies that the character for "win" shares its sound with "axe"—so when persuasion fails, one simply resorts to the blade. When Zhu Houzhao quotes, "Hearing the Way in the morning, one may die content in the evening," his tutor explains that the "Way" is in fact a weapon of mass destruction: by the time the enemy perceives it, their end is already sealed. The emperor-in-training finds these twisted interpretations exhilarating, yet the entire court watches in horror. Their sacred texts are being reduced to absurdist warfare, and the heir to the throne is eating it up. Desperate ministers implore Yang Shen to cease his corrupting lessons, but their pleas only amuse him further. As the future emperor begins applying these subversive maxims to statecraft, the empire teeters on the brink of glorious chaos—and the only man who still finds it all hilarious is the very tutor they cannot silence.
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