The Dragon’s Fire

Chaos erupted in the Emperor's private wing of the palace. The sound of running feet, hushed, panicked whispers, and the clatter of medical instruments echoed through the silent, late-night corridors. Ying Zheng's bedchamber had been transformed into a desperate battleground, not against an army or an assassin, but against an invisible, relentless enemy that was consuming him from within.

He lay upon his bed, his body a furnace. A fever of an intensity the imperial physicians had never seen before raged through him, so hot that the cool, damp cloths placed on his forehead seemed to steam. His breathing was a shallow, ragged gasp, each inhalation a sharp, searing pain in his lungs. He was drowning in his own blood, his life fading with every tortured breath. This body, the vessel of a two-thousand-year-old soul, for all its secrets, was still made of mortal flesh. And that flesh was failing.

Dr. Zhuang and a team of the most senior physicians worked with frantic urgency. They recognized the symptoms, but not the cause. "It is a 'wind-heat invasion of the lungs,'" the old doctor murmured, his face grim as he read the Emperor's pulse, which was terrifyingly fast and thready. "But its speed, its violence… it is unnatural. It is like a forest fire, not an illness." Their traditional remedies, the cooling herbal broths and the carefully placed acupuncture needles, had no effect. They were trying to put out a volcanic eruption with teacups of water.

Meng Tian stood guard at the chamber door, a mountain of helpless, silent fury. He had fought assassins and armies for his Emperor, but this was an enemy he could not see, could not strike. He could only watch as his sovereign, the being he had followed across the millennia, was being extinguished before his eyes. His orders were to let no one interfere, to trust the Emperor's will, even now. It was the hardest order he had ever had to follow.

Ying and Lotus moved with a desperate, quiet efficiency, trying to aid the physicians, their faces masks of cold terror. They knew this was Cixi's work, her final, most venomous strike, and they knew they were powerless to stop it.

Ying Zheng drifted on a red tide of pain and delirium. His connection to the world was fraying. But in that state, on the very edge of consciousness between life and death, his mind, untethered from the immediate agony of his body, traveled back. He was no longer in the Forbidden City in the 19th century. He was in the dark, subterranean cavern beneath Mount Tai, two thousand years in the past.

He saw the roaring, violet flames of the great cauldron. He saw the swirling, iridescent concoction. And he felt, with a clarity that transcended memory, the sensation of swallowing the Celestial Pearl. He remembered the feeling of that single, perfect orb of liquid gold dissolving on his tongue—a concentration of pure, elemental fire, the very essence of a dragon's spark.

In his delirious state, a profound understanding dawned. His power, the energy he called the dragon's spark, was not just a tool he commanded. It was not a weapon he wielded. It was a fundamental part of him. The elixir had not just granted him powers; it had rewritten his very soul, infusing his life force with a spark of elemental, creative, and destructive energy. He had been using it to cleanse his body of toxins, like a janitor sweeping a room. He had been thinking too small.

He felt the alien fungus spreading through his lungs, a living, growing entity that his cleansing fire could not burn away without destroying the flesh it inhabited. His own energy and the invasive sickness were locked in a deadly stalemate inside his own body, and the battle was tearing the battlefield apart.

He knew he had only one chance left. A final, desperate, and utterly insane gamble.

He would stop fighting the sickness with his energy. Instead, he would become the energy. He would stop trying to purge the fire; he would become the fire itself.

With the last vestiges of his fading consciousness, he pulled all of his focus inward. He let go of his grip on the physical world. He focused on the very core of his being, on that single, ancient spark of celestial power. And with a silent scream of pure, indomitable will, he commanded it to ignite.

It was not a command to heal or to cleanse. It was a command to burn.

His body, lying on the great bed, began to convulse. A low hum filled the room, a sound that seemed to come from the very air itself. The physicians, who had been trying to force another herbal remedy down his throat, fell back in shock.

A faint, reddish light began to emanate from the Emperor's skin. It was a soft glow at first, like the embers of a dying fire. But then it grew brighter, more intense, turning his pale skin a translucent, fiery orange. The temperature in the sealed bedchamber began to skyrocket. The water in the basins beside his bed began to steam. The wax of the candles softened and drooped. The air grew thick and heavy, shimmering with a heat that was not of this world.

Dr. Zhuang and his team stumbled back, shielding their eyes, their faces slick with sweat. "What sorcery is this?" one of them cried, falling to his knees in terror.

Lotus and Ying stared, their assassin's composure finally breaking in the face of this truly supernatural event. They recognized this power—they had felt a tiny spark of it before—but this was different. This was raw, uncontrolled, and utterly terrifying.

Ying Zheng was no longer conscious. He was pure sensation. He was a supernova contained within a fragile, human shell. He felt an agony beyond all imagining as his own internal fire raged through him, a self-inflicted purification. He felt the alien fungus, the source of the sickness, shrivel and turn to ash in the face of this impossible heat. But he also felt his own flesh, his own organs, being pushed to the very brink of annihilation. It was a race. Could he burn away the sickness before the fire consumed the vessel itself?

His body arched on the bed, a silent scream trapped in his throat. The reddish glow intensified, becoming almost too bright to look at. The wooden frame of his bed began to smoke.

Meng Tian stood his ground at the door, his hand gripping the hilt of a sword he had not drawn. His face was a mask of agony, watching his Emperor immolate himself from within. But he did not move. He trusted his sovereign's will, even unto death.

The Emperor of China was engulfed in his own internal, divine fire. He was either about to burn himself to ash, a tragic, incomprehensible end to a second life. Or, he was about to emerge from the flames reborn, his connection to his powers—and perhaps his own mortality—forever and irrevocably changed. He was fighting the final battle of his internal war, not for his empire, but for his very existence.