The Serpent's Envoy

The Emperor's study in Nagasaki was no longer a war room. It had become a workshop, a sanctum of focused creation. The great maps had been rolled away, and in a corner of the dimly lit room, a small, intensely hot forge glowed, pulsing with a light that seemed to come from within the fire itself, not from the burning coals. The air smelled of hot metal, ozone, and strange alchemies.

Qin Shi Huang was not dressed as an emperor. He wore simple, unadorned black silk robes, his sleeves rolled up to his powerful forearms, which were smudged with soot. His entire being was focused on the task at hand. With a pair of long iron tongs, he held a small, impossibly complex object in the heart of the supernatural fire. It was a layered construction of strange alloys—platinum, folded steel, and slivers of what looked like meteorite—all wrapped around a core of pure, flawless jade. A thin sheen of sweat covered his face, and his brow was furrowed in a display of deep concentration. This was not the effortless, world-breaking power he used to calm seas or view battlefields. This was fine, intricate work, requiring immense focus and a delicate touch.

"The West is not like Japan, Jiang," he said, his voice strained with effort, his eyes never leaving the glowing object. "Japan was a monolith, a single culture with a single point of failure: their belief in a living god. Once that god was shown to be mortal, their spirit broke. Europe is different. It is a hornet's nest of rivalries, alliances, ancient hatreds, and new, rapacious ambitions. You cannot conquer it with an army. Not yet."

Captain Jiang stood silently a few feet away, watching his Emperor. He was no longer in uniform, but in the nondescript, durable clothes of a wealthy traveler. He had been trained for the battlefield, for the charge and the disciplined volley. This new world of shadows and whispers was as alien to him as the work the Emperor was undertaking.

With a final, intense pulse of heat, QSH removed the object from the fire. For a moment, it glowed with an internal, pulsating light, intricate patterns swirling beneath its metallic surface. He plunged it into a heavy basin filled with quicksilver. The room filled with a strange, violent hissing sound and a plume of acrid, grey smoke. When he withdrew it, the light within the object had solidified into a series of fixed, intricate runes. The object was cool to the touch.

"Then what is my purpose, Majesty?" Jiang asked, his voice quiet but steady. "If not conquest, what is the goal of this mission?"

QSH placed the object carefully on a small, polished anvil. It resembled an ornate, oversized pocket compass, but the needle, exquisitely crafted from a shard of obsidian, did not point north. It remained still, dead. "Their strength is also their greatest weakness," the Emperor explained, finally turning to face him. "Their rivalries. Britain fears Russia's relentless expansion towards India. France fears the burgeoning power of the new German Empire. Germany lives in constant terror of being encircled by France and Russia. Austria-Hungary is a patchwork of ethnicities ready to tear itself apart. They are all so consumed with watching each other that they have failed to properly watch me. You are not going there as a soldier, Jiang. You are going as a catalyst."

He picked up a second, smaller device from a nearby table. It was nearly identical to the first, though less ornate. As he held it, the obsidian needle in the compass on the anvil quivered to life. It swung slowly, deliberately, until it pointed directly at the object in the Emperor's hand.

"This is for you," QSH said, holding out the smaller compass. "And this one," he gestured to the anvil, "is for May-Ling, our spymaster in London. It is a quantum communicator. A… 'sympathetic needle,' as the old legends would call it. It operates on principles of entanglement they will not discover for another hundred and fifty years. When you align your needle to a specific rune on the dial, she can do the same, and your needles will mirror each other's movements, instantaneously, across any distance. You can spell out messages, one letter at a time. It is untraceable, undetectable, and utterly secure. But," he paused, looking at his own hand, "it is taxing to create."

He flexed his fingers, and for the first time in his long service, Captain Jiang saw a faint tremor run through the Emperor's hand before he willed it still. It was a minuscule sign of weakness, of a tangible cost to his 'magic', and it was more shocking to Jiang than watching him calm a typhoon.

Captain Jiang stepped forward and took the device, his head bowed low. "I understand, Majesty. I am not to be a sword. I am to be a ghost. A whisper in the right ear that turns allies against each other."

"Precisely," QSH affirmed. "Your first task is to utilize the asset May-Ling has so painstakingly acquired: the compromised Sir Claude MacDonald. He is a key in a very important lock. Through him, you will gain access to the British corridors of power. But I do not want you to steal their war plans. Their battle fleet dispositions are irrelevant to me. I want you to steal their economy. I want you to learn of impending stock market manipulations, of new colonial ventures in Africa that require massive investment, of vulnerabilities in their banking system. I want you to feed that information back to our financial ministers in real-time. We will not fight their armies on the field. We will bankrupt them from within. We will turn their own glorious system of capitalism into a weapon against them."

Jiang's mind reeled. This was a scale of warfare he could barely comprehend, fought with numbers and whispers instead of bullets and steel. "And the other powers? Germany? Russia?"

"Germany is an industrial powerhouse led by a preening, insecure fool of a Kaiser," QSH said, a flicker of contempt in his eyes. "They are, for the moment, useful. Find men of influence in Berlin—industrialists, military men—who believe a strong China is a useful counterweight to the British navy and the Russian hordes. Fuel their ambitions. Encourage their naval aspirations. A naval race between Britain and Germany will bleed them both dry. As for Russia, it is a wounded bear, lashing out in pain and confusion. Find the revolutionaries, the nihilists, the angry intellectuals who fester in the salons of St. Petersburg and Geneva. Give them money. Give them radical ideas from our own libraries. A bear that is busy fighting a fever within its own body cannot threaten my northern borders."

He stepped closer to Jiang, his presence filling the small space. His eyes were ancient, filled with the cold, clear light of long-term, inhuman strategy.

"Your mission, Jiang, is to ensure that by the time I am ready to turn my full attention to the West, it is a house so rotted from within by greed, rivalry, and internal strife that a single push of my finger will bring the entire rotten structure down. You are no longer Captain Jiang of the Second Army, hero of Pyongyang. You are my serpent in their garden. You will have unlimited funds, complete autonomy, and my absolute trust. But you will be utterly alone, a world away from all you know."

Captain Jiang's face was a mask of unwavering, fanatical loyalty. He knelt on the stone floor, placing the strange compass gently before him as if making an offering. "To be your instrument is not to be alone, Majesty," he said, his voice thick with emotion. "I am your will made manifest. I will not fail."

"I know," QSH said, the words simple and absolute. He placed a hand on Jiang's shoulder, a rare gesture of personal connection. "Go. A fast steamer waits for you in Shanghai. It will take you to Venice. From there, the continent is yours to unravel."

Captain Jiang bowed one last time, his forehead touching the floor. He then rose, took the communicator, and without another word, melted back into the shadows of the study and was gone. The Emperor stood alone in the dim light of his forge, the echo of his exertion still humming in his bones. He had dealt with the capitulation of France, unleashed a hungry wolf on his northern border, and now, had dispatched his most trusted servant to begin the silent, insidious decay of Europe. The great pieces on the global board were moving according to his design. But the board was larger than ever before, and for the first time, he felt the true, immense, and draining weight of holding it all in his mind.