The turmoil was one problem, but the bigger problem was who had stirred it up.
The answer wasn’t hard to find. If Her Majesty the Empress hadn’t made a move, then the only person with both the motive and the ability to bring down Clarence was the Third Princess.
However, when it came to the word “ability,” it was really just a comparison between the Third Princess and Prince Emile, who had only just entered the circle of power. Her own capabilities could not possibly have improved so drastically in such a short time.
To put it bluntly, if she possessed that level of strategic thinking, she wouldn’t have been driven out of the Imperial Capital Star in disgrace before.
The Third Princess had an expert guiding her—this was the consensus among the upper echelons.
But no one could find out who this expert was. The Third Princess, perhaps fearing a repeat of the assassination attempt, kept her inner circle under tight wraps and lived a reclusive life herself.
It wasn’t that no one had tried to visit her, but all who did strangely switched their allegiance to her camp, as if the Third Princess herself were skilled in some kind of supernatural dark art.
Although this reduced the number of visitors, as Clarence’s downfall became an almost foregone conclusion, more and more nobles still chose to join the Third Princess’s ranks.
“She’s like a phoenix reborn from nirvana,” someone privately commented.
But Yun Chuji and Tang Jianxi were unconvinced. As two of the few who had direct contact with the Third Princess without being swayed by her “magic,” they knew she hadn’t changed at all. She was still arrogant, haughty, and contemptuous of all life.
But that no longer mattered. What kind of person she was, or whether she would truly become the empress in the future—none of it mattered anymore.
They had no need to participate in this top-level power struggle. Not only was the current empress still more than twenty years away from the Empire’s average life expectancy, but there was a more direct reason: it wasn’t worth it.
Clarence had already proven that it wasn’t worth it.
The power of O-rights, when placed in the political arena, would only be corrupted by the ambitious. It lacked a solid enough foundation to resist this corruption. For one, most people in the Empire could only be said to pity omegas—and that was only due to the aftershocks of Glory—but they didn’t truly identify with O-rights.
Accelerating the change in public perception was what Spartacus should be doing now. The Empire was not a dictatorship; an emperor who rose to power through A-Virtue couldn’t change much. But a judge, a doctor, a police officer, or a boss who held alpha-supremacist views could change a great deal.
Therefore, after completing the restructuring of Spartacus, Tang Jianxi and Tang Jianshen did not get involved in any of the scheming.
Tang Jianxi gave herself a vacation and spent a few days at home planting flowers with Yun Chuji.
Yun Chuji’s injuries had mostly healed, and she soon resumed her live streams. However, in the Empire’s fiery entertainment atmosphere, she was far from the only one preaching A-Virtue. Compared to her purely theoretical lectures, alphas full of entertainment flair had already started producing A-Virtue skits, A-Virtue concerts, and even A-Virtue emotional programs like “Apologizing to a Hundred Omegas I Unintentionally Hurt,” which siphoned off a large portion of the traffic.
Still, on the day of her first stream back, as someone who had indirectly influenced the imperial succession, she garnered a phenomenal amount of attention.
The change was gradual. As the A-Virtue traffic was divided, Yun Chuji’s live stream slowly faded from the center of the StarNet. Even Jiang Xiu, a consummate professional, had to admit that even a skilled housewife can’t cook without rice. The variety of A-Virtue streams had now expanded to include even risqué content, yet Yun Chuji was still meticulously tracing the historical logic of O-rights, as old-fashioned as the factory ruins in the outer ring.
Perhaps this was for self-preservation. After all, news of the last assassination attempt on Yun Chuji was still being repeatedly watched and analyzed. Being too famous did make one an easy target. The Empire had all sorts of lunatics, and their sensitive points outnumbered the cities in the Empire. One never knew where one might suddenly pop up.
Jiang Xiu felt that Yun Chuji had already achieved fame and success. Even in noble circles, possessing such influence at her age was remarkable. It was only human nature to be a little more cautious with one’s life.
Yun Chuji’s reply, however, was: “Even though there are so many types of A-Virtue streamers, there aren’t many like me, are there? We have to give people who want to understand A-Virtue more choices.”
And so, Jiang Xiu began to wonder if she herself was too worldly.
Yun Chuji continued her lukewarm streams while simultaneously rushing to finish the papers Teacher Chu had assigned her. After her vacation, Tang Jianxi returned to her lukewarm routine of working at both Tang Group and Spartacus.
Tang Jianshen lived up to Tang Jianxi’s expectations. Under his leadership, Spartacus transformed from a non-profit social organization into a large corporation primarily operating as a foundation, supplemented by omega arts and media. Tang Jianxi was very worried that by the time he stepped down, Spartacus would become another Tang Group. That could potentially cause a far more profound crisis for O-rights than the assassination of Clarence—omegas might all just run off to make money. After all, Tang Jianshen always gave people the illusion that making money was much simpler than doing anything else.
Clarence had broken off his engagement. He went to Golden Phoenix Star. At his age, he was just at the cutoff for voluntary military service. It was said that he was performing well in the army and, if all went well, would likely enter the military academy in the same batch as Winona.
His choice to enlist offset much of the public condemnation and doubt against him. In the public’s mind, military service was always a hardship for an omega, and even more so for one of royal birth. Regardless of his actual moral character, the sacrifice he made subconsciously earned him respect.
Tang Jianshen had discussed it with Tang Jianxi. He guessed that sooner or later, Clarence would return from Golden Phoenix Star like the Third Princess, or perhaps take a more radical path and rise through the military ranks. However, given the omega officer corps’ wariness of the royal family, that would be a difficult feat to accomplish.
But at least his ambition still had a chance to sprout and grow.
But these were all distant matters. The most pressing issue for Yun Chuji and Tang Jianxi right now was the small bottle of pills in their hands.
“This? Can it really prevent pregnancy?” Yun Chuji stared at the small bottle. It had no label and was made of a sturdy-looking steel. It didn’t look like a medicine bottle at all.
Tang Jianxi wasn’t entirely sure either. Contraception was just too rare in ABO society, as rare as their own high compatibility rate. The Empire currently had no established contraceptive industry. This drug was already the best she could get, purchased from the most advanced research lab in the field.
But its efficacy was said to be inversely proportional to the compatibility rate.
The contraceptive mechanism of this drug worked by suppressing the flow of glandular pheromones within the body, causing them to radiate outward during the marking process, thereby drastically reducing the chance of conception. The problem was, for an A/O pair with a very high compatibility rate, even inhaling a trace amount of pheromones would maintain a dangerously high conception rate.
But an even more severe problem was: they couldn’t just not use contraception. They had already endured for several months, “eating vegetarian” for so long they were about to turn into rabbits—like rabbits in terms of both their diet and their heats.
Now was really not the time to have a child. Yun Chuji’s wish was to wait until after she graduated, when she could take time off to raise a child. Tang Jianxi’s wish was: why have a child when she hadn’t even had enough fun yet?
But one wish they shared was: they absolutely could not accept a one-try-one-baby conception rate. Neither Tang Jianxi nor Yun Chuji had the slightest interest in the honor of becoming the mother with the most children in the world.
“Should we try it? The worst that can happen is we have a baby,” Tang Jianxi said, eager to give it a go.
“Umm…”
Tang Jianxi turned her head to look at her. Both of them were still fully clothed. Aside from the flower petals scattered across the room and the hot spring pool next to them, everything else was quite proper. Tang Jianxi wasn’t shy about this trip, nor did she act overly coy; she was the one who had ordered the flowers to be scattered. However, she remembered that the person before her was, after all, from a dual-gender era. Perhaps the reason she had been able to endure for so long wasn’t just her exceptional willpower, but more likely her inability to adapt to this kind of activity.
Tang Jianxi decided to be more considerate of her partner. “We don’t have to do it, you know. We can just soak in the hot spring. The environment here is nice anyway. We can just treat it as a getaway and wait until we can buy a better drug.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Yun Chuji still found it a little difficult to say, but when she thought about what she was about to do being even more difficult to talk about, she was suddenly filled with a strange courage. “I, I prepared something too. But it’s physical.”
“Huh?” Tang Jianxi was aghast, thinking of their abandoned proposal. “You’re not thinking of digging out your gland, are you?”
Yun Chuji’s face grew redder. She shook her head without speaking and pulled a small box from an inner pocket of her clothes. Inside were several small packets containing something of indiscernible purpose.
Tang Jianxi picked one up and looked at Yun Chuji in confusion. This didn’t look like a surgical tool.
“I, I did some research and found out that… people in the old Federation used this for contraception. I also looked up the A/O conception mechanism. I think this should work,” Yun Chuji explained with great difficulty.
Tang Jianxi frowned, turning the small packet over and over in her hand. “You still haven’t said how to use it.”
Yun Chuji snatched the object from Tang Jianxi’s hand and stood up, feigning sternness. “This is for me to use. It’s enough that I know.”
“Oh—”
“Don’t ‘oh’ me.” Yun Chuji, blushing, was already starting to be unreasonable out of embarrassment.
But Tang Jianxi loved seeing her like this. “I’ll ‘oh’ if I want to.”
“Jianxi!”
“Oh!”
Yun Chuji could only move forward and stop that relentless mouth with her own.
Once she started, she couldn’t stop. That one kiss led them all the way into the hot spring pool.
Their clothes had, of course, been left behind in a pile of flowers along the way, but Yun Chuji didn’t regret ignoring the trail of petals. She had long since seen a more beautiful flower.
Mist billowed lazily through the spacious room. In the mist, a white dove was taking flight with beating wings.
Tang Jianxi clung to Yun Chuji’s body, as tight as a vine, as light as a butterfly.
From within the mist came Tang Jianxi’s breathy chuckle. “So that’s how you use it,” she teased.
But Yun Chuji was busy with other things, no longer having the capacity for embarrassment.
Still, she kissed Tang Jianxi again.
Because she wanted to be even closer.
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