Deposed? I couldn't be happier! I wouldn't even be a dog to the crown prince.

Eyes facing each other.

The imperial study was deathly silent, with only the faint hum of the air purifier echoing between the two men.

Those once-precise pieces of equipment, representing the pinnacle of Tang Dynasty's industrial prowess, were now mostly cold wreckage. Li Chengqian stood amidst the shattered electronic components, his black leather boots creaking softly on the wood chips. Three meters opposite him, the man who held the highest power in Tang Dynasty stared intently at him like a wounded lone wolf.

In that instant, time seemed to be trapped in sticky resin, stretched out infinitely.

Li Chengqian could clearly see the bloodshot veins in Li Shimin's eyes, a mixture of anger and resentment. Those eyes no longer held the strategic brilliance of the past, but were filled with resentment, violence, and a near-destructive stubbornness. Li Shimin's handsome face appeared somewhat ferocious in the shadows, the veins on his forehead throbbing with each heavy breath.

Li Chengqian had never seen that look in his eyes before; it was a look of utter despair, the kind that comes from being betrayed by the person closest to you, a look that has completely extinguished your reason.

In Li Shimin's view, his unfilial son stood there with an almost absurd indifference. Li Chengqian's black trench coat still carried the salty dampness of Hawaii, which was out of place in the messy imperial study.

Li Chengqian tried to move his stiff facial muscles, attempting to force out his usual nonchalant, lazy smile. But the smile was distorted by a deep-seated guilt. His eyes twitched slightly involuntarily, his gaze sweeping aimlessly over the broken glass on the ground, yet he dared not meet the old man's judgmental eyes.

The air purifier's fan was still spinning, but it couldn't dispel the almost solidified sense of oppression between the two.

Beside him, Eunuch Wang De knelt amidst the shards of porcelain, his fingernails digging deep into the soft flesh of his palms from overwhelming fear. He watched the father and son locked in a silent tug-of-war for ten minutes, the suffocating feeling of his heart being gripped tightly by an invisible hand making every second feel like hell. He could see His Majesty's trembling fingertips due to extreme rage, and he could see the Crown Prince's Adam's apple bobbing laboriously with tension.

This moment of silence felt like the final, suppressed tension before a major earthquake.

Finally, Li Chengqian coughed, breaking the maddening silence.

"Father, look... the weather is nice. I brought you some fresh coconuts. Shall we move to another place to sit? There's broken glass all over the floor. What if it scratches your statue?"

His voice was ingratiating, but it sounded somewhat unsteady due to a lack of confidence.

His hand instinctively reached into his robes, as if to retrieve the "letter of comfort" that had been prepared long ago.

However, the moment Li Chengqian spoke, Li Shimin, who had been as still as a statue, moved.

It was a series of explosive actions driven by extreme anger.

Li Shimin let out a deep, tearful roar, his right hand, which had been resting on the imperial desk, suddenly swept horizontally. His knuckles turned white from the excessive force, and he gripped the only remaining jade teacup on the table.

The scene slows down completely at this moment.

Li Chengqian saw that Li Shimin's bloodshot eyes were slightly bulging due to extreme congestion, and with the great inertia of his arm swinging, the porcelain cup with half a cup of slightly warm tea left his hand.

The teacup traced a sharp arc in mid-air, the pale blue tea swirling and spilling from its rim due to centrifugal force. Crystal-clear droplets tumbled and rolled in the air, reflecting the dim, cold light of the imperial study.

For a split second, Li Chengqian could even hear the faint crackling sound of tea hitting the air.

Without thinking, he instinctively tilted his head to the left.

The porcelain cup almost grazed his cheek as it flew past. The sharp sound of it cutting through the air was like a thin blade slicing across his eardrums, and the gust of cold wind it brought up scattered a stray lock of hair on his forehead.

"Snap!"

The porcelain cup slammed hard against the carved screen wall behind it and shattered instantly.

Countless emerald green porcelain shards shot out in all directions, some embedding themselves in the wooden screen, others landing in front of Xu Xiao's metal combat boots. The once lukewarm tea burst open on the wall, forming a twisted flower, and slowly, heavily slid down the texture, leaving a deep brown stain on the expensive wallpaper, like a tear of blood.

This outburst in a single second completely shattered the last vestige of warmth.

Li Shimin slowly straightened up, his loose undergarment disheveled from the violent movement. He leaned against the broken edge of the table, his voice trembling violently from extreme tension, each word seemingly squeezed out from between his teeth, carrying a kind of resolute determination to destroy everything.

"Coconut juice?"

Li Shimin let out a cold laugh, a piercing laugh that sounded like the hooting of an owl in the dimly lit imperial study.

"How long are you going to keep lying to me? How long are you going to keep making a fool of me like a monkey on television in front of a billion people around the world?"

He took a sudden step forward, the crunching sound of his foot crushing the broken porcelain shards sending chills down one's spine.

"The old ox...working..."

With each word Li Shimin uttered, his body trembled more with anger.

"For the sake of your Great Tang Dynasty, for the sake of this damned sea of ​​stars, I haven't had a proper night's sleep in five years! Every day I stare at these cold, impersonal screens, every day I argue with people until my throat is sore over a few cents of tax revenue! I thought I was working for the eternal foundation of the Li family, I thought I was becoming a great emperor for all time!"

He suddenly raised his voice, and the roar shook the dust off the roof.

"But you're telling the whole world! I'm just a hired laborer you brought in? I'm just cheap labor you use for your amusement while you drink coconut juice in Hawaii?"

Li Shimin's eyes reddened, a mixture of humiliation, grief, and extreme resentment at being used as a pawn by his own son.

"Li Chengqian! You've really gotten to it! Your schemes are so elaborate they're practically a machine gun!"

He stared intently at Li Chengqian's face, which was filled with the thought that "it's all over," and his tone suddenly turned icy, each word piercing the heart like a poisoned dagger.

"Didn't you complain that this position was too tiring? Didn't you want to be an ordinary landlord?"

"I will grant your wish."

Li Shimin suddenly spread his hands, pointing to the ruins all over the room, and to the Tang Dynasty outside the door, which had come to a standstill.

"I'm not doing this anymore!"

"Let whoever wants to govern this land govern it, and let whoever wants to sit on this throne sit on it! Since you think I'm a beast of burden, then go find another beast of burden to carry this enormous load for you!"

He straightened his spine, and the pride that belonged to the greatest emperor of all time erupted in a self-destructive way at this moment.

"I'm going to Salty Fish Island right now! I want to drink that coconut juice too! I want to lie around in my big shorts until I die of old age!"

Li Chengqian was so overwhelmed by this overwhelming anger that he could hardly breathe.

Looking at the old man's resolute face, his heart skipped a beat, knowing he had really messed up this time. All the witty remarks he had prepared seemed utterly pale and powerless at that moment.

His Adam's apple bobbed as he braced himself to throw out his carefully packaged "Modern Tang Dynasty Board of Directors" proposal, attempting to use the concept that "the chairman doesn't need to do any work, he just needs to look at the reports" to fool his father back.

However, just as he opened his mouth, before the first syllable had even escaped his lips...

"Buzz—!"

A faint yet real tremor suddenly erupted in the very center of his retina.

The feeling was as if someone had suddenly pierced his cerebral cortex with a thin needle.

Li Chengqian's expression froze for a split second.

In his field of vision, the originally dark scene of the imperial study instantly became blurred, and in its place was a semi-transparent panel that was jumping wildly.

At the very top of that panel, a blood-red exclamation mark, carrying a danger signal, was flashing at a high frequency of three times per second.

[Warning! Civilization carrying capacity has fallen below the critical threshold of 30%!]

[A clandestine data intrusion has been detected! Datang Global Financial Core System is undergoing physical-level logical tampering!]

[A large-scale civilizational rift has been detected; the underlying management logic has collapsed, and the technological collapse mode has been triggered!]

Those rows of blood-red characters, carrying a suffocating sense of oppression, were imprinted firmly in Li Chengqian's pupils.

The anger that had arisen from the destruction of the fake salted fish was instantly replaced by a deeper, colder fear.

He could sense that every line of code in the system seemed to be emitting a sharp wail, a kind of emergency warning that had never been seen before.

At the same time, at the very bottom of the blood-red text, a small but unusually glaring warning appeared quietly.

[Hidden Warning: A will transcending the present era is attempting to permanently erase the Tang Dynasty's imperial power through capitalist means.]

Li Chengqian's pupils contracted again, and he could even feel the blood at his fingertips freezing completely in that second.

This is no longer just about the old man throwing a tantrum and going on strike.

Someone is taking advantage of the suspension of imperial power to try and seize his and the old man's wealth and turn the Tang Dynasty into some unspeakable altar.

Just as Li Chengqian was about to throw out the concept of "chairman" to refute, the system panel on his retina suddenly flashed wildly and a hidden blood-red warning popped up.