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

In the holographic projection, Li Tai was completely devoid of the demeanor of a prince. The background behind him was no longer the blazing blast furnace that usually filled the sky, but a suffocating silence and darkness.

Inside the side hall of the East Palace, the joyful atmosphere of the eve of the vacation was frozen in that instant. Li Chengqian remained in the position of carrying his suitcase, his right fingertips still tightly gripping the edge of the zipper, his nails turning slightly white from excessive force. He stared at the blood-red screen flashing in mid-air, at Li Tai's chubby face distorted with fear, and his heart skipped a beat, knowing that the beach barbecue far away across the ocean had ultimately become a pipe dream.

"Fourth brother, speak slowly, the sky isn't going to fall down."

Li Chengqian exhaled a breath of stale air, his tone tinged with a sense of resignation and dejection, but his eyes sharpened in an instant.

"Big brother! The sky has already collapsed halfway!"

In the holographic projection, Li Tai was sweating profusely. He reached up and wiped his forehead haphazardly, only spreading the coal dust on his face even more evenly. With trembling hands, he adjusted the camera angle, and as the lens slowly panned, a horrific scene, as if the end of the world had arrived, appeared before Li Chengqian.

That was the North American industrial zone, the global heartland that the Tang Dynasty was so proud of, but now it resembled a soulless steel corpse.

The thousand-meter-high blast furnaces, which should have been spewing crimson flames into the sky day and night, were now not even sparking, and even the sweltering heat of the air had vanished. The enormous chimneys stood lifelessly like broken, withered trees under the hazy sky, no longer emitting black smoke.

What's even more chilling are those sophisticated, fully automated robotic arms.

The once agile and nimble steel behemoths were now frozen in mid-air in various bizarre poses. Some were gripping the torsos of the unfinished mechs, while others hovered above the welding points. The sparks and the meshing of gears had vanished, leaving only the mournful wail of the cold wind blowing through the gaps in the metal.

"What happened? Was the generator set blown up?"

Li Chengqian's voice was icy cold. His first thought was that those remnants of powerful clans had sabotaged the operation.

"No...it's not a hardware malfunction."

Li Tai's voice was clearly choked with sobs. He turned the camera back to himself, his eyes filled with a sense of absurdity as if he had seen a ghost.

"Brother, all the machines are working fine, and the energy reserves are full. But... but the people have gone on strike. Those workers, they stormed into the central power distribution room in droves, and before the supervisors could react, they manually cut off all the main power switches!"

Li Tai choked back a sob, pointed to the boundless darkness behind him, and reported at an extremely fast pace.

"They said they'd had enough! They said working twelve hours a day and only getting half a day off a month was inhuman! Dude, that's a full two hundred thousand skilled technicians! They're guarding the power distribution room door; anyone who dares to come near will be killed. They even locked down the backup power source originally used for testing the mechs!"

Li Chengqian listened to Li Tai's incoherent report, his brows furrowed deeply.

strike?

In the Tang Dynasty, a society that originally valued "diligence in managing the household," this was the first large-scale outbreak of such an event.

Due to the rapid advancements in technology by the Tang Dynasty, the North American industrial zone almost became a "miracle mill" in a sense, as people tried to keep up with the system's progress. There, high salaries lured countless people to leave their homes, but what followed was almost cruel and arduous labor.

They were the fuel of this turbulent era, and now, that fuel has burned out.

Their physical defenses crumbled under the relentless overtime, and their psychological resilience snapped under the weight of capitalist exploitation. This was not merely a power outage; it was a collective backlash from the underlying logic of the Tang Dynasty against this pathological development.

Li Chengqian stared at a corner of the screen.

It was an open space outside the factory area. The smooth cement road, originally laid to pursue efficiency, was now crowded with a dense crowd of people.

They weren't wearing neat uniforms, but rather work clothes covered in grease.

Tens of thousands of torches were lit, converging into an angry, crimson ocean in the pitch-black night. Through the high-definition camera, Li Chengqian could clearly see the faces of the workers standing at the forefront.

Most of them were in their prime, the very backbone of the empire, yet their faces, covered in coal dust and engine oil, bore an overwhelming weariness and rage. The resolute look in their eyes made even Xu Xiao, a man accustomed to grand scenes, instinctively clutch the sword at his waist.

That roar, though thousands of miles away, seemed to shatter the tranquility of the Eastern Palace through the power cable.

This was the first, most primal and genuine roar from the grassroots during the industrialization process of the Tang Dynasty. It was no longer the kind of calculation that arose from the struggle between powerful clans, but a survival instinct.

"Brother, what should I do? The Imperial Guards have already assembled. They're right outside the factory gate. With just one word from me, they can storm in and take back the power..."

Li Tai's voice was still trembling; he was clearly terrified by this unprecedented surge of collective anger.

"Shut up! Keep an eye on those Imperial Guards. Without my orders, anyone who dares to move a muscle will have their entire family sent to North America to grow potatoes!"

Before Li Chengqian could say another word, the communication panel on the desk suddenly emitted a piercing high-frequency scream.

That's an alert indicating that permissions have been forcibly overridden.

The previously static projection of Li Tai was instantly torn apart by a violent surge of signal, splitting the screen in two. In the newly emerged half of the projection, Li Shimin's face, utterly distorted by rage, like a demon crawling out of hell, abruptly captured everyone's attention.

Li Shimin was sitting behind the huge control panel in the Taiji Hall at this moment.

The collar of his black Zhongshan suit had been ripped open, and the veins on his forehead throbbed wildly like startled earthworms. He clutched a freshly printed financial report tightly in his hand, the paper making a pitiful tearing sound from the excessive force.

That murderous aura even made Li Chengqian on the other side of the screen feel a chill run down his spine.

"Li Tai! You piece of trash! What are you doing?!"

Li Shimin's roar shattered a vase inside the hall.

"North American steel stocks just plummeted ten points in a single second due to a sudden event! Do you know how much that represents? Do you know how green the entire market is?!"

Li Shimin suddenly leaned forward, his bloodshot, furious eyes fixed on the camera, as if he wanted to crawl up the screen and devour all the workers in North America alive.

"Are your troops just sitting around doing nothing? If anyone dares to pull the power switch, have the Great Snow Dragon Riders chop off their hands! If anyone dares to strike, hang all the ringleaders on the chimneys! Immediately, right now, I want to see the lights of North America back on before the market closes!"

Li Shimin didn't notice Li Chengqian on the other side at all; his mind was filled with the green curve that was diving into the water.

In his eyes, those workers were no longer living, breathing people, but rather bad spots that hindered the growth of his assets, error codes that had to be forcibly corrected.

"Damn it! North American steel stocks just plummeted ten percent! What happened?!"