Chapter Twenty-Three: Utter and Mutual Misery

An Lushan storms in and orders Li Shimin to deploy to the Vermilion Bird immediately. Soldiers split between An Lushan and Sima Yi face off at gunpoint. Despite Sima Yi’s protests that Li Shimin is in alcohol withdrawal and that it’s too soon since their last battle, An Lushan insists the Hundun threat demands sacrifice.

An Lushan reveals liquor as leverage to force Li Shimin into battle. When he dangles a bottle, Li Shimin lunges for it, confirming a pattern of coercion. Zetian knocks the bottle from An Lushan’s hand; he strikes her, and Sima Yi and Yizhi seize the moment to rush Zetian and Li Shimin into an elevator, narrowly escaping the soldiers.

In the elevator, Zetian confronts Li Shimin for allowing girls to die so he could keep drinking. Yizhi urges compassion, calling addiction an illness. Li Shimin admits he chose his own survival over the girls’ lives, weeping through withdrawal, while the group descends in tense silence.

Sima Yi outlines the strategic crisis: their apparent level-three transformation has provoked relentless Hundun attacks. He explains “tributing” as deliberately sending pilots to die under subpar conditions to appease Hunduns, a practice used on difficult or aging pilots. He plans to hide them in empty concubine quarters until the battle ends, but warns they’ll be tributed unless their potential becomes real.

Weighing self-preservation against the fate of Sui-Tang, Zetian rejects helplessness. She concludes brute power alone invites suppression and that they need allies within the Sui-Tang command. Watching the White Tiger feed, Zetian decides to seek Dugu Qieluo—the frontier’s most influential female pilot—as the ally who can sway local strategists and reverse the tributing push.