At the court assembly site, some people also sensed that the atmosphere was off. The imperial palace guards on both sides were more than three times the usual number, each with solemn expressions and not a hint of levity.
Could something major have happened?
Someone thought of how His Majesty had summoned the Eldest Prince into the palace late at night, and their heart jolted. Could His Majesty finally have decided on crown prince?
Familiar faces unconsciously gathered together, exchanging a few meaningful glances and cryptic words. After some hushed discussions, they returned to their positions.
As the start of the court assembly drew nearer, the emperor still did not appear. Just as everyone puzzled over this, the doors suddenly opened again, and a few more people entered.
Several elders dressed in luxurious robes, with all-white hair and beards, slowly stepped into the hall escorted by attendants. Their demeanors varied—some scanned the hall with piercing gazes, others appeared utterly composed. A wave of stifled gasps rose in the hall, and a few young nobles hurried forward to greet them.
The others were even more shocked in their hearts. These great nobles had not attended court in centuries, enjoying special exemptions from His Majesty. Why had they come today?
The elders ignored the countless shocked and probing gazes in the hall and steadily walked to the reserved front positions.
The entire grand hall fell into an eerie silence, where even breathing could be heard clearly.
Such a grand display could only herald one thing.
This empire would soon welcome a new master.
Someone up front hesitantly said, “The Eldest Prince was only just enfeoffed as a king a few days ago. Naming him crown prince now would be well-deserved, but…”
This was right after the Third Prince had gone missing, his body nowhere to be found. Was His Majesty rushing to name a crown prince at this time because he feared for his own safety?
As the words fell, many hearts sank.
It was not just the Third Prince, either. The Vanderveel family incident a few days prior had chilled everyone to the bone as well. Such a massive family had half its ancestral estate destroyed in a single night assault, a quarter of its members dead, and even its most valuable political bargaining chip diced up like rotten meat.
If not for the stroke of luck in finding a bastard son from another star system, forget royal marriages—even ordinary noble ones would be out of reach.
A young noble said, “I still think it’s unwise. This isn’t the best timing. Naming a crown prince might steady hearts, but if it invites disaster…”
But whether it invited disaster or not, this was never their decision to make. The Old Emperor had ruled for years, his word absolute, never delegating power. They called themselves nobles, but in truth, they were mere appendages to the Old Emperor, obligated to support him unconditionally.
With this in mind, everyone temporarily suppressed their swirling thoughts. Just then, footsteps finally echoed from the front of the hall.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The moment they recognized the sound of those footsteps, everyone’s hearts plunged.
The steps were steady and forceful, each one carrying an undeniable sense of control, weighing heavily on everyone’s nerves. This was absolutely not the slow, unsteady gait of the Old Emperor that they knew.
A chillier, heavier sense of foreboding gripped all their hearts in an instant. Countless gazes fixed like nails on the shadowed source of the sound.
Then, a tall, upright figure slowly emerged from the shadows and stepped onto the pinnacle of imperial power.
It was Wei Tingxia!
He still wore that dark casual uniform, standing out amid the hall full of ornate robes.
But at that moment, no one had the mind to care about his attire. Everyone’s eyes were glued to the object casually dangling from his right hand, unable to look away.
It was a bloody severed head.
Viscous dark-red liquid still dripped from the ragged neck stump, splattering horrifying blood flowers onto the carpet. The head was twisted in frozen terror and disbelief, as if it had endured endless agony and fear before death.
Wei Tingxia’s face showed no expression, only a near-casual calm.
He carried the still-bleeding head like some trivial object, walking step by step to the throne before casually placing it on the imperial desk with a dull thud.
Thud.
The head’s vacant eyes stared down at the stunned officials below.
Time seemed to freeze solid in that instant, the grand hall deathly silent like a vacuum.
Someone clamped their hand over their mouth to stifle a scream rising in their throat, another’s legs went weak and they nearly collapsed, while the elders even forgot to breathe, their faces pallid as if they might faint any second.
Wei Tingxia’s gaze slowly swept over every ashen, bloodless face below.
His voice was not loud, yet it pierced the dead silence clearly, each word weighted with death: “Everyone, you’ve seen Father Emperor.”
The head on the desk was unmistakably that of the Old Emperor, who had wielded great power just yesterday!
Wei Tingxia had chopped off his father’s head and placed it on the desk like a vase.
Someone in the crowd could no longer hold out and dropped to their knees with a thud, eyes wild with terror.
Wei Tingxia seemed utterly oblivious to the crowd’s abnormal reactions, lowering his head to wipe the bloodied hands with the tablecloth. Only when the blood had dried into pink residue on his skin did he continue, “Father Emperor is unwell, and Eldest Brother isn’t much better. So I’ll host this court assembly. Does anyone have objections?”
Unwell? You’d lopped his head off!
And then he suddenly mentioned Eldest Brother…
An elder hoarsely stammered, trembling, “What did you do to the Eldest Prince?!”
‘Oho, right on the mark.’
“Eldest Brother is in the back. Shall I have him brought over?” Wei Tingxia asked with apparent fairness. “I came here today with both their permissions.”
He paused there, his gaze falling on the head before shifting away, as if stating some trivial fact.
“I know what you’re all thinking—that I’ve usurped the throne, committed treason, tried to overthrow the empire. But that’s not the case.”
He swung the head forward, and it smashed onto the hall’s cold floor tiles. Wei Tingxia then leisurely sat down, leaning back against the throne symbolizing imperial power.
“You lot are the most laughable,” he said, gazing at the panicked nobles below with a hint of amusement in his tone. “Riding your ancestors’ good fortune to lord it over others to this day, thinking yourselves so clever and mighty, able to spin a pile of filth into fine brocade—impressive skill.”
With that, he tapped the armrest, and three massive floating screens appeared before the crowd, densely packed with experimental data scavenged from Wei Shu’s lab and analyses of the drugs the Old Emperor had used.
“Starting four years ago, a certain force within the empire abducted Alphas, Betas, and Omegas, dragging them into labs for forced experiments and modifications to produce drugs that extended the lifespans of the empire’s elites on Capital Star.”
Wei Tingxia pointed at the head on the floor. “The ringleaders have paid the price. Now I want to know if anyone else was involved in this.”
Even if they had been, who would dare admit it now?
“No one?” Wei Tingxia arched a brow slightly. “I recall a few lords were quite close to Wei Shu. Didn’t any of you get a cut?”
Even under such coercion, his threats enraged some nobles spoiled to the core. One unhesitatingly pointed at Wei Tingxia and cursed, “You ungrateful wretch, father-slaying, brother-killing beast—what right do you have to threaten us here—”
Before he finished, before Wei Tingxia could even act, a guard swiftly stepped forward and slapped the elder noble to the ground.
The slap echoed twice through the air before landing. The old noble, advanced in years, had not been fierce since his youth decades ago. He lay there half a day, unable to rise.
“Drag him out,” Wei Tingxia waved dismissively. “Chop him up, drain the blood clean, and put it here.”
He pointed to the upper left corner of the desk, his words dripping with casual contempt for all their lives, stabbing deeper than any ice blade into the nobles’ trembling bones.
“Anyone willing to confess?” Wei Tingxia returned to the topic. “Who else was involved in the abductions?”
“…”
Dead silence.
If anyone had clung to faint hope before that the imperial guards might not fully side with Wei Tingxia, that illusion was utterly crushed now.
They finally understood. The crown prince business, the throne handover—all pretexts by Wei Tingxia to lure them into the palace, just to shut the doors and slaughter them clean.
The quick-witted young ones went weak at the knees and knelt at once, shouting loudly, “Since Your Majesty is unwell, please have the Second Highness ascend the throne at once and take command!”
With someone leading, survival instincts ignited a chorus of echoes.
“Please have the Second Highness ascend the throne at once!”
“Please, Your Highness, ascend the throne!”
Amid these ragged, trembling cries, the executioner guard silently returned and placed another fresh head on the desk.
Wei Tingxia eyed the two heads amid the shouts, lids drooping.
“Really no good?” he asked System 0188.
System 0188 reminded him: [Your goal is the origin world, not to be emperor here.]
Wei Tingxia’s mouth twitched almost imperceptibly. Emperor? Even the origin world might not offer that chance.
He slowly rose to his feet.
This simple motion carried a weight of a thousand jun, making all the nobles below clutch their hearts in sudden terror, their frightened gazes nailing onto him like substance.
“Emperor?”
He paused slightly, a faint, icy arc hooking his lips, laced with glaring mockery and indifference:
“There will be no emperor today.”
As the words fell, he casually swept the noble’s head off the desk.
The head thudded and rolled several times across the carpet, leaving a glaring blood trail.
His gaze never left the nobles on the verge of collapse, his voice like a final verdict, beyond question:
“No emperor today,”
“No emperor tomorrow.”
“And from now on—”
He emphasized each word, like hammers pounding the coffin of the old era: “There will never be an emperor again.”
His icy gaze swept the hall once more, a tangible cold wave rolling through:
“Likewise. There will be no more nobles henceforth.”
Faster than the guards’ blades were the unbridled screams from the nobles’ throats.
…
…
On a calm and dull morning, a coup swept through Capital Star.
The rebels severed Capital Star’s links to the outside with lightning speed, hijacked the remote strike systems to paralyze the internal forces, and meanwhile, a small-scale massacre unfolded within the Imperial Palace.
Sixty percent of the nobles died in that slaughter, the rest firmly controlled. The nobility’s foundation in the empire utterly collapsed.
Two hours after the coup began, Capital Star went under full lockdown. All non-essential work halted, residents confined to homes, no outings allowed.
At dusk, the doors of the blood-scented court hall slowly opened, artificial sunset light slanting in through the cracks.
The Second Prince, high on the throne, sensed the light shift and opened his eyes, just in time to see a figure halt before him in the shadows.
The rebel leader, who had spent twenty hours seizing Capital Star, still had a few drops of unwipe-dried blood on his face, trickling down his contours and staining into a patch of bloody pink.
He carried a heavy scent of suppressant to curb the pheromones spilling from overexcitement in battle, making him smell icy and rigid.
The Second Prince made no move, tilting his head to scrutinize the leader.
A long sword with a broken blade lay by his hand, blood dripping from it into the carpet, another sticky crimson patch. The corpses in the hall had been cleared, but the wails lingered, faintly echoing overhead.
![After Backstabbing the Protagonist [Quick Transmigration]](https://i0.wp.com/dobynovels.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/quick.jpg?resize=151,215 "After Backstabbing the Protagonist [Quick Transmigration]")
