The Grand Secretariat meeting after the morning court session the next day.
Crown Prince's Junior Tutor Zhang Song and Vice Minister of Rites Zhang Qingyu were unprecedentedly summoned to attend.
When Zhang Qingyu learned that he could take part in such a Grand Secretariat meeting, he had initially been quite excited.
If he could enter the Grand Secretariat, the Zhang Family might have a chance to become Kyoto's foremost aristocratic house.
It was only after father and son ran into each other on the road that they began to sense something was wrong.
An hour later.
The father and son left the palace looking as though their parents had died.
Zhang Qicheng of the Zhang Family was publicly executed at noon that very day. The spectators packed the place three layers deep, all curious about this flower thief who had run rampant through Kyoto for years.
When Zhang Qicheng's identity was revealed, it caused a small earthquake throughout Kyoto.
The next day, even more shocking news spread: the Zhang Family's hereditary, perpetual privilege had been revoked.
Naturally, this punishment made the people of Kyoto cheer the Emperor's wisdom, believing that Zhang Qicheng's actions as a flower thief had enraged the Emperor.
Only a very small number of insiders knew the truth.
The Emperor's fury had come solely because of that line of poetry.
Nor had anyone in all Kyoto expected that the person secretly driving all this was an Embroidered Uniform Guard Hundred-Household Commander.
Of course, he was now a Thousand-Household Commander.
Had Zhang Qicheng merely been executed in this flower thief case, everyone would have believed that Tang Yu, the true culprit, would face the Zhang Family's fierce revenge.
But now that the Zhang Family had been stripped of its hereditary privilege, it was wholly preoccupied with protecting itself.