"Your Majesty..."
Meanwhile, within the Imperial City, several ministers of the Council of State Affairs had gathered in the palace, their faces heavy with grief.
Earlier, the Empress Dowager and Empress had jointly issued an edict, summoning several senior ministers into the palace overnight to discuss an urgent matter.
Receiving an edict in the dead of night was strange enough. That it had been initiated by the palace women, ordering external officials to swiftly enter the inner palace, was stranger still. Even elderly ministers who had already retired, recently returned to the Central Pivot, or gone into seclusion had received the summons.
There was no need to deliberately analyze the information revealed by these circumstances to know that something extraordinary had happened. Ma Yang, Wang Fu, Zhang Lian, Wang Jing, Geng Chi, Xu Yingyi, Cen Bo, and the others who had been summoned had all gleaned a few hints from it.
Sure enough, after entering the palace and arriving outside the Emperor's bedchamber, they did not even need to go inside to sense the grief within. The senior ministers were not summoned into the chamber, but were instead led by a young eunuch into a side hall.
The Empress Dowager and Empress were already waiting there. Neither looked well. The Empress Dowager, though her face was full of sorrow, still managed to retain some of her imperial bearing. But the Empress's eyes were not merely swollen red—tears streamed ceaselessly from them.
Had it not been necessary for the Empress to appear before the senior ministers, the Empress Dowager likely would never have allowed her appearance to be seen by the assembled officials. Yet none of those ministers had the leisure to concern themselves with how the Empress looked. There was only one thing they urgently needed to know: was the