"Your Majesty... to receive such care from Your Majesty, I..."
Warmth welled up in the Huating Empress's heart. Smiling through tear-filled eyes, she spoke in a choked voice and stepped forward through the void of her own accord, clearly prepared to sacrifice herself.
"Don't be foolish! If they want to condemn you, they'll never lack a pretext!"
Xiao Ying's heart warmed, but he feigned anger, frowning as he rebuked her. He fashioned his magical power into a tether and pulled the Huating Empress back.
After a pause, Xiao Ying glanced at the Great Huan people around him, then looked at the Huating Empress and said with profound meaning and utmost solemnity, "You are an empress, an empress of Great Huan, and one of its only two empresses. If I cannot even protect you, what meaning does anything in Great Huan have? What meaning does my future have? The path of the Great Dao is one thing, but a life worse than death is the heaviest price of all! Besides, this time it is you. Next time it could be another important minister, or even me. And the time after that... how many people can Great Huan hand over? How many would still dare come over to Great Huan?"
As his words fell, the Great Huan people fell silent. The wavering, chaotic atmosphere visibly became much more united and calm.
Xiao Ying's deliberate emphasis on the Huating Empress's status made his meaning plain.
On a personal level, the Huating Empress was the woman of Xiao Ying, Great Huan's sovereign. As a man, if he could not even protect his own woman, what meaning was there in living?
On a public level, given the Huating Empress's standing within Great Huan, if its sovereign Xiao Ying sacrificed Huating this time, who else in