Court Strife (Part One)

As time passed, word that Jiang Mingyang bore the Mandate of Heaven slowly spread from the Heaven Dou Empire Capital to other places...

The various factions with informants in the Heaven Dou Empire Capital grew restless. Was the news true or not?

Some of the top factions knew the truth of it, but they were troubled too.

After all, was the Mandate of Heaven something worth believing in?

The trouble was that Jiang Mingyang's experiences had been far too extraordinary, as though he truly possessed the Mandate of Heaven.

Back when Mingyang's strength had been “exposed,” the major factions had already investigated every detail they could find about Jiang Mingyang.

They had long since learned that he had been adopted as a child.

At the time, though, none of them had paid it much attention. They had focused instead on Jiang Mingyang's strength and the favor he enjoyed from His Majesty.

Now that talk of the Mandate of Heaven was spreading, people examined Jiang Mingyang's history again and found his adoption strikingly peculiar.

Of all the people who could have adopted Jiang Mingyang when he was an abandoned infant, why did it have to be him?

He had been adopted by Jiang Tian, the Heaven Dou Empire's First Military Commander.

No matter how they looked at it, something about that felt wrong.

With that background and that talent, hadn't he been born to rebel?

What was more, the earlier rebellion led by the Balak Kingdom had badly weakened the Heaven Dou Imperial Family's authority. Xue Ye had died, and the new emperor was mild-tempered. From any angle, it looked as though Heaven itself was arranging an opportunity for rebellion!

Was... was this the Mandate of Heaven? The more the major factions thought about it, the less they could dismiss it.