The Si Family Head remained utterly fearless. Even the order to kill without mercy had failed to make him move a single step.
After meeting Ji Gao in secret and sending men to collude with Armory officials to embezzle weapons, he had known there could be only two outcomes.
One was that King Zhou would compromise.
Under their "persuasion," King Zhou would see the error of his ways. Whatever he truly thought, he would have to yield and abolish the reforms, leaving the nobles a class born into incomparable privilege.
King Zhou would have to break the fangs he had bared at the nobles and swallow them, while the nobles trampled his dignity beneath their feet, singing and dancing.
The other outcome was his own death.
If that happened, then clearly King Zhou would not spare the nobles. He would uphold the new law, and any noble who committed an offense would be punished.
In that case, failing to resist would only allow the reforms to succeed step by step. They might even be completed before anyone realized what was happening.
Then nobles would no longer be nobles, and the world would lose its reverence for them.
What would they have left? If King Zhou's methods became even more ruthless, what fate would ultimately await the nobles?
Living without the wealth and splendor nobles had once enjoyed was meaningless. Better, then, to die.
With his death, he would set the first precedent for killing nobles in hundreds of years.
With his own life, he would send Great Shang toward ruin and return the world to the leadership of a ruler who respected nobles and acknowledged their status.
Someone like the Marquis of the West.
There was not a trace of fear in the Si Family Head's eyes. What he was