The next day.
The morning court convened in Taichen Hall as scheduled, but the atmosphere was utterly different from usual.
The Young Emperor sat high upon the dragon throne, while Empress Dowager Guo, clad in the Phoenix Skirt, attended court behind a curtain. Below them, the civil and military officials had all fallen into a silence in which no one stepped forward to speak.
That silence stemmed from Empress Dowager Guo's years of painstaking governance. Over more than a decade, she had slowly hammered the Northern Zhou, which had been on the verge of falling apart, into something resembling a seaworthy warship.
But after three hundred years, with several successive incompetent rulers squandering their ancestors' prestige, the Northern Zhou was already sick beyond cure. The ministers had long lost the loyalty they had felt toward the Xiao Clan at the dynasty's founding. All they plotted for was their own households and clans, and a world where the poor remained poor and the noble remained noble had already become entrenched.
Whether through Empress Dowager Guo's gradual reforms or Wang Zhiyan's sweeping measures, the aim was to suppress the great noble houses, give those at the bottom a way to survive, and prolong the Northern Zhou's life.
Unfortunately, the great aristocratic clans did not care whether the Northern Zhou's Xiao Clan perished. Whether the Southern Dynasty marched north or the Desert North swept south, they were thousand-year-old clans worth winning over. National turmoil would inevitably affect their clans somewhat, but that was a future concern. Before the Northern Zhou had even fallen, why should they agree to bleed themselves to feed those lowly commoners beneath them?
Thus, after the assembled officials had remained silent for a long time, a censor finally stepped forward. He impeached the imperial in-laws of the Guo Clan