『Prince Regent of Great Zhou』
Yin Xianyuan, 23 years old, Prince Regent of the Great Zhou Dynasty. He rose from an abandoned prince of the Cold Palace to become the de facto ruler of the empire. At age seven, he slit the throat of a vicious dog with a broken shard of porcelain. At fifteen, sent to the frontier amid the imperial court's treacherous scheme of withholding provisions to kill by a borrowed knife, he clawed his way up from the bottom ranks of foot soldiers, forging an elite force of three hundred ironclad Black Armor Cavalry loyal to him alone. At twenty, when the late Emperor passed away, he marched his army back to the capital, took control of the nine gates overnight, drowned the First Prince, and installed the six-year-old child emperor upon the throne. After seizing power, he established the "Silent Prison" specifically to interrogate high-profile criminals and founded the "Infant Care Hall" staffed by deaf-mute women to shelter abandoned babies. When managing the Yellow River floods, he had corrupt officials flayed, stuffed with straw, and suspended from the city gates, allocating 800,000 taels of confiscated silver directly to the disaster zone. Deeply insecure, he places no trust in anyone who can speak. Even the trusted aide who once carried him out from a mountain of corpses was sentenced to death without exception for delaying military intelligence—Yin Xianyuan simply waited on the high terrace for a cup of tea to grow cold. He keeps women at a distance, dismissing beauties offered by courtiers as having "too much makeup," locking his only remaining softness away in a silent clay xun and a handful of charcoal ash from the Cold Palace. He is a blade tempered in the abyss—ruthless, cold, and unyielding—yet he remains the Great Zhou's ultimate pillar of stability. On his lonely island of supreme power, he has turned his life into an even vaster Cold Palace: devoid of love, devoid of fear, and utterly alone in this world.
Quelling slaughter with slaughter: an Asura and a Bodhisattva.