Xiao Ying wandered around the edge of the palace, seeking out concubine Jing's personal separate palace and pavilion that stretched out over one of the artificial lakes on the Imperial Compound's grounds, a deliberate gift from the emperor to her after she had requested one to prove that he was worthy of her.
He had taken the request with humour and had viewed the task as making an investment to keep the excessively competent spy master within the wings of his halls, while also viewing it for what it was: a base that she would use and operate from, sending her messages through all the various rivers and waterways that poured into her lake and out into the wide, wide world.
Much like the large network of the waters throughout the countries directly to the East of the landlocked kingdom, her own network of intelligence was just as fast and flowing, all her many informants intermingling, travelling for a while and then separating, all from different backgrounds and walks of life, all appearing different through the use of their disguises when in public and private, with some extending influence into the territories of others so much that it was difficult to tell where one began and the other ended.
Concubine Jing could have easily overthrown the Emperor at her own discretion, and had enough moles within the military, government offices, businesses and the general population to keep a hold on her newfound power, but at the time of writing her, Xiao Ying hadn't managed to come up with an explanation of why she had not done such a thing.
He honestly could not think of a single reason of why the lady had not usurped the throne and taken it for herself, with the level of power that she currently possessed, and it was imperative for him now, in this expanded world, to try and figure out why.
She, in the vaguely shoehorned in backstory that Xiao Ying had come up with, was highly ambitious and determined to leave her position as somebody who would never be noticed, among her many, many sisters, completely aware of her mother aborting all her sons to ensure that her father still paid attention to the family and did not abandon them outright, too many children by one woman that it would be too damaging and controversial if he divorced her, nothing less than publicly as well.
She had been shrewd and calculating, already knowing who to listen to within the town: the gossipers who flittered about with their fans in the teahouse; the hushed conversations that would occur in the back corners of the poetry shop; the chatter and rumours that floated around among the palace staff who were all too afraid to report their findings, knowing that they would be harmed if such a unsubstantiated thing turned out to not be true in the slightest.
Xiao Ying had even decided in his notes for the chapter that Concubine Jing would have attempted her own false assassination attempt, to bring somebody into the palace just so she could even kill a man herself to prove her worth to the Emperor and to mitigate some of the frustration that he had been feeling on how restricted he had been because she did not have the adequate resources to send her own soldier's out to kill the archers hidden in the trees, and the bandits on the roads.
Moreover, he had included in his original draft that Concubine Jing would have the flashback to show her backstory, rather than the emperor, but had thought that maybe, her side of the story as a sequence of events solely for the procurement of power without any real motivation, wasn't particularly riveting to the last few of his audience, deciding instead to change the perspective to the Emperor instead, to make her actions look like an extreme loyalty to her king.
Her pavilion and lake were tucked away in a small area, deceptively close to the palace if one took a more unofficial, unpaved route, just as she wanted, while the actual path, that the servants were mandated to use, passed several other compounds for the Emperor's other wives first, again, just as she had requested.
Xiao Ying made sure that he hiked up his clothing and ducked down as he began to make his way through the thickets and the bushes in an unmarked spot of the palace that was on the edge of the outer walls.
As long as he continued on, in a straight line, he would emerge at the side of Concubine Jing's palace, where her window would be just around the corner, with no balcony to speak of.
The only entrances in and out of her home were the front doors, the servant's doors, and the windows, all of which looked innocuous and innocent from the outside to any would be invaders, but unfortunately, not all those potential entrances were genuine.
Xiao Ying, without doing any research on the subject, had decided that her palace would be built as a fortress.
There were just as many windows that led to prison cell like rooms which contained no doors outwards, and would automatically seal in the window, if the floor was stood on.
The servant's rota had been designed by Concubine Jing to keep all the servants from different specialties separate, and to keep them in their own areas of the palace, forcing them to only use one door, and one door only, as per the requirements of their work, to divide the palace into several sections that could not be accessed from each other due to the walls that she had built to bisect entire corridors in some places.
The only way to move about the palace unimpeded was to use the secret passages that ran between the walls, under the floors, and needed candles to navigate.
Only Concubine Jing and her circle of advisors knew them, and she was the only one who truly knew each and every part of the palace.