He realized the bitter truth: he had been abandoned.
"How could they do this? To leave an old man with only a few days left to live in the position of Beiyang Viceroy!"
This cruel twist of fate was rooted in the emperor's deep-seated mistrust of Yuan Shikai, born from Yuan's past.
For sixteen years, the emperor had endured powerlessness, a humiliation that had only fueled his insatiable hunger for control. To someone so driven, entrusting the Beiyang Army—the empire's most vital military force—to an unreliable figure like Yuan was unthinkable.
But the emperor could not simply remove Yuan by force. Instead, he devised a subtler maneuver: exiling Yuan under the pretense of defending the railways, while simultaneously raising a Central Army loyal only to the throne.
