Return of Black Lotus system:Taming Cheating Male Leads-Chapter 91 --

Even though Heena spent most of her visible time with Larus—walking gardens, drinking tea, laughing over shared meals—that didn’t mean she’d stopped working.

In fact, she was systematically dismantling her consorts’ power bases.

Slowly. Quietly. From angles they wouldn’t notice until it was too late.

She wasn’t dramatic about it. Didn’t march into their offices and strip them of titles. Didn’t make grand proclamations. She simply... redirected things. Shifted foundations. Pulled support structures out from under them one brick at a time while they were distracted trying to figure out what she was doing with the Marus prince.

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’’The Knight Commander’s Power: Redirected’’

Heena had established a police force.

It sounds simple when said like that, but in practice, it was revolutionary.

Before, the empire had only knights. The Knight Order operated out of a central headquarters on the edge of the capital—one massive building where citizens had to travel, sometimes for hours, to report crimes, request help, or file complaints. If something happened in the outer districts or the smaller towns, people had to wait. Stand in line. Hope the knights had time to dispatch someone.

Emergencies were handled poorly. Robberies went unreported. Assaults were ignored because the process of ’getting’ help was often more trouble than the crime itself.

Heena changed that.

She created localized stations—small buildings staffed with officers, placed every five kilometers throughout the capital and spreading outward into the provinces. Different uniforms from the knights. Different chain of command. Different jurisdiction.

The police could arrest anyone as long as they had proof—witnesses, evidence, reasonable cause. They didn’t need to wait for a knight’s approval. Didn’t need to file requests up a bureaucratic ladder.

They just acted.

Within weeks, crime rates in the capital dropped. The slums, the markets, the back alleys where illegal transactions used to happen openly—all of it was suddenly under watch. The police raided smuggling dens, broke up protection rackets, arrested corrupt merchants who’d been operating unchecked for years.

It wasn’t perfect. There were problems—officers who took bribes, stations that were understaffed, jurisdictions that overlapped awkwardly with the knights.

But it ’worked’.

And more importantly, it pulled power away from Damien.

The Knight Commander—the spy master who lived in shadows, who controlled information through the knight network, who had eyes everywhere because the knights ’were’ everywhere—suddenly found his influence fractured.

The police didn’t report to him. Didn’t owe him loyalty. Didn’t feed him intelligence.

His network was still intact, but it had holes now. Gaps. Places where he couldn’t see.

He noticed.

Heena could tell by the way he watched her during council meetings now—eyes narrowed, calculating, trying to figure out what she was doing and how to counter it.

She smiled blandly back at him and said nothing.

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’’The High Priest’s Influence: Undermined’’

Religion was a sensitive topic.

You couldn’t just ’attack’ the church. Not openly. The temples had been part of the empire’s foundation for centuries. The priests held sway over the common people in ways that nobles and military leaders didn’t.

So Heena didn’t attack the church.

She just... made it irrelevant. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

She started funding orphanages. Not through the palace directly—that would’ve been too obvious—but through neutral nobles. Minor houses that weren’t aligned with her consorts but also weren’t her enemies. People who genuinely cared about social reform and had been waiting for someone to give them the resources to do something about it.

Heena gave them money. Gave them land. Gave them official backing.

Within a month, there were orphanages opening in every major city. Clean buildings. Trained staff. Actual beds and food and education for children who’d been sleeping in alleys.

She funded food distribution centers. Set up shelters for the homeless. Created programs that offered direct, tangible help to people in need.

Before, if you were starving, you went to the temple. You waited in line for hours—sometimes five, six hours—and eventually, if you were lucky, a priest handed you a bowl of watery porridge and told you that your suffering was a test from the gods. That if you had faith, you’d be rewarded. Eventually. Someday.

Now, you could walk into a shelter run by one of Heena’s funded programs and get a thick, decent meal in half an hour. No sermon. No lecture. Just food.

The choice was obvious.

Foot traffic at the temples started dropping. Donations slowed. Priests found themselves preaching to smaller crowds, their influence shrinking as people realized they didn’t ’need’ the church anymore—not when there were other options that actually ’helped’ instead of just offering prayers.

And the best part?

None of it pointed back to Heena.

On paper, the programs were run by independent nobles. Funded by private donations. She hadn’t issued a single decree about the church. Hadn’t criticized the priests publicly. Hadn’t done anything that Raphael could point to and call an attack.

She’d just... made better options available.

And people chose them.

Raphael noticed too. She could see it in the way his serene mask slipped sometimes, the way his hands tightened when he heard reports about declining temple attendance.

But what could he say?

That the Empress was wrong for feeding orphans?

He couldn’t.

So he said nothing.

And his influence continued to erode.

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’’The Northern Duke’s Military Power: Neutralized’’

Kieran’s strength came from war.

He was the Commander of the Northern Armies, the man who held the line against external threats, the one people turned to when the empire needed military might.

His power was built on the premise that the empire was ’always’ on the edge of conflict. That enemies were always at the gates. That without him and his soldiers, everything would collapse.

Heena was working on removing that premise.

She’d been negotiating treaties. Quietly. Through back channels. Using Larus’s connections to open trade talks with neighboring kingdoms, offering economic incentives in exchange for peace agreements.

If the treaties went through—and they were close, so close—the fighting would stop.

And if the fighting stopped, what use was a standing army of that size?

You didn’t need tens of thousands of soldiers on constant alert if there was no war to fight. You didn’t need a military commander with absolute authority if the borders were stable.

Kieran’s power existed because of crisis.

Remove the crisis, and the power dissolved.

She hadn’t announced any of this publicly yet. The treaties weren’t signed. The negotiations were still delicate.

But she was close.

And when it happened, Kieran would find himself in command of an army with nothing to do—an expensive, unnecessary force that the empire could no longer justify funding at its current level.

He’d still have his title. Still have his position.

But the ’weight’ of it would be gone.

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’’The Merchant Prince’s Economic Control: Circumvented’’

Adrian’s strength was money.

He controlled trade. Managed tariffs. Had his fingers in every major merchant house and trading company in the empire.

Heena couldn’t dismantle that directly—it was too entrenched, too complex, and trying to rip it apart would destabilize the economy.

So instead, she was building around it.

New trade routes through Larus’s connections. New merchant partnerships with foreign kingdoms. New tariff structures that bypassed Adrian’s networks entirely.

She wasn’t destroying his power.

She was just making it less essential.

Slowly, carefully, she was creating an economic system that didn’t need him at the center of it.

It would take time. Months, maybe longer.

But she had time.

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Lucian was harder to read.