After clashing with Sima Yi over the breeding scheme, Zetian sets out to the Tianlao prison to personally select a male prisoner to be castrated and conscripted as her co-pilot. She rides in a luxury electric carriage with bodyguard Qieluo, maidservant Wan'er, and unexpected stowaway Gao Taiping—Yizhi's cross-dressing, math-genius sister with bound feet, who joins the trip uninvited.

During the drive through Chang'an, Wan'er and Taiping erupt into a class-warfare argument: Wan'er denounces inherited wealth, exploitative labor practices, and corporate planned obsolescence, while Taiping defends profit motives and warns of coming shortages. Wan'er reveals familiarity with laborist ideology that predates Qin Zheng. The two continue arguing privately by chat. Outside, Zetian observes a transformed city—celebrations under the Yellow Dragon flag, women on natural feet in public, free rice rations distributed via the Citizen Central platform—but also smashed elite estates from looting.

The carriage is mobbed when a young man on a hovercycle, mistaken for a rapist named Wang Zhong, is shot down and beaten by the crowd, who then turn on Zetian's luxury vehicle. Zetian reveals herself, and rather than be torn apart, she co-opts the mob with revolutionary slogans Wan'er feeds her, redirecting their fury into a march escorting the captured man to the Tianlao for proper justice. She uses the moment to begin building genuine popular favor, calculating she needs mass adoration to deter Qin Zheng from deposing her.

At the prison, Warden Lai Junchen presents three high-spirit-pressure inmates under twenty. The first, Di Renjie, is a brilliant former student activist imprisoned for protesting the old regime; he immediately deduces—from shadows in coronation footage and the recruitment context—that Qin Zheng is incapacitated and that he is being recruited as Zetian's co-pilot. He agrees to castration on the condition that Zetian fight for "the rest of the voiceless" and dismantle the unjust prison system. The second candidate is rejected; the third, Feng Xiaobao, is a violent robber-murderer who refuses outright, while Qieluo storms off intending to castrate a third pornographer-inmate herself.

Zetian decides to take both Di Renjie as primary co-pilot and Feng Xiaobao as a secondary, arguing that if male pilots have multiple concubine-pilots, she can have multiple eunuch-pilots. Sima Yi, furious, says Qin Zheng will have to approve.