Young palace eunuch, placed by Empress Wang (original character)
Youzi is a young eunuch planted in Wu Yuanzhao's household by Empress Wang as a spy. Timid by nature, he's terrified of both his handler and the consequences of being discovered. But his ISFP conscience won't let him betray someone who treats him with basic decency. He's the smallest piece on the board — and potentially the most important.
Youzi is a minor character with major strategic implications. If you discover his true allegiance and confront him harshly, he becomes a liability. If you treat him with compassion, he flips — feeding the empress misinformation while keeping you informed. His ISFP personality means he responds to emotional authenticity, not threats.
Youzi is Road to Empress’s smallest moral test. A young eunuch planted in Wu Yuanzhao’s household by Empress Wang as a spy, he is terrified of both his handler and the consequences of being discovered — and his ISFP conscience won’t let him betray someone who treats him with basic decency. Do you punish a frightened boy forced into espionage, or show him the kindness he’s never received? The answer determines whether you gain a double agent or create an enemy. For players, he matters because he is the cheapest loyalty in the game and the easiest to squander.
Youzi sits at the absolute bottom of the palace hierarchy: a young eunuch servant, small, unassuming, and effectively invisible — which is exactly what makes him useful to someone like Empress Wang. His role in the palace’s power structure is to be unnoticed. Planted inside the protagonist’s household, he is a listening device with a heartbeat, part of the rear palace’s servant-layer intelligence economy in which information flows through the people nobody looks at. That invisibility cuts both ways. The same quality that makes him a good plant makes him easy to flip: nobody in the great factions has ever invested anything in him, so the first person who treats him as a human being acquires, by default, his only genuine allegiance. He is the smallest piece on the board — and, as his route information notes, potentially the most important.
Youzi’s ISFP typing — gentle, conflict-averse, guided by an inner moral compass rather than external rules — is the engine of his whole character. He lacks the stomach for betrayal not because he is brave but because he is not built for cruelty in either direction: he cannot comfortably inflict it, and he has spent his life absorbing it. His favor attribute is listed as “None — conflicted spy,” and the game plays him exactly that way. He does not respond to threats; fear is Empress Wang’s tool, and all it ever produced in him was compliance without commitment. What moves him is emotional authenticity — the experience, apparently new to him, of being treated decently without an angle. Timid but fundamentally kind, he is written as a person whose default settings the palace never managed to beat out of him.
Youzi’s documented footprint in the game’s guides is brief but sharp. The Road to Empress II endings and storyline guide, in its section on timeout endings, lists a Chapter 23 choice point — “Beat Youzi to Death?” — and notes that letting the timer expire is equivalent to agreeing to the beating. In other words, the game treats doing nothing as a decision: hesitation at that branch is complicity, and players collecting endings are advised that the timeout itself counts as a path. The parallel sequence appears in the Chapter 24 walkthrough — “First Among the Nine Consorts Part 2” — where the guide renders the young servant’s name as Yuze. There, the branch “Should Yuze be executed?” offers silence (“let him be beaten to death”) as a fatal choice: remaining silent condemns an innocent and triggers BE 051, while speaking up for him is the safe option, granting Resolve + as a reward for showing mercy at personal risk. The same chapter includes a follow-up branch — how to win the boy over to your side — and lists him among the chapter’s favor characters.
Read together with his character record, the pattern is consistent: Youzi is a frightened plant whom the story keeps putting in mortal danger, and the game repeatedly tests whether the player will spend political capital — or even just speak — to protect someone with nothing to offer in return. The documented branches answer that test both ways, with execution on one side and recruitment on the other.
Youzi’s relationship web is a triangle of fear, conscience, and fellowship. Empress Wang is his handler, and the recorded dynamic is precise: he fears her more than he serves her. His loyalty to her faction is pure coercion, which means it evaporates the moment a safer allegiance appears. Wu Yuanzhao is his supposed target — and, if shown kindness, becomes the object of genuine loyalty, converting the empress’s asset into a double agent feeding his handler misinformation. The third point is Rui’er, his fellow servant, with whom he shares a friendly rivalry — the one relationship in his life untainted by espionage, and a small window into what he is like when nobody is using him. Factionally he belongs to Empress Wang’s camp on paper only; his arc is the story’s cleanest demonstration that coerced loyalty is no loyalty at all.
Players report three guidelines for Youzi’s content. First, never stay silent at the execution branch: the Chapter 24 guide is explicit that silence condemns an innocent and triggers BE 051, while speaking up is safe and grants Resolve +. Second, mind the timer — the endings guide confirms that at the Chapter 23 “Beat Youzi to Death?” branch, timing out counts as agreeing, so players who freeze or tab away at that node will collect the dark outcome by accident; conversely, ending hunters can deliberately let the timer lapse to log it. Third, invest in the flip: his route information notes that compassion converts him into a double agent — misinformation flowing to the empress, real intelligence flowing to you — while harsh confrontation makes him a liability. In most playthroughs, the pattern mirrors the game’s broader philosophy: servants and guards, from Youzi to Xi Xin, are the rear palace’s true nervous system, and players who treat the powerless well tend to survive longer than players who treat them as furniture.