In the winter of the first year of the Xin era, the jade steps of the Cheng Dynasty's Taiji Hall were soaked in the blood of the imperial clan.
Emperor Chengyuan Yuan Zhang, who murdered his brother and seized the throne, led two hundred thousand troops north to invade the Xianbei, only to find his army shattered and its armor strewn along the White Wolf River;
The old Southern Yuan faction, lying low in Jiangdong, wove a vast web of legitimacy and conspiracy amid the misty rains of Taihu Lake;
And Wang Yu, a military household soldier from Youzhou, rose from a forcibly conscripted auxiliary to become the great general who held the imperial seal and commanded the nation's armies.
He witnessed with his own eyes how a dynasty was stripped away layer by layer by political intrigue, cavalry, and famine:
In the snowstorms of the northern frontier, the wolf banners of the Murong clan tore through the Great Wall;
On the boats crossing south, the noble clans' gold cakes sank beneath the raging, muddy waves;
As the blood of a common-born general stained the walls of Ye City, repeating crossbows forged by craftsmen were quietly rewriting the rules of war.
When the Imperial Seal of State finally sank into the Yangtze,
all that remained of the empire, dismembered by Xianbei sabers, aristocratic conspiracies, and the fury of refugees,
was a bloodstained copy of On the Relocation of the Rong, telling the truth of the nine tripods' fall amid the weeds of Luoyang's abandoned palace.
