In the final years of Great Wei, the emperor is incompetent, spending his days obsessed with alchemy and elixirs instead of attending to state affairs. The crown prince died young, and the princes’ struggle for the throne grows ever fiercer. Powerful aristocratic families monopolize the court, while foreign tribes repeatedly raid the borders. It is a chaotic age when ritual and law have fallen apart, and the common people’s lives are as precarious as duckweed on the water.
