Everyone says Zhongshan is gone. The history books say so too: "A barbarian state, destroyed by Wei." One sentence, two hundred years, wiped clean without a trace.
But the history books leave this out: at fourteen, Ji Liao carried half of a burned royal banner out of a fire. He had set the fire himself. He held grudges, and he remembered fire even better: fire could burn one country to the ground, or set another alight.
