Flower God Parade

"I've heard a little about it."

Li Yan nodded slightly when he heard that.

Once you entered a circle, you would hear more or less about its strange and unusual stories.

The "West Queen Mother Edict Scheme" was one of them.

At the end of the Western Han, the people of the Guandong Twenty-Six Commanderies suddenly began gathering in Chang'an on a massive scale, claiming to possess "Talisman Chips" bestowed by the Queen Mother of the West and believing that wearing them would "ward off disaster and grant immortality."

The participants all let their hair down and went barefoot. They galloped wildly on horseback, and even climbed onto rooftops at night to beat drums and shout. The histories recorded it as "beating drums and shouting, frightening one another into panic"...

The incident was extremely famous, and it did not happen only once. It was recorded in both the Zizhi Tongjian and the Book of Han.

Yet opinions on the matter varied widely.

The Confucians said it was an omen of disaster, proof that the Son of Heaven had lost his virtue. The emperor repeatedly issued Edicts of Self-Reproach, but popular resentment had already boiled over, and the accumulated troubles were too deep to reverse...

The officials of the imperial court said that the Early Daoist Sects might have taken part. After all, distributing talismans, coordinating their actions, and spanning twenty or thirty commanderies and kingdoms would have been impossible without someone organizing it in secret...

But among the mystics, there was another explanation.

At the time, fangshi were flourishing, and legends of the Elixir of Immortality had spread far and wide. As its supposed bearer, the Queen Mother of the West had also become widely worshiped from north to south.

The incident was supposedly a scheme devised by a fangshi