"Soaring light propped up a brush to write Questions to Heaven; brocade mansions boasted thirteen peaks."
In his youth, Min King Yu Liyang roamed the world, and with this line of poetry, he elevated the thirteen famed mountains within the Xia Kingdom to heights no other mountains could reach.
Jinan Prefecture had Singing Sky Cold Mountain, lofty, strange, perilous, and sheer—yet it failed to make the list of the Thirteen Peaks.
Liu Xiyi, who hailed from Jinan Prefecture, once said to someone—
"I do not regret that this peak is not tall enough. I regret only that Yu Liyang has never seen it."
At a banquet, Yu Liyang responded, saying, "With Lord Liu Xiyi here, how would I dare speak of Singing Sky?"
Someone asked why he did not dare.
Yu Liyang replied, "I fear a single mistaken word might earn me a beating from Lord Liu!"
For a time, it became a celebrated anecdote.
Of course, after Yu Liyang attained True Lord status, even Liu Xiyi could no longer address him by name in public.
As one of the extraordinary mountains ranked among the Thirteen Peaks, Ford Mountain's peril, strangeness, majesty, and steepness had always been endlessly praised.
To ford was to walk through water.
Legend had it that Ford Mountain had once stood in the water. Only when the waters ran dry did its peril become known; only when the tide receded did its peak emerge.
Of course, when the name Ford Mountain first appeared in the historical records, it was already a lofty mountain. Nor did those chronicles record any great river in the Southern Regions large enough to swallow Ford Mountain.
So a legend was only a legend.
Tai Yin led his army here at a gallop, erased every trace, and lay in ambush well in