The Yang Kingdom had already perished!
The pages of history had long since turned.
Even the so-called "Nine Sun-Rising Kingdoms" that had once risen from Yang Kingdom's bones and carved it up between themselves were now reduced to only Xu, Zhao Kingdom, and Chang Kingdom. All of them bowed their heads to Qi, wishing they could kneel and offer up their letters of surrender.
The year the Yang Kingdom was formally declared destroyed was Dao Calendar 2813.
Now, in Dao Calendar 3928, more than a thousand years had passed. No one mourned it anymore.
There was no Yang rule under heaven.
Yang Valley at the Sea Frontier still remained, but they did not hold the old Yang in remembrance. What they inherited was the responsibility of guarding the Sea Frontier, not the station of the Yang Kingdom as a state.
That so-called "heart for the fallen nation" had already ended when the general who led Yang Valley into independence took his own life.
At least, as far as Jiang Wang knew, only this old Confucian scholar before him, Yan Sheng, still called it the "old nation," still referred to himself as "a remnant of a fallen state," still missed the Sun Palace that had once shone over the east.
Perhaps the great fire in the East Palace of the Yang Kingdom all those years ago still burned in this old man's heart.
Yan Sheng was silent for a long while.
For a time, only wisps of blue smoke curled upward, never quite gathering into a shape.
He burned incense in reverence for books, clinging to ritual with every thought—but ritual could not bring him back to the kingdom of his dreams.
When the Yang Kingdom had first been founded, it had dominated one region in an exceedingly short span of