Xiong Yinggeng obediently went to his maternal grandfather's home to steal a kasaya—naturally, this was also New Sun Earl's declaration of allegiance.
New Sun Earl's eldest son, Xiong Yinggeng's uncle Wu Zongben, was a worthless fool who did not know the height of heaven or the depth of earth. He had actually passed off the power of the entire aristocratic bloc as his own prestige, daring to openly trample upon the hopes of the entire commoner class. It was only right that the hopes of his own life were extinguished in turn.
When besieging a city, one must leave one side open; when squeezing people dry, one cannot deny them all hope. If you give no hope, you will invite the fiercest resistance of lives set aflame. Just like Great Chu's new policies: they sought to thoroughly reform court governance, yet they would not, like Wen Jingxiu, exterminate the aristocratic houses to the last. The goodwill expressed by this Crown Prince returned from prison was the hope the dynasty gave the aristocratic class.
Xiong Yinggeng had more or less inherited the ignorance of that worthless uncle of his. He actually believed that with the East Palace vacant, everyone had a chance. He thought his other brothers and sisters were so law-abiding merely because they lacked ambition!
But even worthless fools had their value.
A worthless fool like Wu Zongben, for example, had once sparked an immense court struggle that nearly tore the court apart, making many people confront for the first time the chronic malady that had persisted in Chu since the era of the Grand Ancestor. In a sense, he became the fuse that ignited the dynasty's institutional reforms, followed by firecracker blasts that went on for decades.
And an idiot like Xiong Yinggeng was best suited to be