When he was forty, he was still a merchant. But at forty-one, Yellow Heaven Daoist's death swept him up in its fallout.
Yet in truth, he had already seen a year earlier that the Yellow Heaven Dao was about to fall, and had fled ahead of time. But where in this world was there any land of purity?!
The chain reaction caused by the Yellow Heaven Dao's collapse engulfed the entire Wang Family. In the end, only Wang Jiran and thirteen trusted retainers escaped with their lives.
A man in his forties—in these times, already half-buried in the grave—whose entire family had died, leaving only himself and thirteen servants alive... no one believed such a person could still accomplish anything.
But reality was that, after escaping death, Wang Jiran dug up the gold his ancestors had buried and used it to recruit men and buy horses. Among those thirteen servants under him were two fierce generals who would become renowned in later generations: one named Wang Meng, the other Wang Qi.
Both had been granted the Wang surname by Wang Jiran. After their escape, he directly took them as adopted sons and entered them into the Wang Family genealogy.
Over the following short year, Wang Jiran recruited men and bought horses in the name of crusading against the Yellow Heaven Dao, directly raising a force of more than a thousand men.
Several years later, when the Yellow Heaven Dao was utterly defeated, Wang Jiran already commanded tens of thousands of troops.
Later still, at his peak, he even occupied half a province.
There were twelve provinces under heaven; that was already one twenty-fourth of the realm.
Indeed, it did not seem like much.
But compared with the other powerful clans, such an achievement was extraordinarily hard-won.
Those powerful clans whose