Riding the northwesterly wind, Pan Long headed south. After only a few days, he spotted the Dragon River winding across the vast land.
The Nine Provinces had two great rivers. The southern one was called the Heaven-Reaching River. It flowed past several of the realm's most famous lakes and gave rise to renowned bodies of water such as the Cloud-Dream Great Marsh, Pengze, and Zhenze. It could be called the mother of all the realm's waters.
The northern one was called the Dragon River. There were few lakes along its course, only rivers large and small flowing into or out of it. Much of the land it passed through was drought-stricken wilderness, a thousand miles of parched earth. Only its banks showed patches of green, lending the land a touch of life.
For the people of the Nine Provinces, the Dragon River's existence was a far more pressing concern.
Unlike the Heaven-Reaching River, this exceptionally winding river did not have a steady flow. Sometimes it flooded; sometimes it dried up to its bed. It caused trouble at least once or twice every ten years. Like a capricious tyrant, it kept everyone trembling with fear.
According to an old legend, the river was a Dragon pinned to the earth. Unwilling to remain trapped, it often thrashed in anger, and whenever it struggled, disaster struck the human world.
That was how the Dragon River got its name.
People in the Dragon River basin often envied those who lived along the Heaven-Reaching River. Its flow was steady. It flooded occasionally, but almost never ran dry, and even its floods were seldom severe enough to turn a thousand miles into a watery waste and plunge countless lives into misery.
But people could not choose where they were born.
They had been born beside the