At the mountain summit.
The mountain had plenty of rock but little soil.
The surrounding scenery was hazy, as though veiled in gauze. Shadowy shapes drifted through the mist and clouds, now near, now far, seeming to approach only to slip away.
Zi Shou stepped onto the Sacrificial Altar. He had no idea how good Jizi's construction skills were, so for safety's sake, he had not brought the Royal Guards.
"I, the twenty-ninth ruler of Yin Shang, lead my civil and military officials in reverently addressing our ancestors. Bless the people of Yin Shang!"
What followed was a hurried yet orderly ceremony, a standard ancestral sacrifice, only on a grander scale. Wearing leather ceremonial caps, with tablets tucked into their robes and long sashes hanging down, the ministers assisted Zi Shou in paying his respects and performing the sacrifice.
Turning an ancestral sacrifice into a Fengshan Sacrifice was simple. People of this era did not even know what a Fengshan Sacrifice was, so naturally, whatever Zi Shou said went.
The feng in the Fengshan Sacrifice meant building an earthen altar atop Mount Tai to worship Heaven and repay its blessings. Zi Shou changed that: forget worshipping Heaven, they would worship their ancestors. Without the efforts of their forebears and ancient sages, could the Human Race have come this far?
He swapped out the beams and pillars beneath their noses, making it fit perfectly with an ancestral sacrifice.
At this point, the ministers had yet to notice anything amiss.
When the ceremony ended, Zi Shou and the ministers took bronze spades and began digging.
This was a ritual he had specifically instructed Jizi to add to the ancestral sacrifice. Ostensibly, it was to bury a jade tablet bearing a message for their ancestors.
Put plainly, they were whispering a few private