"What a man, Zhang Mazi!"
Shen Fa skimmed the latest dispatch from Luting County, ten lines at a glance. Fired with emotion, he shattered his command desk with a slap and roared his approval: "Now that is killing the rich to aid the poor!"
Hearing the commotion inside, the Embroidered Uniform Guard officers stationed outside the hall hurried in with their hands on their sabers.
Shen Fa looked up, saw their lavish uniforms embroidered with Yazi, and flew into a rage. "Get out!"
The officers immediately bowed and withdrew from the hall even faster than they had entered.
Shen Fa rose and paced briskly back and forth across the hall, his hands clasped behind his back. His heroic spirit still surged; he could not calm his heart.
He was the second legitimate son of the Shen clan, holders of the Marquis of Pingliang title, one of the twenty-four founding marquises.
In his youth, he too had ridden a white horse in light furs, wild and unrestrained, knocking at the emperor's gates by morning and sleeping in pleasure houses by night, throwing away a thousand gold pieces for a beauty's smile and raising havoc at the Ministry of Justice to relieve a hero's troubles!
Back then, who in the He-Luo region would not raise a thumb at the mention of Second Young Master Shen, the "Jade-Faced Fox," and declare him a "real man"?
Then, in the third year of Xiping, the Tartars took advantage of the turmoil at court and across the realm as the reigning emperor put his government in order. They brazenly sent a great army across the Great Wall to slaughter the border populace, then dispatched envoys to the capital who whipped the people of Luoyi in the streets for blocking their path, declaring that unless Great Wei