When Ma Zaiyuan heard that the mares he had sold on credit to the Donkey-Riding Lady had been used in her "beautiful mare stratagem" to wipe out the entire Chengde cavalry in one stroke, he fell to the ground in shock and sat there, unable to recover for a long while. He knew he could no longer stay in Chengde. Lady Yu happened to approach him with an offer of allegiance, and he immediately packed his valuables and brought his entire clan over to her side.
Ma Zaiyuan was a powerful local magnate. With him taking the lead, the Ma Family was followed by a steady stream of great clans, displaced people, deserters, and mountain bandits. Together with surrendered officers and prisoners willing to pledge allegiance, they flowed in like a hundred rivers pouring into the sea, rapidly swelling Baozhu's forces to more than ten thousand.
These people held all manner of strange and wondrous notions about Li Baozhu, the leader they had come to serve.
Some said she was the peerless master known throughout the Rivers and Lakes as the "Donkey-Riding Lady," whose martial arts were unfathomable; others insisted she was Princess Wanshou returned from the dead, carrying the blood of the Imperial House. Some whispered mysteriously that she possessed a divine weapon capable of overturning the world; others declared with absolute conviction that Han Zhu, the commander who had annihilated the Chengde cavalry, was one of her male lovers. Still others claimed she had displayed her divine might in Zhaoyi and driven out the plague, because everyone from there said, "Baozhu banishes pestilence"-Baozhu sounding just like the word for firecrackers...
Whatever the claim, Baozhu neither responded nor troubled herself to explain. In everyone's hearts, there was only one indisputable point of agreement: she was the heart of the