Yan State.
It was one of the oldest states of All Xia, enfeoffed by the Sage King more than eight hundred years earlier. Its present capital, Ji City, had formerly been the capital of Ji State, another ancient state dating back more than eight hundred years.
The old scars mottling the city walls and the moss growing in their shadowed corners all bore witness to that vast history. A closer look revealed many small pits in the walls, marks left by blunt weapons and sharp blades. Through those ancient years, this city had sheltered the people of Yan State from the blades of the Rong and Hu.
Among the All Xia states, Yan had always been an outsider.
Almost none of the great events among the All Xia states had anything to do with Yan. Even within the Ji-Jiang Alliance, Yan was little more than an extra thrown in.
In more than eight hundred years, Yan's greatest glory had been striking north against the Rong and Hu and expanding its territory by a thousand li, yet even those thousand li had been given to it outright by Qi.
With its infertile land and sparse population, Yan was still in the stage of clearing out the Rong and Hu when the other states had already finished clearing out the barbarians around them and moved on to contending for supremacy over the realm.
Back then, to repel the Rong and Hu, Yan's nobles had chosen to kill their ruler when he insisted on going to war with Qi. Naturally, this had not been for the sake of so-called friendly diplomatic relations, but because the Hu people were the true threat festering at their heart.
After all these years, with the help of a gradually growing population and successive natural disasters.
Yan had