The Righteous Army fighters of Eastern Sea Commandery were filled with boundless fury!
Their fury was directed at the powerful gentry and officials of the commandery and its counties, at Wang Mang in Chang'an City with his institutional reforms and new policies, and at the Empress Dowager, that legendary, peerlessly bewitching woman!
The sage had said: "He who bears a state's disgrace is called the master of its altars of state; he who bears a state's misfortunes is called the king of All Under Heaven."
With a keen weapon in hand, the urge to kill arose of its own accord!
Once they had put down their hoes, once they had cast aside their farming tools and taken up swords and sabers instead, everything they had suppressed could no longer be contained.
The anger they had accumulated for who knew how long surged like an erupting volcano, seeking to destroy everything in this world.
The more the rebellions in Eastern Sea Commandery were suppressed, the more they multiplied. These new policies were like toppling dominoes; the people of Eastern Sea Commandery were no longer willing merely to kill an official or two to vent their anger.
Righteous Army forces sprang up everywhere and even easily captured two county towns. Soon, someone realized that the Righteous Army was too disorganized, like a heap of loose sand.
So someone climbed to a high place and raised a rallying cry, proclaiming himself the Heavenly King of Eastern Sea. He mounted an altar in a county town, brandished his sword, gathered the heroes, and called out to the raggedly dressed commoners, "To have been born into this dark world is perhaps our misfortune.
"But with swords in our hands and the road beneath our feet, are we simply to die nameless out in the wilds?