Yuan Shu was dead, but the turmoil in Runan had not stopped.
When Cao Cao led his army into Runan, what greeted him was a vision of hell on earth.
"What happened in Runan?"
This was what Cao Cao and everyone else most wanted to know.
The scouts sent out in all directions brought back word, and Cao Cao and the others listened to the whole story in stunned silence.
A mutiny had broken out in Yuan Shu's army, while popular uprisings had erupted once again in Runan-and there was more than one.
These righteous armies were not made up solely of ordinary commoners.
Under a reign of terror, ordinary commoners naturally suffered.
But in truth, the powerful gentry suffered terribly as well. These people were the main source of elite troops and were also responsible for supplying warlords with grain and other provisions.
With a normal warlord, cooperation was still possible. With a tyrannical ruler, merely keeping their families safe counted as good fortune.
Clearly, the powerful gentry of Runan Commandery had not been fortunate enough.
Yuan Shu targeted every subject under his rule equally, regardless of how exalted their status was.
Naturally, his followers rebelled and his kin deserted him.
The Runan Yuan Clan faced utter destruction. They could only rely on their fortified cities to hold off their enemies, yet lives continued to slip away one after another.
The Yuan Clan's close branches numbered over a thousand people, and more than half had died-a calamity unmatched since the founding of Later Han.
It was not only a war of attack and defense between the Yuan Clan and the righteous armies. The righteous armies were fighting one another too, throwing all of Runan Commandery into a seething cauldron of chaos.
Faced with the tangled situation in Runan Commandery,