Zhao City was partially sealed off, with a three-year deadline decreed. This was both a summons to the clan's descendants and a notice for visiting students staying in Zhao City to leave.
The whole world was in uproar, and there was bewilderment too. Events under heaven truly moved too swiftly. In the decades since the Great Han's collapse, things had changed three times a day, leaving people unable to keep up.
Upon the Yellow River, in the season of greatest cold, a bitter sheet of ice stretched from north to south. Naturally, neither boats nor boatmen were to be seen. Luo Chu's party had come from the Southern Kingdom. Nothing could outweigh Zhao City's grand summons, and he had left his state behind to come. Upon reaching this place, he ordered the horses' hooves wrapped in cloth and the carriage wheels covered as well. Yet as the horses and carriages advanced, the ice that should have been solid as rock unexpectedly cracked. He stepped down and silently gazed at the cracked ice, then switched to riding a horse. With that change between warmth and cold, he had gone only a few steps before he collapsed upon the ice, feeling only a bone-piercing chill. Suddenly, a gale swept snow toward him, and those cracks seemed to have been an earlier illusion.
The people of All Xia pursued their own endeavors in youth, but faced with the despair of life and death, they placed their faith in the Mandate of Heaven. Whether commoners in plain clothes or princes, lords, generals, and ministers, it came down to one sentence: "My circumstances today are Heaven's mandate." Their words seemed resigned, but their hearts remained unreconciled.
Feeling the ice against his face, Luo Chu felt only that this was his allotted fate. He looked around