The Liu Clan of Pengcheng had flourished into many branches.
So far, according to what Liu Jili and Liu Rengong had worked out between them, there were fully six branches besides Liu Cheng's.
First was the Liu Bo-Liu Lang branch, descendants of Liu Kui. They had once represented the pinnacle of the Liu Clan of Pengcheng's development after the Southern Migration, but now they were clearly slipping down to the level of a military family trusted by the aristocratic clans. As for Liu Jili's prospects, those lay in the future and could not yet be counted.
There was also a branch in Jiankang descended from Liu Kui's cousin, Liu Ne of the Twenty-Four Friends of Golden Valley Garden. They still retained their standing as Second-Rank Great Clans, but they too had suffered from Liu Kui's influence back then. They had produced no one with real power in all these years, and their house teetered on the brink, seeming merely to linger on thanks to the precedent that Second-Rank Great Clans did not readily lose their status.
Back then, this had also been the first household of his clansmen that Liu Jili could no longer bear staying with.
At present, this household could not, and would not wish to, enter into any deeper dealings with the other branches... they simply would not have any contact at all.
Liu Acheng's private assessment was that this was a walking corpse, still holding itself upright when it was already dead. Unless another upheaval forced some of its sons to cross south or return north, after which those particular sons made something of themselves through their own efforts, they really could do nothing but wait to die.
Another branch was also very important: the one that remained at the Liu Clan of Pengcheng's ancestral home