Liu Acheng had attended to Xie Shang so well that he had earned the right to breathe beside him.
Do not actually imagine that this General Who Pacifies the West was just as the rumors described, trusting someone to the death and taking their every word as gospel merely because he liked their looks or they had served him well... er, in a sense, that was indeed true, but there were prerequisites.
Take Yuan Hong, Yuan Ahu, for example.
There was a legendary story about this Secretary-Aide on the General Who Pacifies the West's staff. Supposedly, he had been so poor that he rented a boat at the ferry below Stone City to deliver goods and scrape together a living. One evening, while delivering goods to Niuzhu-Caishi Rock-he recited poetry beneath the moon.
And, as luck would have it, Xie Shang happened to be at Niuzhu and heard him. Finding the poem extraordinary, he "invited him to converse," then promoted him directly to Secretary-Aide outside the usual rules, entrusting him with military secrets to this day.
A classic tale, was it not? A story like that even had the potential to survive into the Ming and Qing dynasties and be turned into a play.
Yet everyone, Liu Acheng included, knew that Yuan Hong came from the Chen Commandery Yuan Clan, with a clearly documented pedigree. He was a genuine clansman of Xie Shang's wife, Yuan Nüzheng—the woman of Huan Wen's dreams—and Yuan Zhen, the Governor of Lujiang, an independent petty warlord who currently served as a buffer between Huan Wen and Xie Shang. His own grandfather had served as Attendant-in-Chief.
He was a proper relative of Xie Shang's by marriage, a scion of a premier émigré clan who had merely fallen on hard times financially because his father and grandfather