Murong Ke tossed and turned that night and could not sleep well.
It was not because of the heavy snow. Heavy snow was a good thing: auspicious snow promised a bountiful year, after all, and it could cover the corpses and prevent disease. Mainly, he kept turning things over in his mind all night, unable to forget what the envoy named Liu Cheng, courtesy name Liu Yulong, had said at the banquet.
Deep down, he resisted that claim about ruling Han with Hu, about how the Murong Clan was bound to follow in Later Zhao's overturned tracks, yet he truly could find no obvious flaw in the theory. Naturally, he felt somewhat apprehensive.
That alone would have been manageable. Murong Ke understood that matters of this sort, if one really wanted to judge them, would take years, even a decade or more, to reach a verdict.
The other thing that kept him thinking all night was the bargain the man had proposed at the end.
The more he thought about this bargain, the more it seemed truly... truly feasible! That, in turn, forced him to weigh it over and over, worrying about any obvious traps or flaws within it.
As the man had said, these people opposed his elder brother's becoming emperor, yet this was precisely when the Murong Clan needed to win people's allegiance on a grand scale. It would hardly do to turn their weapons on these native Hebei scholar-officials. More importantly, these people had set a very bad example, making their fathers, brothers, sons, and younger kinsmen, along with their friends, feel too embarrassed to enter the Murong Clan's service.
There was also something the man had not mentioned, but which Murong Ke knew perfectly well: rebellions were breaking out everywhere in Hebei, with a Son of