Decades earlier, Shi Le had personally orchestrated a classic pursuit in the Central Plains.
At the time, with the Central Plains devastated after the War of the Eight Princes, Sima Yue, Prince of Donghai, had used forty thousand armored soldiers to take fifty or sixty thousand people, including court princes, dukes, ministers, palace attendants, and maids, along with the national treasures, maps, and records, intending to return to his base in Xuzhou. He himself had died of illness on the way.
Shi Le had been in Xuchang then and immediately sent light cavalry in pursuit. After defeating several rearguard units, he employed the classic tactics of light-cavalry harassment and mounted archery to hunt them down, all but wiping out Great Jin's last remaining civil and military elite. The bodies of princes, dukes, ministers, palace attendants, maids, soldiers, and civilian laborers were piled together, numbering over a hundred thousand.
Wang Yan and the other ministers who surrendered were also killed.
That battle had essentially marked the demise of the Western Jin central government in history.
His confidence soaring, Shi Le had then conceived the ambition of swallowing the realm. After swiftly sweeping through the Central Plains, he had waited only a year before deciding to march south and continue destroying the remnants of Great Jin that had fled to the South of the Yangtze.
Then, at Gebi, here in Huaibei, he had encountered a plum-rain season lasting three months.
Those three months of rain had drenched more than half of Shi Le's crack Hebei troops to death, and washed away his ambition to ride his momentum south and swallow the realm.
After that rain, this hero of the age, who considered himself only a little inferior to Emperor Gaozu of Han, had followed Zhang Bin's advice and abandoned any intention of