Early on the seventeenth, after receiving Han Bo's latest message, Liu Cheng immediately ceased to be angry. Instead, he gradually grew frightened, then shocked, and finally... angry all over again.
Slowly, very slowly-only in his thoughts, of course; in actual time, no more than a moment had passed-he realized what a rotten mess he was about to inherit!
That damned Xun Xian deserved to be married off in a ghost wedding even after his death!
He did the killing but left the burying to others! He saw to the dead but gave no thought to the living!
For the interests of the political faction behind him, possibly prompted by the successive deaths of the Xie Shang brothers and Wang Qia, he had launched two Northern Expeditions in the middle and at the end of last year. His defeat in the middle of last year had led him to bring Liu Cheng over to bolster his forces. Then he had encountered both Murong Jun going mad and Jia Jian, that one-in-a-hundred specimen among the Northern Migrants, and endured two winter rains whose destructive power rivaled Murong Ke's, leaving him worse off than if he had lost a battle. And now this master of the Northern Command, who had held it for nine years, was dead too.
Fine, die if you must, but couldn't you have put things in order first? Why had everything been piled onto the shoulders of an outsider like him?
The Xianbei people had moved their capital to Yecheng. A major defeat in the middle of the year had shaken the northern front. This Northern Expedition had originally been intended to stabilize that front and keep its Refugee Commanders and Wubao Lords in check, but his own death at Mount Tai had instead heightened the danger of everything