China's Son of Heaven, Murong Jun, dreamed that Shi Hu bit his arm. When he woke, he ordered Shi Hu's grave dug up.
Yet, to everyone's surprise, the grave was already empty.
Not only that, the inside was a complete mess, plainly having been dug up any number of times already.
It made sense. Shi Hu had been dead for ten full years, and the realm had been in chaos for seven or eight. Nowhere had been more chaotic than Hebei, and the very heart of Hebei's indiscriminate slaughter had been Yecheng. The entire city had been emptied by war; even the living were gone. There was nothing strange about someone digging up a dead man.
But now Yecheng's new master wanted this dead man.
Well, that was simple enough.
Yecheng lacked everything except the court-and-street sycophants who had long since begun to form a tradition, favorites who had already adapted to Hu rulers. These court-and-street favorites had emerged from the trade in sensual pleasures fostered by Hebei's developed economy and dense population, already famous back in the Han. Combined with the extravagant ways of the Western Jin grandees, they had been thoroughly forged into shape. In the original course of history, they had continued participating in the court struggles of Hebei's regimes throughout the Northern and Southern Dynasties, eventually earning a historical name all their own.
Leaving all that aside and speaking only of the present, nobody even needed to say a word. The men, women, and those in between of the Former Zhao court, who had fled elsewhere during the earlier fighting and now returned to Yecheng's Three Terraces, arranged everything for the Son of Heaven.
The emperor had barely posted a reward of a hundred measures of gold before a former consort of Shi Hu's, whose name