As the second half of the third year of Shengping began, Liu Cheng had only one feeling: time was passing too quickly, as though someone were pushing him along.
Too many things had been delayed at Mount Tai.
He had only just finished rewarding and replenishing his troops, reporting all the promotions and meritorious deeds, and wrangling with Jiankang. After finally getting the army into a normal period of rest and recuperation, the autumn harvest was already upon them.
It was during the autumn harvest that Xun Rui died, while Sima Yu, Prince of Kuaiji, formally "returned the reins of government" and became Minister over the Masses.
Whether it was because the core figures of the so-called "imperial faction" the former had tried to assemble were falling away one after another was unclear, but the latter's political influence enjoyed a highly effective continuation: shortly after relinquishing his title of General of the Guards, Yangzhou Governor Wang Shu formally became Director of the Secretariat.
And in stark contrast to that earlier spectacle of Nine Resignations and Nine Refusals, Wang Shu did not decline even once. He proudly accepted the appointment, which represented the highest authority to participate in government, or even to govern.
Then the autumn harvest ended, bringing them officially into the "post-harvest" season, and an expected memorial duly arrived in Jiankang.
Grand Marshal Huan Wen formally submitted an open memorial to the court in the style of his previous victory dispatches. Attached were extensive records and tables, carefully calculating the scale of the mobilization underway in the North: 560,000 newly mobilized troops, added to the seventy or eighty thousand elite soldiers the Xianbei people already possessed across their three divisions, for an enormous total of six or seven hundred thousand men.
The memorial also explicitly identified or discussed the