At the beginning of the sixth year of Yonghe in Great Jin, the first year of Qinglong in Great Wei, blood truly ran like rivers inside and outside Yecheng, the north's military, political, and economic center for many years. Brains and entrails lay smeared across the ground.
As with countless massacres before and after it, once the blades were drawn, the killing did not relieve the fury in people's hearts. Instead, it brought their bloodlust to a boil, beyond restraint, until everything spiraled completely out of control... First came the killing within the city, where tens of thousands of men and women, old and young, were slaughtered in a single day.
Then Ran Min personally led organized units of armored soldiers out of the city to sweep the countryside, pursuing and killing the Hu people leaving in groups.
Finally came the uncontrolled slaughter of neighbors by neighbors, villages by villages, across the countryside and city districts.
No one knew how many Hu people had been killed, or how many innocent people had been swept into the chaos. What was certain, however, was that the Jie Hu group, which had ruled northern China for decades, had been utterly destroyed in its former center of power. For the moment, only one large contingent remained in Xiangguo.
Later historians put the death toll at over two hundred thousand, a figure that happened to match the wave of Han refugees who had tried to flee Hebei and seek refuge with Chu Pou before the new year, only to be caught up in slaughter along the Yellow River. Whether that was the will of Heaven or the handiwork of historians was impossible to say.
At the same time, this massacre formally announced to the world that the last vestige of order in the north had