He governed Dongyi City only to fulfill Si Gujian's final wishes.
He had thought that day would come very soon, but he ended up waiting three years.
When Fan Xian arrived in Dongyi City on Zhou Cheng's orders, Yun Zhilan agreed without hesitation.
For Si Gujian had told him that Dongyi City could cease to exist, but its people had to remain safe and well.
The mission to Dongyi City went far more smoothly than Fan Xian had imagined.
When Fan Xian left Dongyi City, he also brought Si Gujian's Si Gujian Technique back for Zhou Cheng.
Zhou Cheng was quite satisfied that Dongyi City knew which way the wind was blowing.
He had no particular conviction that he must unite the world, nor did he believe everything had to come under his rule.
He had taken Dongyi City purely because it stood between Qing and Northern Qi, getting in the way of deeper integration between the two countries.
He certainly did not want someone stopping him halfway to demand a toll when he took his women sightseeing along the border between the two countries.
Another year after Dongyi City submitted, in the tenth year of the Qingli era, Northern Qi followed Qing's example and introduced a parliamentary cabinet system.
Zhan Doudou faced far greater resistance to her reforms than Zhou Cheng had.
But Zhou Cheng had long since sent the dozen or so ninth-rank swordsmen of Dongyi City's Sword Hut to Zhan Doudou's side.
After killing one batch of opponents, then another, she spent a year implementing the parliamentary cabinet system throughout Northern Qi.
Only then did the people of Qing and Northern Qi discover, to their astonishment, that the hundreds of thousands of troops stationed along the Qing-Qi border had quietly withdrawn at some point.
They could actually