After autumn arrived, before the summer heat had faded, the Eastern Capital began killing people.
It was actual killing, every day, without pause, a wholesale slaughter that sent blood flowing in rivers and heads rolling.
That spring, Yang Shen had rebelled, and the second expedition against Dongyi had ended in a crushing defeat, sending a thousand snowdrifts surging up at once and terror through ten thousand hearts. Yet in the end, thanks to Great Wei's powerful overall strength, the rebellion had been swiftly suppressed in just twenty-seven days; Dongyi had won a complete victory, yet could not advance a single step beyond Fallen Dragon Shoal. Instead, they could only send envoys to seek peace in humble terms, and had even been driven straight back by that now-deceased minister, Zhang Wenda.
Next had come the summer's upheavals at court, the secret life-and-death contests among the highest ranks, political unrest and disturbances to public order in the Eastern Capital, and the postwar devastation of the Central Plains.
But by autumn, as the court began killing on a grand scale-settling accounts in autumn, as the saying went-it more or less signaled that the situation had stabilized. By this point, setting aside such nebulous talk as the people's hearts and speaking only of concrete things, Great Wei had, in theory, digested those two colossal military calamities of spring, in the open and in the shadows, from top to bottom.
Perhaps only the ravaged Central Plains and Eastern Territories, along with the heaps of bleached bones at Fallen Dragon Shoal, could still count as objective remnants whose effects would endure.
And returning to the present, this early autumn came down to one word-kill.
Yang Shen's entire clan, Li Shu's entire clan apart from Li Shu himself, those with clear connections such as Han Shixiong, those