By the middle of the first lunar month, spring had officially begun.
Across the realm, the thaw began in the south and spread north. The Great River's ice floods would soon end, and after the fifteenth of the first lunar month, the year's most important work-spring plowing-could begin.
But that year's spring plowing was destined to be haphazard and frantic.
For the entire realm had entered a state of total war, with no sign of slowing down. Instead, there were signs of escalation and expansion.
If one had to characterize it, then according to the conversations among those famous clerks in Yecheng, in the preceding sixty years, only the Third Dongyi Campaign had surpassed that year in scale... Before that, one had to go back to Sima Hong and Gao Hun's successive great wars, and everyone knew that the scale of the Third Dongyi Campaign had hardly been normal.
Thus, a rumor soon spread through Yecheng. Many believed that the fighting that spring and summer would directly determine the shape of the next two hundred years.
If they succeeded, they would soon enter the mopping-up stage and unite the realm, quite possibly ushering in another age of good government like the Tang Emperor's. If they failed, they might not even be able to return to the path of Sima Hong and Gao Hun, but would instead have to wait another century or two before seeing a true hero.
And these two conjectures, born only of the present situation, actually matched perfectly with the widespread speculation about the age of chaos after the Three Expeditions-back then, some had felt that Great Wei was merely an accident, and the realm would slide back into the centuries of chaos that had preceded it. But many had also insisted that this age of turmoil