The fourteenth day of the tenth month, the yiwei day, was a sleepless night. In the all-out pursuit and suppression of the rebellion led by the sorcerer Lu Song of Pengcheng, Chen Caozhi, Ran Sheng, Mao Anzhi, Huan Mi, Yin Kang, and the others had killed 193 of the 413 Way of the Celestial Masters followers who had broken into Taicheng and captured every last one of the rest. Casualties within the palace were also considerable: eighty-seven men of the Central Army and Palace Guards had died, along with seventy-six palace eunuchs, palace maids, minor clerks, and menial servants. Most of these palace servants and guards had been caught unprepared and killed when Lu Song first led his followers into Taicheng. Once Chen Caozhi, Mao Anzhi, and the others arrived, the rebels had essentially become fish on the chopping block-a motley rabble unable to withstand a single blow-
The attack Xu Long and Wang Guo led against Chongde Palace had been the most perilous. Had General of the Left Guard Yin Kang arrived even a step later, Empress Dowager Chu would very likely have fallen into the rebels' hands. Born into an eminent family of the Southern Crossing, Empress Dowager Chu had entered the palace at sixteen. Although she had lived through political struggles, she had never experienced a rebellion that reached the very gates of her palace, and the fright had nearly made her ill-
A little under an hour later, toward the end of the Hai hour, Emperor Sima Yu came to Chongde Palace to inquire after Empress Dowager Chu, accompanied by Xi Chao, Chen Caozhi, Huan Mi, and Gao Song. The ruined palace gates and the corpses that had yet to be fully cleared away made a truly shocking sight-
After asking and learning that all the