In the twenty-second year of the reign of Lu Zhuang (672 B.C.), Jin Xiangong sent troops to attack the Rong people of Lidi, and under the impact of the Jin army, Lirong was quickly defeated, so he sued for peace with the Jin State, and dedicated the two daughters of the leader, Li Ji sisters, to Jin Xiangong. Because of Li Ji's beauty and beauty, she soon got the favor of Jin Xiangong, and gradually participated in the court politics, a few years later, Li Ji and her sister successively gave birth to Gongzi Xi Qi and Gongzi Zhuozi for Jin Xiangong, and Li Ji was also made a wife.

Previously, Qi Jiang, the wife of Jin Xiangong, the daughter of Qi Huangong, and Darong Huji and Xiaorongzi, who later married from Di Ren, gave birth to three sons, Shen Sheng, Chong'er, and Yiwu respectively, and Shen Sheng, as the eldest son, was made the crown prince early. But Qi Jiang died early, and Li Ji was deeply favored by Jin Xiangong, seeing that Shen Sheng did not have the protection of his biological mother, and he was not loved by Jin Xiangong, he wanted to persuade Jin Xiangong to abolish Shen Sheng and set up his son Xi Qi as the crown prince.

But Li Ji understands that it is not enough to get rid of Shen Sheng, if Gongzi Chong'er and Gongzi Yiwu, who are older than Xi Qi, get the position of crown prince, then she is just marrying someone for nothing. So she first bribed the favored ministers of the Duke of Xian, and asked them to create public opinion in front of the Duke of Xian, saying: Quwo is the location of the Temple of the Emperor of Jin, and the prince must be guarded, and Pucheng and the territory of Nan and Beiqu are very close to Rong Di's territory, and reliable people are needed to garrison them, so please send two sons to guard them separately. Jin Xiangong listened to their words, so he let Shen Sheng leave the national capital Jiangcheng and go to Quwo, and sent Gongzi Chong'er and Gongzi Yiwu to Pucheng and Qucheng respectively.

Li Ji found an excuse to take away the three sons, cut off the direct contact between Xiangong and them, and cut off the communication channel between their father and son, but she never came forward to hide her sinister intentions. Then she blew the "pillow wind" to Xiangong in the middle of the night: "I heard that Shen Sheng is very good at buying people's hearts, I'm afraid he will commit murder on you and seize the throne!" Xiangong frowned, shook his head, and said, "He loves the people so much, how can he not love his own father?" Li Ji saw that although Jin Xiangong did not like Gongzi Shensheng, but out of the love of father and son, he still trusted him very much, so he resorted to another strategy for this.

Li Ji also proposed to Xiangong to let Shen Sheng return to the capital to live for a few days, saying that he wanted to show Shen Sheng virtue and harmonize the relationship between the monarch and the minister. After Shen Sheng came to the palace and had a few meals with Li Ji, Li Ji told Xian Gong that Shen Sheng had molested her when he was drinking. Xiangong didn't believe it, so Li Ji arranged that she could go to the garden with the prince and let Xiangong observe on stage.

The next day, Li Ji asked Shen Sheng to play with her. Li Ji first smeared honey on her hair, so that the bees gathered around her hair. Li Ji said, "Can you please help me get rid of them?" Shen Sheng didn't know what to do, so he stood behind her rashly and brushed his sleeve around her head to chase away the bees. Jin Xiangong saw it, thinking that Shen Sheng was really teasing his favorite concubine, but he didn't expect Shen Sheng to care about the relationship between father and son like this, and the anger in his heart reached the extreme, and he wanted to kill the prince immediately. Li Ji knelt down and pleaded, "I called the prince back, but he was killed, and I killed him." And these things in the palace, outsiders don't know, so just bear with them. Li Ji designed to ignite the fuse of Xiangong's anger, but said good things for Shen Sheng, this is to clear his suspicion of being framed, and destroy the father-son relationship between Shen Sheng and Jin Xiangong, Li Ji is about to make a fatal blow.

One day, Li Ji sent someone to Quwo to tell Shen Sheng: "The monarch dreamed of your mother Qi Jiang, and you should sacrifice her as soon as possible." At this time, Shen Sheng didn't know that Li Ji had assassinated him several times, and thought that she was telling him how to please his father, so he hurriedly held a ceremony in Quwo, sacrificed Qi Jiang, and then sent the sacrificial meat back to the capital and presented it to Jin Xiangong. At that time, Jin Xiancheng was hunting in the suburbs, and the envoy sent the sacrificial meat to the palace of his wife Li Ji, who took this opportunity to poison the meat.

A few days later, when Jin Xiangong returned from hunting, Li Ji brought out the sacrificial meat and told Jin Xiangong that this was the sacrificial meat that Gongzi Shensheng sacrificed to Qi Jiang. Jin Xiangong was very happy, so he was about to eat it, but Li Ji suddenly remembered and stopped from the side: "This meat is from outside the palace, please test the poison first." Jin Xiangong sent someone to cut off a piece of meat to feed the dog, and found that the dog was foaming at the mouth, convulsing and dying, and found a eunuch to eat, and the eunuch died immediately. Jin Xiangong was shocked, and couldn't react to what happened for a while, Li Ji cried on the side: "This is the prince's wolf ambition!" ”

Jin Xiangong was furious, thinking that this was Shen Sheng's teacher Du Yuanqian who had taught his son badly, so he ordered someone to kill Du Yuanyuan. Someone advised Shen Sheng: "You are innocent, why don't you flee from the Jin Kingdom?" Shen Sheng said: "I can't run away, if I go, this crime will surely fall on the head of the king, and the princes will be ridiculed for preaching the fault of their father, and who will be willing to take in such a person?" Fleeing will aggravate my sins, and if the king wants me to die, I should not run away, I will bow my head here and wait for fate to arrange it, and I will never flee. ”

Truth be told, people who are too stubborn don't end well. And that's just for him.

Shen Sheng refused to leave the Jin Kingdom, and Jin Xiangong also hesitated, and could not bear to kill his son, Li Ji saw that the matter was at an impasse, but the night is long and dreamy, and there will be changes. So he went to see Shen Sheng in person, and accused him with tears in his eyes: "You have done such a cruel thing to your father, how can you treat the people with a loving heart?" Kill your own father to seek benefits, everyone will spit on you, do you still want to live a long life? ”

Shen Sheng listened to Li Ji's words, thinking that his father had already decided that he had poisoned and killed his father, and there was no hope of clearing his name, and he thought that in the future, everyone would despise him as a person who killed his father and the king, and there was no place in the world. Under the double blow of grief and despair, Shen Sheng never wanted to live in the world again, so he hanged himself in the temple. Before Shen Sheng died, he sent someone to find his maternal grandfather, the doctor, and said: "Shen Sheng is guilty of not listening to your words, so that he died today." Now Shen Sheng doesn't dare to be greedy for life and afraid of death, but the monarch is old and the country is in difficulty, if you can go out of the mountain to assist the monarch, Shen Sheng will have no regrets even if he dies. ”

Li Ji forced the crown prince Shen Sheng to death as she wished, so she pointed the finger at Gongzi Chong'er and Gongzi Yiwu, and she privately slandered Jin Xiangong Jin that Chong'er and Yiwu were involved in Shen Sheng's plot to poison his father. Shen Sheng's incident hit Jin Xiangong very hard, he no longer dared to believe any of his sons, so he sent Xian Chu to kill Chong'er, and Chong'er fled to Beidi; He also sent Jia Hua to kill Yiwu, and Yiwu went into exile in Liang. Jin Xiangong drove his sons away one by one, and established Xi Qi as the crown prince. Since then, the office of the Jin State has declined, and it is unable to suppress the power of the Qing Doctor, which has laid a hidden danger for the later Zhao, Wei, and Han three Qing Doctors to divide the Jin State.

After the death of Jin Xiangong, the doctors were not satisfied with the accession of Gongzi Xi Qi to the throne, and wanted to welcome Gongzi Chong'er back to China as the king, so they gathered the subordinates of the three princes left behind in the Jin State and killed Xi Qi and Zhuozi. Seeing the chaotic situation in the country, Chong'er didn't dare to go back rashly, so Gongzi Yiwu returned to China with the help of Qin State and ascended the throne for Jin Huigong. However, the temporary prosperity of the Jin State's Wu Gong and Xian Gong's exhaustive and dismal management disappeared, and the country fell into turmoil, and the revival and hegemony of the Jin State still had a long way to go.

Gongzi Chong'er was framed by Li Ji, and his uncle Hu Mao and Hu Yan and the doctors Zhao Yuan, Wei Li, Dian Jie, Xu Chen, Jie Zitui and other virtuous ministers protected him and escaped from the Jin Kingdom, and they first came to the country of Di, the country of Chong'er's mother clan. The king of Di was very welcoming to Chong'er and his party, and it happened that Di Guo defeated one of Chidi's Yaoru, so he gave the two daughters of the captive leader of Yaoru, Shu Kui and Ji Kui, to Chong'er. Chong'er married his sister Ji Kui, and gave his sister Uncle Kui to Zhao Yuan, and later Zhao Dun, who was in power in the Jin Kingdom, was her son, and Chong'er lived in Di for 12 years.

After Shen Sheng's death, Chong'er was the eldest son of Jin Xiangong, and he was known as a virtuous man and had a high reputation in the Jin Kingdom. After Jin Huigong ascended the throne, he was worried that his brother would return to China to compete with him for the throne, so he sent someone to assassinate Chong'er. The doctor Hu Yan persuaded Chong'er and said, "We chose to come to Di Country because it is close and easy to get help. But now that I've lived here for too long, it's easy to lose my morale, and it's time to leave. At the beginning, we didn't choose Qi and Chu because they were too far away, but now we have been preparing for 12 years, and we can travel far. Duke Qi Huan is old, and he wants to envelop the Jin Kingdom, now that Guan Zhong is dead, and there are many traitorous ministers around Duke Qi Huan, he will definitely seek a sage like Guan Zhong, we might as well go to the Qi Kingdom. After hearing this, everyone felt that Hu Yan's words were very reasonable, so they left Di and went to Qi.

On the way from Di to Jin, you need to pass through Weiguo, but Jin had a grudge with Weiguo before, and Chong'er and his party came from Di Guo, who had a grudge against Wei Guo, and Wei Wengong did not receive them according to etiquette at all. So they had to ask the peasants in the suburbs for food, and the peasants knew that they were from Di Guo and were unwilling to help them, so they picked up clods of soil and handed them to Chong'er.

Chong'er has been pampered since childhood, where has he been humiliated like this? To raise the whip is to whip the peasants. Fox Yan saw that his side was alone, and if he beat the patriots on the territory of the country, he would be out of control, so he hurriedly took Chong'er's hand and said: "The soil is the territory, it is the country, this is a good omen from God!" When Chong'er heard this, he turned his anger into joy, bowed to the peasant, and then took the clod of soil from his hand and got into the car and left. These are superficial articles after all. Because Chong'er also understood what Hu Yan meant to himself.

After arriving in the Qi country, the Duke of Qi Huan was really very polite to Chong'er and his party, in order to envelop Chong'er, the Duke of Qi Huan also married the clan woman Qi Jiang to Chong'er as his wife, and gave eighty horses to Chong'er. After a long period of exile and many years of living in the wild and backward Di country, Chong'er finally had his own wealth and family again in the prosperous capital of the big country, and also enjoyed the favor of the king, he was satisfied, so he wanted to live in the Qi country for a long time and no longer return to the Jin country.

The accompanying doctors thought that although the Qi Kingdom was good, it was not their homeland after all, and they should return to the Jin Kingdom in order to obtain true glory and wealth and bring glory to their families. So they gathered under the mulberry tree to discuss how to persuade Chong'er not to be greedy for pleasure and leave the Qi country as soon as possible. After everyone dispersed, Cai Sang Nu quietly left, quickly found Qi Jiang, and told her that Chong'er's ministers were plotting to get Chong'er to leave Qi and leave Qi Jiang.

Qi Jiang is a woman who understands righteousness, and she knows that the best development for Chong'er should be to return to the Jin Kingdom, but if Chong'er enjoys the wealth of the Qi State but is planning to leave the Qi Kingdom, she will definitely be punished. So Qi Jiang killed the mulberry picker, and then found Chong'er and said: "The big husband is ambitious, I know you are leaving, don't worry, I have killed the person who knows." Chong'er hurriedly said: "Where to start with this, I never thought of leaving the Qi country. Qi Jiang said: "You go, it's not a gentleman's thing to be happy, and people will laugh at it if you spread it." Qi Jiang tried to persuade him repeatedly, but Chong'er resolutely refused to leave.

So Qi Jiang found Hu Yan to discuss countermeasures together, drunk Chong'er, and then sent him out of the city overnight. After waking up, he found that he was not in the mansion of Qi Du, but in a galloping carriage, and he knew that everything he enjoyed in Qi had to be discarded, and he had to embark on a precarious life of exile again, and he was very angry. So he took a weapon and chased after Hu Yan to kill him, but Hu Yan and the others grabbed him and persuaded him with kind words, and then continued on the road.

Soon after, Chong'er and others came to Cao Guo, and Cao Gonggong heard that Chong'er's ribs looked different from ordinary people, and they were connected together, which was very rare, so he wanted to take a look. But doing so was inappropriate and a great insult to others, so Cao Gonggong secretly approached to see it while he was taking a bath. This kind of behavior is simply a violation of etiquette.

When Cao's ministers learned of this, they went home to discuss with his wife, who said, "In my opinion, the retinue of the princes of the Jin kingdom is all talents who are sufficient to serve as the prime minister of a country, and people like them will surely return to the Jin kingdom one day." Once they return to the Jin Kingdom, the Jin Kingdom will be able to prosper, and when the time comes, they will crusade against those who are rude to them, and the Cao State will bear the brunt of it. You better prepare early and leave a way out for yourself. So he prepared food and jade to give to Chong'er and showed him goodwill. Chong'er was very angry when he learned about Cao Gonggong's behavior, so he accepted the food, but sent back the jade, and left Cao Guo within a few days.

Chong'er and his entourage passed through the Song State and Zheng State successively, and then arrived in the Chu State, where King Chu Cheng received Chong'er and his party with a very high standard. During the banquet, King Chu Cheng asked Chong'er triumphantly: "If the prince can return to the Jin Kingdom, how will he repay the widow?" Chong'er said: "The children and jade silks, the king already has them; Feathers and leather are the specialties of the Chu State, and these things in the Jin State are all purchased from the Chu State for your leftovers, and I really don't know what to use to repay you. ”

King Chu Cheng said: "So how does the prince plan to repay the widow?" Chong'er said: "If I can return to the Jin Kingdom in the future thanks to you, then one day the Jin and Chu will fight in the Central Plains, and the Jin army will definitely retreat." If I still can't get your understanding at that time, then I can only meet with your army and have a good time. ”

Yin Ziyu, the commander of the Jin State, heard that Chong'er had been in exile for many years, and even dared to speak wildly on the land of Chu, thinking that if this person was not removed, it must be the future of Chu, so he asked King Chu Cheng to kill Chong'er. King Chu Cheng said: "The prince of Jin is generous, frugal, gentle and courteous, and his entourage is also dignified, strict and loyal. The revival of the Jin Kingdom is on him, this is the blessing of God, if it goes against the will of heaven, it will definitely cause trouble. ”

Chong'er lived in Chu for a few months, and suddenly an envoy from Qin came to invite him to Qin. Previously, Qin sent troops to escort Jin Huigong back to China and ascend the throne, but Jin Huigong did not cede the area south of the Yellow River to Qin according to the previous agreement. Later, the Qin State sent troops to crusade against the Jin State, captured the Jin Huigong, obtained the land in the Hedong area, and after peace talks, the Qin State released the Jin Huigong, and only asked the crown prince of the Jin Huigong to go to the Qin State as a hostage. Who knew that within a few years, the crown prince quietly fled back to the Jin State to succeed to the throne, for the Jin Huaigong, and after the Jin Huaigong ascended the throne, he immediately announced that he would cut off contact with the Qin State, and even Qin Mugong married his daughter Huai Ying and abandoned it.

Qin Mugong was very angry at the untrustworthy behavior of Jin Huigong's father and son, so he tried to support another pro-Qin prince among the Jin princes in exile to return to China and take the throne. I heard that Gongzi Chong'er has been in exile for more than ten years, but he is very popular and has a great influence in the Jin Kingdom, so he chose Chong'er. King Chu Cheng saw that Ziyu had to kill Chong'er, and he didn't want to kill him and didn't want to offend Ziyu, so when Qin Guo came to pick him up, he said to Chong'er: "Although the widow wants to send his son back to China, it is very inconvenient for the two countries to be too far apart, and he is really powerless. The two countries of Qin and Jin are adjacent to each other, and the king of Qin is also very virtuous, so it is better for the prince to go to the Qin State for help. In this way, Gongzi Chong'er bid farewell to King Chu Cheng and embarked on the road to the west.