Emperor Wu of Zhou was far away in October of the seventeenth year.

The Zhou Wutie Brigade collected the remnants of the seven legions, totaling 120,000 wounded soldiers, and slowly retreated south with the bones of the generals who died in battle. This expeditionary force once carried the highest dream of "great harmony in the world", held high the banner of Zhou Wu, and crossed thousands of miles of grasslands to conquer the north, but more than half of the people could never return to their hometowns, and even their bones could only remain forever in the depths of the northern grass sea. Seventy years later, in the Great Weekend Year, herders often picked up withered bones and rusted iron knives in the grass on the banks of the Iron Wire River. The herdsmen of the True Face tribe were nomadic in the vicinity of the area, collecting scraps of iron to use to forge weapons and other small pieces of iron to sell to other tribes. After losing the tribute from the Eastern Continent, the barbarians could only exchange the refined steel they needed through the fur trade with a huge price difference, and in the following decades, the price of refined iron products gradually increased in the northern continent Hanzhou. The small tribe of Zhenyan became a little rich because of this, until when Longge Zhenhuang Kusar Beruha was the lord, he was exterminated by the big tribes led by the Shuofeng Tribe. The big tribe chose the True Face Department as a victim, largely because of the wealth of the True Face Department.

It is late autumn, and the Xuesong River, which could have been used as a waterway, has entered a dry period, and if the cold snap in the north hits, it may freeze. Most of the ships on which Zhou Wutie's brigade was aboard were not warships with solid wooden hulls, but merchant ships that were requisitioned from place to place, for whom even thin ice was dangerous. So the fleet carried the spoils and badly wounded soldiers down the river at the highest speed, including the dragon-blooded horses of the Northern Continent, the richness of the furs, and the medicinal herbs of the Far North, which were the most precious in the Eastern Continent. The largest spoils of war, the large herds of cattle and sheep, were incorporated into the retreating army and traveled south along the banks of the Xuesong River, which greatly slowed the retreat.

Zhou Qing didn't want to break away from the barbarian-controlled area immediately, but he chose to retreat slowly, with more careful consideration. He needs time to look at the current situation in the country and think about how to deal with the next waves. Zhou Qing is eight years old at Chinese New Year's Eve, tempered in the waves, and is no longer a young man who insists on going his own way. After several times of secret wrestling with the ancestral party, he vaguely touched the lifeblood of the power system in the Eastern Continent. But he hasn't been able to master this massive system yet. He knew that the politics of the Zhou Dynasty were still "family politics", the ancestral party still maintained a huge influence in the government and the opposition, and the Gongqing family shrank its minions and curled up after several defeats, watching Zhou Qing's every move. If the result of the Second Northern Expedition was a great victory, then no one could question Zhou Qing's power, and the subjects of the Eastern Continent would be intoxicated with the great honor of the triumph of the Northern Expedition and the long-term vision of the imperial unification of Kyushu, and his throne would be more secure. And now, the so-called triumph is only a defeat for both sides, a large number of booty is far from enough to make up for the loss of national strength caused by the war, the princes' treasury has been empty, Zhou Qing first has to face the problem: how to repay the huge war loans of the Wanzhou merchants? Zhou Qing's finances are also stretched.

If it could not be repaid, then according to the conditions written in the contract, the emperor as guarantor and the princes as borrowers had to pay for the lost war with future taxes. In this way, both the royal family and the princes had to tighten their belts to get by. For Zhou Qing himself, a hard life was nothing—he was not a king who was greedy for pleasure, otherwise he would not have fallen into such a step—but for the princes in Tianyuan City, for those princes who were forcibly tied to Zhou Wu's chariot, they could not bear to spend decades of hard life to pay off their debts for an emperor they didn't like. In order to smooth the road to the north, Zhou Qing once made a great promise to win over those ministers who did not advocate war. Although he did not like these courtiers, his sword was not directed at them, and he had no way to uproot their power, so he could only promise them the brilliant results of his imagination. According to the history books, the Zhou Qing promised to give every minister who supported the Northern Expedition a fief of Hanzhou, and the ministers who obtained the fief could cultivate their own land, transform the grassland into fertile land, attract landless wanderers from the Eastern Continent to settle, and finally master the taxation and have their own armed forces like the princes. Although Hanzhou was bitterly cold, the hereditary land was still extremely attractive to some ministers, which won Zhou Qing some supporters and neutrals. But these promises cannot be fulfilled now, and both former supporters and centrists could become his enemies.

The imperial dynasty failed, and the dragon-like Great Zhou no longer had the strength or will to conquer its most formidable opponents in the north, hundreds of thousands of young men died in the north, and the emperor brought back only a beautiful barbarian princess, some horses, some furs, and some cattle and sheep. No matter how many triumphant declarations are disseminated to the outside world, such a decline cannot be concealed from the shrewd ministers. These people have been in the power field for many years, and they know very well what real victory is. When Zhou Qing pointed his sword to the north, his only victory could only be to completely conquer the herdsmen on the steppe, assimilate the barbarians, or kill them all and take their land.

Zhou Qing's dream of "the great harmony of the world" is stupid and ridiculous in the eyes of the ministers, and the courtiers who are accustomed to seeing the sinister hearts know that the so-called victory is not a win-win situation for both parties, and it can only be life and death. Zhou Qing also had to admit his defeat. He was worried. Once he returns to the imperial capital, he will have to face the ridicule of the ancestral party. His failure proved that he was inferior to his father, he was a martial and greedy emperor, and such an emperor was naïve and even stupid in the eyes of his courtiers. What hit him even harder should be the disillusionment of his ideals and the departure of his friends, Ye Zhengxun, Li Lingxin, and Ao Tingshen...... These men who had built the dream of "the world is the same" with him had left their souls in a foreign land, and Zhou Qing, who had become accustomed to galloping on the field with his iron cart and shouting loudly, must face death at this time. War is brutal and does not lead only to glory. His team was silent and desolate, and in order to ensure safety during the retreat, Su Jin and Ye Wang were both arranged in the rear army, leading the Wind Tiger Iron Cavalry to guard against the herdsmen who might be attacking. The Great Monarch of the Northern Continent, Chuyun Alam Khan Shuofeng, had warned them that a large number of barbarian families had lost their fathers, brothers, or children in the war, and that this deep blood feud could not be concealed by a paper covenant, and that the Shuofeng tribe, as the leader, could order his army not to pursue for revenge, but could not restrain the small herdsmen tribes on the steppe. Zhou Qing's Chinese army was left with him, and in the middle of the night the soldiers sang the elegy of their hometown to pay tribute to their dead comrades, and the cold of the barbarian wilderness invaded Zhou Qing's heart, and he finally fell seriously ill, unable to ride a horse, and had a high fever. The result of the imperial doctor's diagnosis was dysentery caused by severe soil and water adaptation, which then caused the body to be "scorched on the outside and weak on the inside, and it was difficult to retreat from the cold", but it was more likely that the heart disease overwhelmed the emperor who had been rampant.

The unliterate emperor arrived at the north shore of the Tiantuo Strait a month and a half later, he looked back at the sea and looked back at the north, facing the withered yellow grassland in the autumn wind, as if looking at the northern capital, the perverse capital that he had dreamed of all his life but had never met, and wrote a poem: "I am looking north today, and I have been on the battlefield for twenty years; The wind is bleak and the soul is flying. ”

Zhou Qing's worries were not wrong, while his army was slowly retreating, the ancestral hall party that had been dormant for a long time had quietly become active. In the imperial capital, the movement between the clans suddenly became frequent, and the invisible web of power was quietly spread again. This time the net needed to catch a prey that they had repeatedly missed, and it was also an extremely dangerous prey - Emperor Zhou Qing. The emperor can no longer be allowed to do whatever he wants, and he cannot be allowed to continue to waste the empire's national strength in an ethereal dream, and the empire must immediately return to the peaceful rule of the world, and return to the track that Emperor Ren has planned for the empire! At this time, the powerful people in the whole Eastern Continent were concerned about the emperor's itinerary, where would the emperor land? When did the Emperor return to Tian Yuan? Will the emperor dismiss the army of 120,000 surviving princes? How did the emperor explain the results of this northern expedition to his countrymen? And the commoners are also concerned about the emperor's itinerary, they don't know if their relatives are still alive, they are eager to know the news of the recruitment, and the huge list of dead has not yet been fully sorted out. The first to return to the Eastern Continent were troop carriers, among which, in addition to the booty, there was also an extremely important figure - Baili Yu.

The emperor has fallen, and someone in the imperial party must step forward to suppress the current situation, so Baili Yu has to step out of the background again. He is very aware of the division of labor between him and the emperor now, the emperor is slowly retreating, and he needs to divide the relationship between friend and foe in the power field of the Eastern Continent as quickly as possible, discern the situation, and open up a space for the emperor's return. Their homeland may have become a dead place for wolves! In his decades of political career, Baili Yu has turned the tide several times with his personal talent and intelligence, and single-handedly fought a bloody path in the political territory of the ancestral hall. He was a gambler of power, believing in his luck, and this time he still bet his chips on his personal ability, but this time, he made a mistake that made him regret the rest of his life. He had miscalculated his opponent, and he had always thought that what he was dealing with was a force that the Ancestral Party had put together improvisely. He forgot one person - Beiwu Jun Zhou Chun!

Zhou Chun did not die, and the Zhou family elder, who had lost in the struggle between the Imperial Party and the Ancestral Hall, was supposed to have withdrawn from the political arena. After the Qingwang Zhou Lizhi died violently in Wanzhou, Zhou Chun wrote a "resignation", and Zhou Qing approved the favor without showing any willingness to retain, so Zhou Chun and his successor calmly handed over the power in their hands and officially left the royal ministers. This incident fully illustrates the victory of the emperor and the fiasco of the ancestral party. Zhou Qing did not immediately relax his guard against Zhou Chun, needless to say the intelligence officers secretly sent out to monitor his daily life, Zhou Qing also wrote to Zhou Chun seven times in the year after his resignation to ask him about his health. This former political opponent cared so much about Zhou Chun's health, and Zhou Chun didn't understand it from the good side, he understood Zhou Qing's letter so well, and he was very straightforward - "Aren't you dead yet?" Zhou Chun replied to as many as nine letters, in addition to thanking the emperor for his care, that is, telling about his increasingly heavy illness. Zhou Chun's disease is very common among the elderly, that is, stroke. In the last letter written to the emperor by Zhou Chun's second son, Zhou Yule, according to Zhou Chun's dictation, Zhou Chun was no longer able to get out of bed and walk, and even spoke indistinctly, and half of his body was nearly paralyzed. Zhou Qing and Bai Liyu had learned the hot hand of this mastermind behind the scenes, Zhou Chun, and naturally they didn't want to believe it easily, so Zhou Qing sent different imperial doctors to the mansion four times to treat Zhou Chun. The imperial doctors all came to the same conclusion, Zhou Chun's stroke was already very serious and was spreading to the whole body, even if he could last another year or two, he would just be a wooden man paralyzed on the bed drooling and waiting to die, and there was no medicine to cure it. Zhou Qing and Baili Yu, who confirmed the news, breathed a sigh of relief, and Zhou Qingjia gave the old minister precious medicinal materials, plaques, and famous calligraphy and paintings, and told him to recuperate with peace of mind. The gift of medicinal herbs is easy to understand, but the plaques and famous calligraphy and paintings are not intended to be used to let him lie down and observe after Zhou Chun is completely paralyzed to maintain a little joy in life.

But what none of them expected was that Zhou Chun really didn't die, and he miraculously recovered. Some records in the wild history are very legendary, saying that according to the memories of the servants in Zhou Chun's mansion, about the harsh winter of the seventh year of Zhenyuan, Zhou Chun suddenly fell into a coma with a high fever and did not wake up for a day and night, and the doctor judged that because the stove was burned in the warm pavilion in winter, the ventilation was poor, and Zhou Chun had not been active for a long time, and the hot and dry air eroded his body. This kind of uncirculated hot air is called "hot poison" by doctors, Zhou Chun's symptoms are "hot poison into the bones", and his whole body functions are declining, but because it is heat poison, tonic medicine may be counterproductive, and the doctor is helpless, suggesting that Zhou Chun's family can start preparing for the future. Zhou Chun's wife died early, leaving only a group of pampered children, tossing and arranging the funeral of the leader of the ancestral hall. At this time, many important members of the court and the central government have begun to alienate the former leader of the ancestral party, and the political power of Zhou Chun's group is rapidly declining, and this once prestigious family has declined to the point that only a rich and noble shell and a bunch of useless descendants remain. Zhou Chun's most beloved second son, Zhou Yule, was the minister of the imperial capital stationed in Chu at that time, and when he returned home urgently, Zhou Chun only had a faint breath like a candle. Zhou Yule was sad in his heart, and his brothers and sisters were just rushing to welcome guests, buy coffins, and discuss the division of the family property, as if Zhou Chun was dead, and Zhou Yule was furious and kicked his brothers and sisters out of the room to prevent them from getting close to his critically ill father.