On the night of the twenty-seventh day of the first month of the fifteenth year of Yuanhe, the Tang Emperor Li Chun collapsed.

On the third day of the first month of the leap month of the fifteenth year of Yuanhe, the crown prince Li You succeeded to the throne.

Once a son of heaven and a courtier.

In the cold spring, Chang'an is facing a huge change and a huge personnel change.

The first unlucky person was Huangfu Lu.

As the first villain in the Yuanhe period, Huangfu Gong relied on his unique skills - brazen magic skills to stand alone in the rivers and lakes and smile proudly in Chang'an. With his supreme miraculous skills, Huangfu defeated Pei Du, who had worked hard, and Cui Qun, who was struggling to support the crisis, and became the prime minister smoothly, becoming the leader of the civil official group above 10,000 people under one person. At least, that's what the emperor himself thinks.

Fortunately, the man who stood tall, the emperor who was once wise and martial, suddenly became obsessed with taking medicine, taking aphrodisiacs, and of course, taking elixirs. Because of taking medicine, Li Chun, who was in his prime, healthy and healthy, finally had a problem and became a bedridden patient, who could no longer handle the government freely. The powerful Emperor took advantage of this opportunity to cultivate cronies and install his comrades.

If you are a human being, you have friends, whether you are a righteous gentleman admired by everyone, or a traitorous villain who is gnashed by everyone, whether you are a loyal and filial son who has been famous for thousands of years, or a rebellious minister and thief who has been stinking for thousands of years, you can't do without friends, and even the notorious Qin Hui has three good friends.

Huangfu Lu doesn't have many good friends, only two, one less than Qin Hui. However, strictly speaking, Qin Hui's friends cannot be counted as real friends, but only his wife and subordinates; Huangfu Lu's friends are real friends, not wives or subordinates.

What is surprising is that the first friend of the infamous Huangfu is a gentleman, a moral gentleman.

Xiao Li, whose ancestral home is Lanling, is a noble person, because he has a noble background and is very noble. Xiao Li's ancestors are the royal family, the royal family of Southern Qi and Southern Liang, although the time as a royal family is not long, but the Lanling Xiao family Qi Liang Fang also has an identity, a noble identity: the Shi family, a first-class scholar family that has been continuous for hundreds of years.

When the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties became the past, when the prosperity of the past was blown away by the wind and rain, when the 480 temples of the Southern Dynasties became a tower lost in the smoke and rain, when Wang Xie's Tang Qian Yan flew into the homes of ordinary people, how many Jiangdong old clans slipped like meteors, only the Lanling Xiao clan Qiliangfang still adhered to the noble clan, no matter the change of dynasties, no matter the changes of the world.

In the long history, there are not too many prime ministers surnamed Xiao, only eleven. However, in addition to the famous Xiao He, the other ten prime ministers of the Xiao family are from the same dynasty, that is, the Tang Dynasty, which is talked about by later generations. The ten prime ministers surnamed Xiao have almost run through the Tang Dynasty, and they can't help but admit that this is a legend, so much so that there is a saying that "the Li family is in the world, and the Xiao family is in the dynasty". Moreover, what is even more legendary is that among the ten prime ministers surnamed Xiao in the Tang Dynasty, eight are from the same family, and this great family is the Qiliangfang of the Xiao family in Lanling. Therefore, there is a beautiful talk of "Eight Leaves Passing Fang". And our Xiao Li is one of the "eight leaves", and the other two leaves are his great-grandfather and grandfather.

In the filthy Chang'an, Xiao Li is like a blooming white lotus, pure and noble. It's a pity that the pure and noble Xiao Li has two friends who are not very pure and noble, one of them is naturally Huangfu Lu, and the other is named Ling Hu Chu.

Ling Hu Chu's background is not noble, at least it cannot be compared with his good friend Xiao Li. Although he claimed to be a descendant of Linghu Defen, one of the eighteen scholars of the early Tang Dynasty, his authenticity is really doubtful, because Linghu Chu's grandfather and father have only served as county commanders, Gongcao and other minor officials, which are really not noble. However, there is one thing that Linghu Chu is very similar to Linghu Defen, and that is Wencai.

The star-studded Yuanhe era has made remarkable achievements: the prose of Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan, the poetry of Yuan Zhi and Bai Juyi, Liu Yuxi's "Bamboo Branch Words", and Wu Yuanheng's five-character poems,...... have all made brilliant achievements, by the way, and there is also Linghu Chu's pun style.

In fact, what Chang'an's literati and dignitaries are most fond of is not the articles of Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan, nor the poems of Bai Juyi and Liu Yuxi, but the poems of Yuan Zhi and Linghu Chu's prose. Therefore, in the three-person group of Huangfu Lu, Xiao Li and Ling Hu Chu, Xiao Li is the most noble, the most treacherous is Huang Fu Li, and the most famous is Ling Hu Chu, and Ling Hu Chu is brilliant.

A moral gentleman, a literary giant, a traitorous villain, three friends who have nothing in common form a wonderful combination, forming the biggest friends in the Yuanhe period.

But do they really have nothing in common? If they really don't have anything in common, how can they come together. Therefore, they still have something in common, there is only one, they are all Jinshi in the seventh year of Zhenyuan.

Back then, in the face of Li Chun's worries about forming a party in the same year, Li Jiang said conclusively that the same year was just "people from all over the world accidentally took the first place at the same time, where is there any personal relationship"; Now, in the same year, three people who had no origin and were not similar were tightly tied together!

With the formation of the political alliance of Huangfu Lu, Xiao Li and Linghu Chu, following the division of feudal towns and the dictatorship of eunuchs, the third cancer of the Tang Empire officially surfaced. From then on, the Tang Dynasty will become a stage for the performance of feudal towns, eunuchs and friends. As for the titular master of the Tang Empire, the emperor, he basically withdrew from the foreground.