Only Duan Guihong knew that on his deathbed, Fu Jian had called him over, mentioned his impending death, and made him swear to bring the Autumn Night White back to the southwest and guard it carefully, ensuring not a single plant would flow into the central plains.
He listened in a daze as Fu Jian said: “The peace of the world, the century of prosperity, will be created and destroyed by your hands. Though you do not bear the Fu surname, you are a Fu family member at your core.”
“I have fought in all directions, spent half my life on horseback, with only one unfulfilled wish: to see peace in the human world. Now… I entrust this to you.”
The old general gave his final command. Duan Guihong kowtowed three times with tears, and after sending off Fu Jian and settling all matters, he followed the imperial army to the southwest.
From the sixth year of Yuantai, when the southwest was pacified, until now, he had been guarding for twenty years.
In those twenty years, Fu Ting’zhong was assassinated by Tatars, Fu Ting’xin died on the battlefield, and Fu Shen was sent to the northern frontier. Though he was in the southwest, he never forgot the withered grass and yellow sand of the north.
In the first few years after Fu Shen went to the northern frontier, Duan Guihong saw the war gradually subsiding and the north returning to stability. He thought that after these ten-plus years of turbulence, the “peace in the human world” was finally about to be realized.
But later, he realized he was mistaken.
The North Yan cavalry had been passed down through three generations of the Fu family, and the Yuantai Emperor could no longer sit still. The Fu family members were all short-lived, but the Yuantai Emperor was a long-lived monarch. He watched generation after generation of Fu family members take up the military seal and go to the battlefield, with the North Yan army growing stronger and the commanders becoming younger, while he grew older.
If this continued, ten or twenty years later, would this world still belong to their family?
When the Yuantai Emperor ordered Fu Ting’yi to inherit the title and made Fu Shen the Jingning Marquis, Duan Guihong had already sensed the emperor’s wariness and vigilance towards this new commander of the North Yan cavalry.
