Chapter 581: Wildfire (5)
The Southern Emperor.
The one who looked downward from the highest direction. Called the Southern Emperor, for he always gazed southward.
The greatest martial figure in the North bore a sense of dignity.
It sickened him to see clans feeding on other clans to fill their bellies.
The Yozoku. Savage and grotesque tribes, labeled so by the Southerners. Yet the Northern martial world took pride in that slur—declaring it proof of how feared they were.
To the Southern Emperor, it was a culture that relentlessly eroded his dignity. Such things could not be tolerated by one born to rule.
—Chewing on a coarse boar hide would be better. There’s nothing one can’t digest with enough inner energy.
Once, his fellow clansmen called him “the boar hide hammered with iron.” In another time, he had been Aisin Gioro Nurhaci.
He longed for bountiful lands.
Though a famine was rusting the whole realm, the North had always been barren—unlike the Ming Empire, where the people of the Myeong clans had settled. Moreover, the very cause of the great famine lay in the Ming.
Always.
He could only gaze down upon the South.