A long, long, long... time ago—

Chinese history, having reached the end of the Eastern Han, passed through the turbulent Three Kingdoms, and the short-lived Western Jin, began quietly, then shockingly, to slip into an abyss of near destruction.

Foreign invasions, the Jin imperial family's migration south, and the blood from ethnic massacres filled the long river of history.

The founding emperor of Later Zhao, Shi Le (of the Jie tribe), openly decreed that Hu people who plundered Han scholars would not be punished; if the Hu needed anything, they could take whatever they wanted from ordinary Han people. One can imagine the plight of the Han at that time.

An envoy from the Cheng state of Shu, sent to Later Zhao, recorded the horrors along the way: from Chang'an to Luoyang and then to Yecheng, the trees were hung with Han people who had hanged themselves, the city walls were lined with Han heads, and the bones of the dead were arranged as grisly warnings to terrify the living. The corpses of tens of thousands of resisting soldiers were abandoned in the wild to feed the beasts...

Bloody massacres and brutal ethnic oppression reduced the Han population in the north to six or seven million, leaving a landscape of scorched earth, and for the first time, the Han people stood on the brink of extinction.

History could not bear to watch the Han people sink further, and suddenly dozed off, so...