When Sun Jian dies, Kuai Liang urges an attack on the east while it is weak. But Liu Biao says he cannot abandon his close friend Huang Zu, and exchanges Sun Jian’s body for Huang Zu. The eldest son Sun Ce buries his father at Qu’e, settles at Jiangdu and gathers men around him. In Chang’an, Dong Zhuo hears that Sun Jian is dead and says one great worry is gone. Told that the son is seventeen, he gives it no more thought.
After that Dong Zhuo grows even more arrogant, calls himself Shangfu, and uses the regalia of the Son of Heaven. Two hundred and fifty li from Chang’an he puts two hundred and fifty thousand people to work building the fortress of Mei. Inside it he stores twenty years of grain and eight hundred young women. At a banquet outside the city gate he had several hundred surrendered soldiers cruelly put to death while he went on eating and laughing as if nothing were happening. Another day he had the minister of works Zhang Wen dragged out of a gathering of officials and killed.
That night the Minister Wang Yun cannot sleep, and goes out into the back garden to weep at the sky. From the direction of the Peony Pavilion comes a long sigh, and creeping up he finds Diaochan, a sixteen-year-old singing girl who came into the house as a child to learn song and dance. When Wang Yun scolds her for harbouring a secret love, Diaochan drops to her knees in alarm. She sighed only because she saw his worry, she says, and if she can be of any use to him, she will not refuse even ten thousand deaths.