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So industriously were these pursued that the three friends succeeded in taking their B.A. degree at the next examination, and, encouraged by this success, determined to venture on a struggle for a still higher distinction. Though at one in their affection for Jasmine, Tu and Wei were unlike in everything else, which probably accounted for the friendship which existed between them.
Wei ruled what at that time were the most important and richest regions of China, the plain of Shensi in the west and the great plain east of Loyang, the two most thickly populated areas of China. But the events at the end of the Han period had inflicted great economic injury on the country.
Nor was the colonel wrong, for almost immediately Wei was announced, who, after expressing the genuine pleasure he felt at seeing Jasmine again, began at once on the subject which filled his mind. "I am so glad," he said, "to have this opportunity of asking you to explain matters. At present I am completely nonplussed.
The tenure of power by Houchi was summarily cut short by the revolt of the Wei commander-in-chief, Erchu Jong, who got rid of his mistress by tying her up in a sack and throwing her into the Hoangho. He then collected two thousand of her chief advisers in a plain outside the capital, and there ordered his cavalry to cut them down.
Wei answered this plan very effectively by recourse to diplomacy and it began by making Wu believe that Wu had reason to fear an attack from its western neighbour Shu Han. A mission was also dispatched from Wei to negotiate with Japan.
"Will you go and talk to Tu about it?" said Jasmine, who felt that the subject was becoming too difficult for her, and whose confidence in Tu's wisdom was unbounded, "and he will explain it all to you." Even Tu, however, found it somewhat difficult to explain Jasmine's sphinx-like mysteries, and on certain points Wei showed a disposition to be anything but satisfied.
Then with an axe he unceremoniously detached their incomparable limbs from their sublime bodies and flung the parts into a fire that he had prepared. "It is better," declared Sun Wei, standing beside the pile, his hands buried within his sleeves "it is better to be struck down at once, rather than to wither away slowly like a half-uprooted cassia-tree."
Before the friends parted, Wei, whose own affairs were always his first consideration, took an opportunity of whispering to Jasmine, "Don't forget your honoured sister's promise, I beseech you. Whether we succeed or not, I shall ask for her in marriage on my return."
It may be, that out of my insufferable shortcomings of style and expression, this answer did not convey to his mind the logical sequence of the warning; yet it would have been more difficult to show him how everything arose from the faultlessly-balanced system of the heroic Wei Chung, or the exact parallel lying between the ill-clad outcast who demanded a portion of tobacco and the cheerfully unassuming stranger who had in his possession a larger accumulation of money than he could conveniently disperse.
The nineteen tribes within north China held more and more closely together as militarily organized nomads, but did not yet represent a military power and remained loyal to the Wei.