On the morning after Emperor Xian reached the ashes of Luoyang, Cao Cao's envoy arrived before the temporary traveling-palace raised upon those ashes.

In the envoy's hand was a memorial (表文). Cao Cao had written: "That Your Majesty's carriage rests upon ashes is the great sorrow of all under heaven. Your servant has prepared a traveling-palace at Xuchang (許昌); I beg to move Your Majesty's carriage to Xuchang." The memorial reached the ears of Yang Feng (楊奉) and Han Xian (韓暹). Their faces hardened at once.

That evening, Yang Feng laid a low line before Han Xian. "Cao Cao means to move His Majesty's carriage to Xuchang. We cannot lose this seat's merit entirely to him. Of all the captains who carried this carriage eight hundred li through famine and rain, it is we who earned the right to settle where it rests. Tonight let us set our army before the carriage and break Cao Cao's envoy first." Han Xian nodded, yet without the speed of a man who believes his own argument.

That night, the armies of the two raised banners before the traveling-palace upon the ashes. Cao Cao's vanguard Xiahou Dun (夏侯惇) and Cao Hong (曹洪) had already arrived behind them. Xiahou Dun stepped forward and cried out loud. "Any who plants a spear before the carriage is His Majesty's enemy. Step back." In great rage, Yang Feng and Han Xian stood against him.

Xiahou Dun's twin spears met the great axe (鉞斧) of Yang Feng's lieutenant Xu Huang (徐晃). Before many exchanges, Xu Huang turned his horse and stepped back. Xiahou Dun did not pursue; he only halted his horse. The grain of Xu Huang's turning was unusual. Xiahou Dun watched that grain a long while.

Late that night, Xu Huang slipped quietly out of his own camp and crossed to Cao Cao's. He bowed before Cao Cao. "I am a man of Yangxian (楊襄) of Hedong (河東). My surname is Xu (徐), my name Huang (晃), my style Gongming (公明). Tonight, having read from outside the grain of Yang Feng's camp, this Gongming's step has crossed to this side. Receive me into your retinue."

Cao Cao was greatly pleased. The first step by which Xu Huang would become one of Cao Cao's Five Great Captains was set tonight upon the ashes. Later chroniclers would count that, from this night forward, a line of captains — Xu Huang, Zhang Liao still to come, Yu Jin, Yue Jin, Zhang He still to be gathered — would form the spine of Cao Cao's eastern campaigns for a decade. Tonight's quiet bow was the first vertebra.

The next morning, Yang Feng and Han Xian learned of Xu Huang's departure. Their bearing broke. Cao Cao stepped before Emperor Xian and knelt.

"Your Majesty. Upon the ashes of Luoyang, no palace yet stands; not a single meal is properly set upon a table. Your servant has prepared a traveling-palace at Xuchang; move Your Majesty's carriage to that place. There, grain enough for more than a year lies in the storehouses; the roofs of the palace stand whole."

Emperor Xian kept silent long, then slowly nodded. Within that single nod, a recognition was quietly buried: that an Emperor's carriage now moved beneath the roof of one man. The Empress beside him reached silently for his sleeve; her fingers, less ashamed than the Emperor's tongue, admitted what his tongue could not — that the freedom granted by one man's roof was also a freedom measured by that man's door. Neither of them spoke this truth aloud; yet both understood it from the fingers' grip alone.

A few days later, Emperor Xian's carriage left the ashes of Luoyang and began to move toward Xuchang. The wheel crossed the ashes one last time. Behind it, Cao Cao's light cavalry followed; Yang Feng and Han Xian tried to pursue late, yet were broken heavily by Cao Cao's ambush.

On the road from Luoyang to Xuchang, the people whom the imperial caravan passed had nothing to offer beyond a bowl of water dipped from the nearest well; yet they gave the water with both hands. The old form of respect survived even when its roof did not. This commentary marks that truth also: beneath the walls of a burnt capital, when nothing official stands, the gestures of common people are the first roof under which an Emperor remains, for some hours yet, an Emperor.

Within Cao Cao's own carriage, a day's ride behind the imperial line, Xun Yu was already rolling in his mind the first syllables of a longer sentence he would, the following night, offer low into his master's ear. The four characters of that sentence — "Phongcheonja iryeongjehoo" — waited, quietly, upon a brush-tip that had not yet touched paper.

The fifty-first morning of Book 2 opened quietly at the edge of the ashes. The three characters Hoedocheon (灰都遷, the relocation of a capital upon ashes) were planted as a seed: the breath in which an imperial carriage leaves ashes and crosses beneath a new palace's roof. The peak of Day 50's Osipyeom had, this morning, settled into the direction of the imperial carriage's wheel.

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