Welcome to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast. This is episode three. Before we pick up where we left off, I have a quick programming note for those of you who have not seen it yet on the website.

I have decided to scale back the length of the episodes.

Each of the first two episodes came in at nearly 40 minutes, and it felt long when I was writing them, recording them,

editing them, and listening to them.

When I'm talking from a script for a long time,

I have a tendency to fall back into reading rather than talking, and I want to avoid that,

so I'm going to try to keep future episodes to between 25 and 30 minutes.

I think that will make the episodes easier for me to produce and result in a better product for you.

It does mean that it will take a little longer to get through the whole novel, but hey,

when your project starts out being at least a three-year commitment, what's a few more months,

right?

So anyway, back to the story.

At the end of the last episode, we were knee-deep in palace

intrigue as a power struggle had broken out at the very top of the empire. Emperor Ling had just

died, he had two sons, and both of them were just kids at this point. The eunuchs were planning

to make one son,

Prince Liu Xia, the heir, but the regent marshal, He Jin, the brother of the empress, beat them

to the punch. He declared his sister's son, Prince Liu Bian, the new emperor.

He Jin was going to kill all the eunuchs because they were plotting to kill him.

But the eunuchs's silver tongue charmed the empress, and in a moment of,

What the heck were you thinking?

He Jin was persuaded by his sister to not exterminate the eunuchs, even though that would have

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