Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion is advised.

On the day of Wuzatian's coronation, the day the woman who had ruled by proxy for decades

behind her husband and then her son would finally take the throne in her own right,

an earthquake hit China.

It roared through the province, leveling homes and raising the already jagged edges of

the mountain range north of the Yangji River.

The earthquakes meaning seemed obvious to any brave enough to allow the thought to enter

their head.

A woman becoming the emperor, upset the natural order of things.

The earth itself was rejecting Wuzatian, her manipulations, her power hungry ascent.

But Wu had not become the emperor of China by accepting things as they were.

The earthquake was not a bad omen, she remarked to the noble men who surrounded her that

afternoon, but a blessing.

Those jagged mountain ranges that had been thrust into the sky with the shaking of

the earth were a symbol of the Buddhist mountain of paradise.

As she was becoming China's ruler, Sumeru was coming to earth.

But that night when she went to bed, Wuzatian didn't think of mountains or paradise.

She was in bed in her dreams.

She was visited once again by the ghosts of a concubine named Zhao, and a former Empress

named Lady Wang.

The two of them never said anything.

...