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Download the app today. The chariot wheels clattered over the uneven ground, drowning out the whinnying of the horses and the thumping of hundreds of feet on the trampled millet. It was nearing harvest. The stocks were long, the crop almost right, but this bounty would never fill the bellies of the farmers whose fields these were. Their village was burning, the roofs the dead or taken. The lucky few that had run off into the surrounding hills, the rough terrain cut

through by steep river valleys, would be fools to return anytime soon.

The village was simply collateral damage, a byproduct of the vicious fight that had taken place in these convenient fields of millet.

The two armies had crashed into one another with a metallic crunch, bronze, ringing off bronze with bell-light clangs

as the long dagger axes swung and chopped and sliced.

Stapping spearheads skidded off helmets.

Bronze-tipped arrows whizzed through the air, burying themselves in flesh, or, more

often, the rich soil of China's eastern plain. That soil would soon be far richer, copiously watered by the blood and fertilized by the bodies of the slain.

The casualties of a rebellion against the all-powerful son of heaven, the Jove King.

These deaths were all part of heaven's will. The King had a mandate to rule divinely granted

legitimacy and this Lord's petty insurrection deserved to be crushed. That was the proper order of the world. The divinations had told the

king that this was what heaven desired, the fine patterns of cracks in the tortoise shell,

an obvious indication that a campaign in the east was not only viable but required.

And so the Joe King had dispatched one of his many younger brothers through the narrow passes and

gorges separating the Wei River Valley from the Great Plain to the East,

taking the eight armies of Chengcho to crush this rebellion.

That brother would receive lands in return for a victory like this, a little state of his own, and fine bronze sacrificial vessels

inscribed with a record of his appointment and his many successes on his brother's behalf.

That was the way of the Joe, following the will of heaven as it led them to victory after victory.

The shong had lost heaven's mandate through their incompetence and cruelty.

The Joe, through their virtue, had gained it.

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