Dissolution
While restoring order in Luoyang, Sun Jian was alerted by his men that there is light faintly emitting from a well. He ordered to retrieve whatever was in the well, and they found a dead woman with the Imperial Seal in a silk bag around her neck. As advised by Cheng Pu, Sun kept the Seal for himself and warned his men not to reveal anything about the discovery.
Unfortunately for Sun Jian, one of his soldiers went and told Yuan Shao about it, and was heavily rewarded. During a meeting on the following day, Sun cited health problems as an excuse to return to Changsha, to which Yuan remarked sarcastically, "I know you're ill because of the Imperial Seal", causing Sun to be stunned. After rounds of accusations and denials, Yuan Shao and Sun Jian's men drew swords in preparation for a fight, but the conflict was defused by the rest of the coalition members. Sun then quickly fled from Luoyang with his men. In anger, Yuan Shao sent a letter to Liu Biao of Jing Province, asking Liu to intercept Sun on the way and take him into custody. This gave rise to the conflict between Sun Jian and Liu Biao, which eventually culminated in the death of Sun at the Battle of Xiangyang.
The next day, Cao Cao returned to the main camp from his defeat in Xingyang. He lamented at the lack of motivation within the coalition and left as well. Gongsun Zan told Liu Bei, "Yuan Shao is an incapable leader, and together there will be strife, we should leave", and so they also pulled their forces from the alliance and retreated north. Seeing everyone had dispersed, Yuan Shao dismantled the camps and led his army back to his base.
Read more about this topic: Campaign Against Dong Zhuo, In Fiction
Famous quotes containing the word dissolution:
“The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.”
—Eugenio Montale (1896–1981)
“...that absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent—the State, family life, secular art and science—was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)