This episode tells how, after the failure of the amnesty mission, Emperor Huizong flies into a rage and appoints Privy Councillor Tong Guan as commander-in-chief, placing him in command of one hundred thousand troops drawn from eight prefectures to campaign against Liangshan. Governor Zhang Shuye offers well-intentioned advice, only to be sharply rebuked by Tong Guan. The heroes of Liangshan deploy the Nine Palaces and Eight Trigrams Formation. Qin Ming kills Chen Zhu, the Garrison Commander of Zhengzhou, and wins the first distinction of the campaign, shattering Tong Guan's confidence in a single battle. Later, Zhang Shun tricks Tong Guan into pursuing him deep into Liangshan, while the Garrison Commanders of the eight prefectures fall one after another in battle. Although Tong Guan suffers defeat, he is unwilling to admit failure and may well raise another army and return. Wu Yong therefore sends Dai Zong and Liu Tang to the Eastern Capital to learn the true state of affairs there.
The translation of this book series was assisted by various AI tools, but the translator has manually reviewed the content sentence by sentence, with particular care given to correcting potentially confusing expressions. The result is fundamentally different from content directly generated and edited by AI.