At first, the remaining loyalist states in the East had to bear the bulk of the fighting, as the government needed not only much time to mobilize its forces, but also at least two months to move them out of the Wei River valley and deploy them on the eastern plain. As result, the rebels remained largely unchallenged for almost a year. After the long preparations, however, the dukes of Zhou and Shao finally launched the second "eastern campaign" to put down the rebellion. Bronze inscriptions of the time suggest that King Cheng himself participated in the counter-insurgency campaign as commander, further disproving the later claim that he was a child at the time.
