At his wife's request, Chunyu takes an official post at Nanke (a prosperous and fertile southern tributary state) where he serves as governor, with Tian Zihua as finance minister and Zhou as chief councillor.
One day, the neighboring kingdom of "Sandalvine" invades, and Chunyu is commanded to raise an army and fight them, which he does, putting Zhou in charge of 30,000 men.
Zhou flees back to Nanke under cover of darkness, where Chunyu arrests him, but the king pardons both men for the defeat.
Meanwhile, the king is informed of a mysterious portent that the kingdom will be destroyed by an event caused by a foreigner close to the royal family.
Chunyu forbids his friends to damage the nests and covers them again with the vines, but that night a severe storm destroys Ashendon, fulfilling the prophecy of destruction.
Chunyu then remembers his friends Zhou and Tian Zihua, and sends a servant for news, to find that they are both recently dead.
Yu[5] says that this story is similar to others such as "The World Inside a Pillow" ("Zhenzhongji") and "Cherry and the Blue Robe Maiden" ("Yingtao qingyi") in that it uses the concept of a dream as a cautionary device.
Indeed, this story has led to the Chinese idiom "Nankeyimeng" (南柯一夢) to describe such an illusory dream or fantasy of grandeur, despite the emptiness of materialistic life.
[1] Many works have utilized the concept of a lifetime being lived in the space of a single dream, including the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Inner Light", and Adrian Lyne's 1990 movie Jacob's Ladder.