order, Wang Chao and his brothers continued to take their mother Lady Dong with them. Wang Xu rebuked them and threatened to put Lady Dong to death. They begged for Lady Dong's life, offering to die in her stead. Other officers also spoke on their behalf, and Wang Xu relented. Meanwhile, by this point, Wang Xu had also become extremely paranoid, as he had been warned by a sorcerer that there was qi belonging to a king in his army, so he began to put to death anyone whom he considered to have talents surpassing his own—going as far as putting Liu Xingquan to death. The fact that Wang was willing to put someone as close to him as Liu to death terrified the other officers. When the army reached Na'an (南安, in modern Quanzhou, Fujian), Wang Chao persuaded Wang Xu's forward commander, who feared that he would be Wang Xu's next target, into turning against Wang Xu. The forward commander and Wang Chao thus laid an ambush for Wang Xu and, when he was caught off-guard, arrested him. Wang Chao initially wanted to support the forward commander to be the new leader, but the forward commander pointed out that it was Wang Chao's idea that allowed them to survive Wang Xu's cruelty, and so the army agreed to have Wang Chao become their leader. Wang Chao subsequently took over Quan Prefecture (泉州, in modern Quanzhou, Fujian) and obtained a commission from Chen Yan the governor (觀察使, Guanchashi) of Fujian Circuit (福建, headquartered in modern Fuzhou, Fujian) as the prefect of Quan Prefecture. Service under Wang Chao In 891, Chen Yan grew deathly ill. Chen sent an order to Wang Chao, summoning him to the circuit capital Fu Prefecture (), intending to entrust the matters of the circuit to him. Before he could depart, however, Chen died, and Chen's brother-in-law Fan Hui () got the soldiers at Fu Prefecture to support him as acting governor to resist Wang. Fan, however, soon lost the support of the soldiers, and Wang Chao sent his cousin Wang Yanfu () and Wang Shenzhi as Wang Yanfu's deputy to lead an army to attack Fu Prefecture. However, they could not capture it quickly, and Fan sought aid from Dong Chang the military governor of Weisheng Circuit (威勝, headquartered in modern Shaoxing, Zhejiang), who dispatched an army to aid him. Hearing that news, Wang Yanfu and