After the "Yongjia Rebellion", Zu Di led hundreds of relatives and township parties to defect to Sima Rui, and was appointed Sima Rui as the Assassin of Xuzhou, and was soon conscripted into the military road to sacrifice wine.
In the first year of Jianxing (313), Sima Yi took the throne, with Sima Rui as his attendant, Zuo Chengxiang , and Dadu governor of eastern Shaanxi , and ordered him to lead his troops to retake Luoyang.
At that time, Sima Rui already had the heart to use Jiangnan as a barrier to claim the emperor, so he postponed it for various reasons. Therefore, Zu Di said: "The rebellion in the Jin Dynasty was not the incompetence of the emperor, nor was it because the people were making trouble, but the imperial family was fighting for power and killing each other, giving Yi Di an opportunity to take advantage of it." Now the people in the north are devastated and have the determination to fight back. If the great king can send people on the expedition according to the order, he should appoint someone like me as the commander-in-chief, and I believe that Jiangbei Haojie will surely respond to the wind, and the people in the occupied areas will rejoice. In this way, it may be possible to recover the lost land and shame the country. "
Although Sima Rui was very reluctant, he could not openly oppose it, otherwise he would lose the hearts of the people, and then the emperor's dream would be shattered. However, he did not want to go north, so he appointed Zu Ti as the general of Fenwei and the assassin of Yuzhou, and only allocated 1,000 rations and 3,000 pieces of cloth to Zu Ti, and did not even give weapons and equipment, so that Zu Ti himself crossed the river to recruit people and horses.
Zu Di took hundreds of clans and family members across the river to the north. When the boat reached the river, Zu Ti knocked on the oar and swore to heaven: "If my ancestors can't clear the Central Plains, just like the water of this great river, there is no return!" Then in Huaiyin, recruit troops, forge weapons, and recruit more than 2,000 people.
After the fall of Luoyang, the people of the Central Plains, in addition to moving south, had to unite to defend themselves, they cultivated in peacetime, and the whole people were soldiers in wartime, but they could only deal with small groups of rogues, and if it was large-scale armed forces, they could only submit to each other. These large thousands of people, small hundreds of people, because Zu Di represented the orthodox Han regime, the banner was to expel hu yu and recover lost land, naturally won the enthusiastic support of the broad masses of the people, and soon recovered a large area of land south of the Yellow River.
Yu Commandery (谯郡, in present-day Southwest Xuzhou, next to the Vortex River) was the gateway to the Central Plains, and the history of Yuzhou at that time was called Zhang Ping, who was appointed by the former Western Jin Dynasty General Liu Yan (Liu Kun's nephew) during the war, and Zhang Ping made his brother Fan Ya the Taishou of Yu Commandery, and the two of them still insisted on holding on to Yu Commandery. Therefore, when Zu Ti led his troops to Luzhou (逖州, in modern Bozhou, Anhui) on the north bank of the Dong vortex, he sent his army to Yu Commandery (谯郡) to persuade Zhang and Fan to obey his command, and Zhang Ping, who was already struggling to support him, planned to give up his position to Shun Zu Ti. But Zu Ti used people improperly, Yin Qi was a tough guy, as soon as he saw Zhang Ping, he took up the shelf, picked his nose and picked his eyes, and finally provoked Zhang Ping to cut Yin Qi with a knife.
Zu Ti's army was small and widowed, and he had previously taken enwei and shi to deal with those weak reactionary forces, and it was impossible to attack a city like Chen County, so he had to ask for help from Chen Chuan and Nanzhonglang, who had left chen to guard himself. Wang Han sent Huan Xuan to lead 500 soldiers north to reinforce, and Chen Chuan also sent the fierce general Li Tou to lead the army south to help. Huan Xuan was originally a retainer of Sima Rui's side, because he was a fellow villager with Zhang Ping and Fan Ya, and had been ordered to recruit Zhang and Fan to submit to the Jiankang court, and was later hired by Wang Han. Zu Di took advantage of this relationship and sent Huan Xuan to Yu County to do the work of plotting against Fan Ya.
Huan Xuan said to Fan Ya, "Zu Yu Prefecture is doing its best to wipe out the thieves, and it is very much in need of your support, but it is not a person sent, Yin Qi is frivolous and rude, which is not Zu Yu Prefecture's original intention." You are now trapped in an isolated city, there are strong thieves in the north, and there are fierce generals of the imperial court attacking in the south, there is no way out, if you now return to Zuyu Prefecture, you can not only establish loyalty, but also preserve wealth. In the end, he successfully persuaded Fan Ya to surrender.
After Zu Ti occupied the city, he finally gained a foothold in Yuzhou and opened the passage of the Northern Expedition. Shi Le reacted quickly and sent his nephew Shi Hu to lead his troops south in an attempt to take advantage of Zu Di's unstable foothold and drive him back to the lower reaches of the Huai River. Wang Han heard that Shi Hu was besieging the city and sent Huan Xuan to lead an army to rescue him. Shi Hu was unable to attack for a long time, and seeing that Wang Han's reinforcements were coming, he had to withdraw and leave, and Huan Xuan was also left by Zu Di to assist him in recruiting the Wu fort forces that refused to return. The city also became the base camp of the Northern Expedition of the Ancestors, and many areas under Shi Le's rule were annexed.
However, Zu Ti's victory not only did not make Sima Rui feel happy, but it made him feel worried, worried that Zu Ti Gong was high and threatened his throne, but Zu Ti's Northern Expedition was deeply popular with the people, and he had to express something, so in addition to giving Zu Ti the title of a Zhenxi general, there was not even a little substantial support. Without support, Zu Ti took a series of measures to persuade Nongsang to take the lead in developing production and gradually gaining enough food and clothing.
Shi Le saw that Zu Ti's power was strong and did not dare to invade the south, so he ordered people to repair the mausoleum for Zu Ti's mother in Chenggao County, and wrote a letter requesting mutual trade. Although Zu Di did not reply to the letter, but let the two sides communicate with each other, the business was booming, the muffled voice made a fortune, and the soldiers and horses became stronger and stronger. Later, zu ti had a general who fled to Shi Lebu, and Shi Le ordered his men to kill him, return the head, and make overtures to Zu Ti, and the two sides entered a rare and short period of peace.
In the fourth year of Taixing (321), zu Ti's troops were well fed and prepared to cross the Yellow River north to attack Shile and retake Hebei. Sima Rui was afraid that he would make a new contribution, so he appointed his close associate Dai Yuan as the general of Zhenxi, and the military governors of the six prefectures of Dusi, Yan, Yu, He, Yong, and Ji, and The History of Sizhou, nominally to assist Zu Ti in his crusade against Hu Yu, but in fact to contain Zu Ti. Zu Di saw that he had worked hard to recover Henan, and he had worked hard to manage it, but he still could not be trusted by the imperial court, and those recovered and unrecovered states were under the jurisdiction of others, and his heart was extremely depressed. Soon, bad news came that his friend Liu Kun in the north was killed, Wang Dun in the south was arbitrary, and the internal strife in the imperial court was about to erupt. Once Liu Kun died, besides his ancestors, who else really wanted to recover the lost land? The imperial court was in turmoil, the Northern Expedition was even more hopeless, zu Ti fell ill in grief and anger, and then died at the age of 56.