Welcome to the World of Women
The second year of Xingping (195 AD).
Han Dynasty Corporation stood on the very brink of delisting.
The former chairman—no, the former emperor, Emperor Ling—had spent over two decades peddling government offices for cold, hard cash just to amass a private slush fund. Naturally, the corrupt officials who bought their way into power began wringing every last drop out of the workforce—the common folk—to turn a quick profit of their own. Driven to despair by the grinding misery of daily life, the hurting public turned to a shady new cult known as the Way of Peace in search of spiritual healing.
The seventh year of Guanghe (184 AD).
When the sect swelled to the point where its guru, Zhang Jue, felt he could make a bid for the enterprise union's leadership, he incited the masses into rebellion. Donning yellow bandanas and chanting, "We can't live like this! Overturn the board! Strike!", they triggered the Yellow Turban Rebellion. Still, a fallen giant doesn't collapse overnight. Scraping together the last dregs of its corporate might, Han Corporation narrowly quelled the uprising, but the foundation of the state had been rattled to its core.
The first year of Guangxi (189 AD).
When Emperor Ling finally resigned straight to heaven, one might have hoped for a turnaround. Instead, the eunuch faction and the royal in-laws initiated a vicious corporate battle royale over the succession, practically screaming, "Now kill each other!" until the corporate headquarters in Luoyang burned to ash. Perhaps they had chased a bit too much dopamine during their very first arson party; the royal in-laws and their Pure Stream allies, convinced victory was in hand, managed to misplace the newly appointed chief executive, young Emperor Liu Bian, amidst the pandemonium.
He fell straight into the clutches of Dong Zhuo, a provincial warlord who happened to be lingering near Luoyang due to "grown-up matters."
A backwater brute who seized the Luoyang board of directors through raw violence and dirty tricks, Dong Zhuo promptly dispatched Chairman Liu Bian—who had barely lasted a year in office—to join his father in the afterlife. In his place, he appointed the late emperor's younger half-brother, Liu Xie.
The trouble was that with all internal checks and balances annihilated, Dong Zhuo made no effort to focus company resources on national development. Instead, he occupied his days embezzling public funds and engaging in blatant workplace sexual harassment. Enraged, the minority shareholders—the regional officials of the Pure Stream faction—banded together to launch an aggressive shareholder activist movement known as the Anti-Dong Zhuo Coalition.
Riding high on their initial momentum and spearheaded by the legendary corporate raider Sun Jian, they even managed to briefly occupy Luoyang headquarters. But Dong Zhuo had already pulled a fast one, declaring Chang'an the new headquarters and spiriting the Emperor away. The minority shareholders could do nothing but sit around scratching their thighs in frustration. And as retail investors so often do, no matter how loudly they yelled, "Diamond hands! Hold the line!", they fractured at the slightest whiff of personal profit or loss. Ultimately, they disgraced themselves by holding real-life street brawls against one another, and the entire coalition dissolved into farce.
Yet Dong Zhuo, who seemed omnipotent in Chang'an, crumbled from an enemy within. Minister over the Masses Wang Yun, whom Dong Zhuo had kept on payroll to actually run the company, seduced Dong Zhuo's top enforcer, Lu Bu, and successfully orchestrated his assassination.
At long last, the scholars of Han rejoiced, crying, "Is this the bottom?! To the moon!" as they welcomed the long-awaited rescue team. Unfortunately, it was nothing more than a dead cat bounce. Wang Yun launched an overzealous purge, only to be slaughtered when Dong Zhuo's surviving lieutenants—Li Jue, Guo Si, Zhang Ji, and Fan Chou—rallied to counterattack. Lu Bu fled for his life.
And as the old adage goes, beneath rock bottom, there is always a basement. The aftermath grew exponentially worse. If Dong Zhuo had at least bothered to maintain the corporate facade, these thugs operated under the mindset of, "A company? Is that something you eat?" and focused entirely on pillaging everything in sight. Their behavior was so appalling that securities fraudsters pumping and dumping stocks through fabricated regulatory disclosures would have looked like saints by comparison.
Trapped in this nightmare, the Emperor could bear it no longer.
The second year of Xingping (195 AD).
Seizing the moment while Li Jue and Guo Si were locked in a bloody feud, the Emperor staged a desperate escape from Chang'an. Having realized the Han was hopelessly bankrupt, he put himself up on the auction block for the regional warlords—the "whales" quietly hoarding their own shares.
Unfortunately, the asset had such a notorious reputation for toxicity that even at fire-sale liquidation prices, not a single reputable bidder came forward. The only ones who latched on were the White Wave Bandits, a pack of cutthroats sharing the mentality of penny-stock day traders trying to squeeze a buck out of delisting volatility. Expecting a disorganized rabble incapable of maintaining internal discipline to fend off the relentless pursuit of Li Jue and Guo Si was, from the very beginning, an utter impossibility.
[Emperor Xian = Mi-na / Inside an Ox Cart Bound for Anyi]
So that's how this absolute disaster came to be.
Even so, I had never heard of Emperor Xian taking an arrow to the back. This was an Emperor sustaining a critical wound and nearly dying. There was no way an event of this magnitude had been omitted from the historical records. If it had been real history, that hack of a webtoon author would have practically screamed at me to illustrate it in agonizing detail.
Then again, this is a completely different worldline, so maybe things unfold a little differently...
This wasn't simply a matter of the gap between the modern era and antiquity. This world was quite different from ours. No, it was vastly different.
"Your Majesty, has your jade body found some ease?"
"...I am fine. Do not fret."
Just looking at the woman nursing me with such tender devotion, her head concealed beneath a Head Veil—Empress Fu—brought another wave of dizzying alienation washing over me. She had a genuinely gentle nature, and in the brief time since I had awakened, I had come to lean on her immensely. But beneath that Head Veil were actual canine top ears. How on earth was I supposed to casually adapt to that? It was no easy task.
Astonishingly, this world contained only women.
To be fair, they seemed perfectly capable of distinguishing between men and women among themselves, but by my standards, both varieties were unmistakably female. And why wouldn't they be? Breasts jutting out, slender waists, and while I hadn't inspected anyone firsthand, word was that they lacked the essential equipment down below. How could anyone call that a man?
I repeat: as a consequence, there were only women around me.
From venerable statesmen like Yang Biao and Chong Ji, who had accompanied me on this desperate flight from Chang'an, to the White Wave bandit leaders Yang Feng and Han Xian, who barged in whenever boredom struck to demand official titles and grain—every single one of them was female. Not that those two bandit chiefs looked any less terrifying for it.
So where did that leave me, Emperor Xian? Was I a woman too?
Shockingly, I was the sole exception. Supposedly, it was because "the Emperor is the Son of Heaven and therefore uniquely divine."
No, seriously, Mister Heaven. What do you mean I'm a man? What kind of cosmic joke is this?
At that revelation, my sanity had blasted straight off into the Andromeda galaxy. Having confirmed the presence of my little brother with my own two eyes, I couldn't even seek refuge in psychological denial.
I almost died the second I was dragged into the Three Kingdoms, and now I have to live as the only biological male on the face of the earth...?
Not that I could embark on some harem-conquest power trip that male readers would drool over, either. There would be no cozying up with Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Sun Quan, Xun Yu, Zhuge Liang, or Zhou Yu for some love and peace. Among themselves, they maintained strict distinctions of gender, and a man and a woman loving each other was the undisputed default; anything outside that norm hadn't achieved cultural correctness in this era.
Regardless, now that I had been flung into this alternate world, survival demanded adaptation. When I inquired about the most fundamental question—how one actually told the sexes apart—Empress Fu looked far more bewildered by my ignorance than I had been by the avant-garde nature of this realm, and patiently laid it out for me. She had probably worried that taking an arrow and losing consciousness had scrambled my brain.
Well, she listed several anatomical differences, but the only one practically useful to me was the Jeong-i—canine top ears—that grew exclusively on female heads. It sounded like an exceedingly archaic and dignified term, but in modern terminology, they were simply dog ears. Why dog ears and not cat ears, I had no clue. In any case, because they developed solely on women, they carried the modesty equivalent of breasts by my modern sensibilities. As such, the women of this world always kept their heads concealed beneath a Head Veil.
When I had asked Empress Fu to let me see hers once, she had blushed far more intensely than I'd anticipated.
Her expression was actually pretty cute, though.
Regardless, thanks to those veils, I could at least distinguish between palace maids and eunuchs. If not for that, I would have stumbled into countless disastrous misunderstandings.
Wait, then what did Yuan Shao use to identify the Ten Attendants during the purge?
Back when the eunuch clique known as the Ten Attendants held supreme power under Emperor Ling's favor, they assassinated General-in-Chief He Jin, the leader of the faction plotting their destruction. Infuriated, He Jin's subordinate, Yuan Shao, carried out a merciless massacre of two thousand eunuchs within the palace. History noted that because they identified eunuchs by their lack of beards, many clean-shaven men were slaughtered by mistake.
How on earth did they tell them apart here?
Since they were eunuchs, something had to have been snipped. I briefly considered asking Empress Fu, the one person I could somewhat trust, but an intuition warned me that her answer would shatter my sanity beyond comprehension, so I decided to keep the thought buried deep in my chest. I wasn't quite ready to launch my mind past the event horizon just yet.
Lying here with nothing to do just breeds pointless worries.
Then again, it wasn't as if I possessed some brilliant masterstroke to reverse our fortunes.
Rattle, clatter.
For all my imperial majesty, I didn't even have a proper carriage, so I was being hauled along in a rickety ox cart. On top of that, I was a critical patient who had skirted death only days ago. From what I pieced together, an arrow had struck dead center in the Emperor's back, briefly stopping his breathing altogether.
Wait, did the original owner actually die?
Transmigrating into a deceased body was standard operating procedure for web novels, after all. If so, the fact that such a catastrophic wound had stopped bleeding was a miracle in itself. All I could do was pray that it wouldn't turn septic and quietly wait for it to heal.
What a life...
What made the future even bleaker was knowing that no paradise awaited us in Anyi, no matter how agonizing this escape was. Not that I was the only one who realized it.
"Moo."
See? Even that dumb beast of an ox was letting out a mournful low, as if it understood our misery. Or perhaps it was just starving.
Thud!
"The ox collapsed!"
"Dammit! We're still nowhere near Anyi!"
"Boss! The whole thing's gone to hell. Let's just ditch them and run!"
Haaah... my life, seriously...
You hack of an author, you son of a—
Once again, Writer Byun successfully added another day to his lifespan courtesy of my curses.
[Reference Illustration]
Empress Fu, formally known as Empress Xiaoxian.