The Blue Sky is Dead, The Yellow Sky Shall Rise
I said I would teach the little kid survival skills, but there was no way I could put a child who had not even begun puberty through the same grinder I used on Liu Bei. Novels and comics always push characters until they are on the brink of death, but that barbaric training method had proven completely useless on the UFC’s octagon. Therefore, the only instruction I could give until her body matured was something resembling an ecological field trip.
“Law of Nature Number One: Never eat mushrooms when you are stranded.”
“I already know that much…”
Is that so… Well, of course she would. Unlike people from my original time, the people of this era possessed rich knowledge about what could and could not be eaten. If we were talking about descending into an environment as alien as Vietnam or Sichuan from the northeast of China, the story might be different, but people of this period rarely left their own districts. There was little need to point out what was “edible” in the immediate vicinity.
“How to start a fire?”
“I know how.”
“How to filter water?”
“Filter water?”
“Didn’t drinking straight from the river give you a stomachache?”
“It never did.”
…Of course it didn’t. Just as the words of the great sages implied, in an era where survival itself was nothing more than a crude joke, any weakling who could not even handle a single cup of water properly had already died off long ago. Then what else was left… I honestly couldn’t think of anything.
“Sigh… Just follow me, watch closely, and learn. If you don’t understand something, ask.”
“Yes.”
In the end, my words became the little kid’s property. Tico the First, who normally bore my own weight of nearly five hundred pounds, looked positively delighted to carry a child who probably weighed only a quarter of that. When she approached to mount, he even bent his knees to make it easier for her. Honestly… riding him did feel a little like animal abuse. I shortened the stirrup straps to match the length of her legs and kept the reins in my own hand off to the side.
Three days to You Province. We had crossed every mountain we needed to cross, and not a single cloud marred the dry sky. The golden fields stretching into the distance were stunning. There were patchy bald spots here and there as though the land itself suffered from alopecia, yet they remained beautiful all the same. It was autumn.
Several years passed. Those years had been relatively peaceful, and fortunately my mania had not resurfaced. I returned to You Province, married Lady Jin, received my formal appointment as Administrator of Liaodong, spent a heated newlywed period, and set out for my post in the spring when the sea ice in Bohai Bay finally melted.
During that time Liu Bei occasionally visited to request sparring matches, and I also met the famous Peach Brothers. Brothers… more like sisters. Fortunately they were not an elf Liu Bei, a centaur Guan Yu, and a dwarf Zhang Fei; aside from Liu Bei, all of them were ordinary Homo sapiens. Liu Bei’s twin-sword technique had improved considerably, and the strength of the woman named Guan Yu—who possessed the long, straight hair rarely seen in this era—was astonishing. How should I describe it? Her power was comparable to my own. In other words, it rivaled the natural-born muscle of this Gongsun Zan: eight cheok tall, five hundred geun, with not an ounce of fat anywhere. A remarkable feat. At one point I even wondered whether this world was actually a wuxia novel and whether Guan Yu was a master of internal-energy cultivation, which would explain her deceptively slender frame.
Zhang Fei? Hmm… she was simply a little kid. A few years older than the little one I was already raising—Uni—but by the time my term as Administrator of Liaodong ended, she would probably make an excellent sparring partner. The little kid, Zhao Yun, bore a name I had never heard in my previous life, so she probably was not fated to become all that famous. In the original history she must have died at the hands of bandits back then.
At any rate, I took up my post without incident. I had already mastered paperwork during my days as a low-level clerk, and the population of a frontier region like Liaodong was not especially large, so I was not buried beneath work. I had assumed the post of Administrator of Liaodong would be some sort of military office, but it turned out to be little more than chief secretary to the governor.
When I looked beyond Liaodong’s borders, the nearest power—Goguryeo—was still in its infancy, having only just shed its horse-thief phase, while Okjeo lay on the opposite side of the Korean peninsula; we were unlikely to meet. The nomadic tribes descending from the north were held at bay by a reincarnator—me—one of history’s oldest chronic afflictions. Originally a mere chief secretary would not have led troops to the front, but thanks to my teacher’s recommendation I was permitted to hold concurrent military authority. Thanks to the intervention of a modern man, the nomads had no answer yet for improved steel crossbows a thousand years ahead of schedule (known in English as arbalests) combined with the traditional Northeast Asian doctrine of overwhelming mass.
Later, if an elite boss-level horse barbarian capable of bearing the Tatar yoke appeared, the story might change, but I had yet to encounter any horse-barbarian leader who had reached that level and finished optimizing his skills. And the phrase “we blocked the nomads” carried the same meaning as “we obtained good horses.” The warhorses that adapted well to Liaodong’s steppe climate created the perfect environment for the birth of true cavalry. Plate armor remained an impossible dream given the era’s primitive metallurgy, but the introduction of the stirrup—an improvement likewise born from the chronic disease called modern intervention—allowed us to train serviceable light cavalry. By the standards of this age they might qualify as medium cavalry, yet by my own they remained light.
The nomads, having been badly burned several times, chose to swing farther west and feast on Bing Province—the hot spot for primitive ancient Chinatown horse barbarians—rather than set foot on this hellish Liaodong soil. As a result, we maintained a relationship of polite but distant neighbors with my spiritual homeland of Goguryeo. Those guys really did gopnik squats when they rested… Gopnik squats were a long-standing Goguryeo tradition. I had told them to be sure to leave some watermelons behind, but the village chief there cursed me out, asking what kind of nonsense I was spouting. Later, once I manufactured Samseon tracksuits, I would definitely sell them to that region. Gopniks and Adidas always shared an unbreakable bond. Would that make Samdidas a Goguryeo tradition? My heart swells just thinking about it.
Around the time our protagonist, Gongsun Zan, was filming the prologue to his life as the Northern Grand Duke in Liaodong, the Han dynasty was flooring the accelerator toward its final chapter. Without exaggeration, Emperor Ling had established a royal authority powerful enough to build the Great Wall once more. With that authority he was living the “Wanli Emperor” lifestyle—sucking up every drop of honey he could before the bomb went off. And because the supreme commander himself had checked out, the unleashed eunuchs gleefully tore out the pillars of the state and yanked the brakes off an eight-ton truck running wild.
During the real Wanli period the royal power had been weaker and the ministers more competent, allowing the country to continue functioning. But the chaos brewed by the Clean Stream faction’s “We are not the same” mentality and the Dirty Stream faction’s “With that money, fuck it” mentality faithfully obeyed the law of entropy. The disorder grew until it reached an irreversible point. That natural progression was none other than the great opening event of the Three Kingdoms era: the Yellow Turban Rebellion.
Zhang Jue of Julu reigned as a prophet who bound together peasants—seeds of a proto-Bolshevik revolution already sown among them—through the power of a grand faith. The rebels gained access to the opium of the masses. The Dirty Stream faction, having bought their offices and proven their competence with cold cash, found their emperor too busy living the Wanli lifestyle to hold their reins and direct their talents properly. Naturally they prioritized recovering their investment over fixing the country, behaving like private-equity managers. Meanwhile the Clean Stream faction, armed with their “We are not the same” spirit, had long ago been exiled to the secretariat where they could not exercise their military talents.
As private-equity funds are wont to do, they slashed training budgets to recoup their capital. Government troops who received no training had long since fallen to the same level as the rebels. The Yellow Turbans, however, were drunk on the opium of the people and could charge mindlessly. They advanced in a steady trickle, harvesting fresh comrades from the fields as they went.
Qingzhou, Xuzhou, Youzhou, Jizhou, Jingzhou, Yangzhou, Yuzhou. In eight of the Later Han’s thirteen provinces, peasants rose up shouting for revolution. Instead of guillotines they carried bamboo spears and axes as they stormed government offices.
The blue sky is already dead, so the yellow sky must rise! The year is Jiazi, and the world shall be greatly blessed!
The phrase had already been written too many times to count. Their numbers alone reached a million. They lacked proper supply lines and resembled an army conducting a “southern campaign,” yet numbers themselves were violence. In the end even Emperor Ling—who lived by the creed “as long as it isn’t me”—felt the crisis approaching. He wielded his formidable royal authority to recall the Clean Stream faction en masse. The old heroes who had once left office—Lu Zhi, Huangfu Song, Zhu Jun—answered the summons and donned their aged armor once more.
And just as old men are wont to do, the three elders in worn-out armor gathered crowds of young people willing to exert themselves on their behalf. The Clean Stream faction, bearing their “We are not the same” spirit, gladly rose up—not to offer their own lives, but to offer the lives of their subordinates. It was around that same time that a letter reached Gongsun Zan.