The Mystery of the Severed Head
The groan slipped out before I could stop it. “Ughhh…”
I hadn’t noticed while the endorphins were flooding my brain, but my body was in no shape to be called normal. That much was obvious. Sure, I’d pulled off a walk-off grand-slam home run (courtesy of an improvised explosive), but every part of me not covered by armor had been stabbed, scraped, and left bleeding. My muscles felt like they’d been torn apart; the slightest twitch sent fresh waves of agony rolling through me.
“Ow… shit…”
No exaggeration—if the fight had dragged on another ten minutes, I would have died. I’m dead serious. Still, I survived. For now.
The cavalry unit that had started with roughly a hundred men was now down to seventy. Every rider except Guan Yu was bedridden and groaning in pain, yet somehow all our heads remained attached to our shoulders. That counted as a win.
I would have loved to process the leaderless wild Zerg the usual way—thoroughly, then launder them clean—but this time it was physically impossible. Even counting the seventy wounded cavalry and the infantry who had pulled back earlier, our total fighting force barely reached ten thousand. There was simply no way to manage a million prisoners with those numbers.
No matter how wildly we had rampaged or how many corpses we piled into mountains, their casualties hadn’t even crossed the ten-thousand mark. A hundred men would each need to kill a hundred enemies to reach that figure. The reason they had surrendered wasn’t because I had annihilated them. Their hive mind in the rear was dead, and the only leader they believed could guide them past the two Generals of the Household closing in from the south had also perished. That was why.
Their revolutionary zeal hadn’t been fully extinguished yet. A mere one-percent casualty rate was far too low to break their will. In other words, their morale hadn’t collapsed.
Someone might ask, Didn’t you handle a hundred thousand back in Liaodong? That was only possible because our home base was close. Besides, ten thousand and a million aren’t just a matter of digits. Tens of thousands form a division; a million forms a group army. Divisions combine into corps, corps into field armies, and only when field armies gather do you speak of a true group army.
During the Korean War, the entire ROK military numbered around 1.3 million. A million men were literally enough to fill an entire front. Supplying them would require at least a division-sized logistics train. In an era without railroads or trucks, we would also need to haul bio-ethanol—haystacks, essentially—tens of times less efficient than petroleum. I had no idea how these bastards summoned water and bread to fill their stomachs, but there was no chance that the combined forces of Liu Bei and me—barely division strength—could feed, clothe, and shelter them.
Of course, like many rulers on this continent, I could have kept only the manageable number of Yellow Turbans and slaughtered the rest. But knowing that the great warlord era was about to explode, that was not an option I could choose. Every scrap of information in this period was gathered, maintained, and transmitted through human intelligence. If I lost the people’s hearts, the price I would pay in blood would multiply several times over.
The foundation of civil-military operations is the belief that “this guy may be a bastard, but he’s still a decent human being.” No matter the reason, a man who casually slits his neighbor’s throat can never be seen as decent. At least… yes, unless people were already thinking that bastard deserves to die, I could not swing my blade freely.
What about the people I killed on the battlefield yesterday? That was collateral damage. Even they would admit it. They charged into revolution knowing they might die.
Regardless, my task was clear. I had to soothe these million wild Zerg with extreme care so the burning sparks of revolution would not ignite. Then I needed to disperse them across Ji Province and You Province. I would have liked to bring some to Liaodong as well, but with autumn only just beginning, suddenly increasing the population would lead straight to a “March of Suffering.”
Ji Province had always been known as a good place to live, and You Province could import its grain directly. Even with an extra million mouths, the cities could somehow sustain them. Besides, some of these people had originally come from You and Ji provinces anyway.
…Which meant I had to stand up first.
Every muscle from the top of my head to the tips of my toes was screaming, “Please, just let us rest!” But the sad law of humanity is that if you want rest, you must first work.
“Ughhhhh…”
Damn it, I could really use some morphine. Or at least Tylenol. My body was in such bad shape that simply lifting an arm made me hiss in pain. I needed someone to attend to me, but as I had said earlier, the friendly forces who had retreated to the rear fortress would need more time to return. Traveling at night in this era was a polite way of saying you wanted to commit suicide, so there would be no help until sunrise.
Squeezing out what little literary talent I possessed, I began mentally coding a hypnotic application that might charm the million wild Zerg—currently categorized as non-core population—while I lit a torch.
“The traitor Zhang Jue, who deceived and incited you into rebellion, is dead! I killed him!”
There were no streetlights or flares in this era. The torchlight was faint, yet in a world lit only by moonlight, that small flame was enough to highlight my figure. Fortunately, sitting atop my horse placed my eye level roughly a meter above theirs.
“I know you are disappointed in the current emperor! That is only natural!”
The basis of persuasion is to pretend you understand. Honestly, I didn’t truly know how hard life was for the peasants of this age. My father in this body had been a commandery governor, and he had possessed enough wealth to keep his illegitimate son from starving. From a fairly young age I had served as a civil official, and after being appointed Administrator of Liaodong, I had lived at the level of a mid-grade seventh-rank bureaucrat. Still, pretending to understand wasn’t impossible. It was obvious.
“They wasted your taxes! They relied on violence to twist the law however they pleased! They framed your rightful governors, arrested them, and sold the offices to greedy profiteers who paid for their positions! They ran the country together with bandit gangs and treated the imperial seal like a thief’s pocket—I know all of this!”
Once I had pretended to understand sufficiently, the next step was to make them realize how wrong their choice had been.
“I ask you! Do you want total war? Did you truly desire the most radical, all-out war imaginable?”
Because of the backlighting I couldn’t clearly see their eyes, but I could imagine their expressions. As I had said repeatedly, most of them were farmers. They had risen up because life was unbearable, but they had neither the heart nor the resolve for a “real war.”
My face had been twisted by pain and exhaustion for a while now, but the backlighting meant they couldn’t see it clearly.
“Did you want a war that would fill the Yellow River and the Yangtze with our blood, turning them crimson, until the seed of every man in this great Central Plain dried up?!”
We could not see each other’s faces. They were probably imagining what my expression looked like, just as I imagined theirs, while we shouted and listened to this speech in the darkness.
“Instead of impeaching the treacherous eunuchs who blinded the emperor’s eyes and restoring the five-hundred-year history of the Han to its rightful path, did you want to walk across a vast, unknown ocean you have never experienced or even imagined?!”
Farmers are fundamentally conservative. Not only in political outlook, but in their very stance toward life. Unlike officials or salarymen whose income arrives monthly or even more frequently, farmers receive a lump sum once a year. Their profession lets them observe an entire year before knowing what their “annual salary” will be. Therefore, they were the type who found it safer to farm according to proven habits rather than risk “adventures” with new agricultural methods.
“I believe none of you fully followed the traitor’s will! I have no desire to punish those who were merely deceived by a madman who mistakenly believed he had received Heaven’s Mandate and did not even know what they were doing!”
I still could not see their faces, but I could sense the atmosphere shifting. Even from their silhouettes, their body language told me so.
“I will send you back to You Province and Ji Province! I will personally inform the Inspectors of You and Ji that you are innocent!”
Liu Yu, Inspector of You Province, was connected to my father-in-law, and the Inspector of Ji Province was connected to Liu Yu. The Clean Stream faction was a group bound by the spirit of “we are all family,” while the Dirty Stream faction had no choice but to adopt the mindset of “then we are not.” In such a world, most people knew one another through personal connections.
“Of course, I cannot forgive those among you who truly harbored treasonous hearts! The law of the state is strict, and the crime of defying Heaven cannot be washed away! However, I, Gongsun Zan, hereby declare that I have personally enlightened the foolish commoners who were deceived by empty words!”
In any case, the official doctrine of the Han was Confucianism. Though it differed slightly in flavor from Joseon’s version, Confucianism was still Confucianism. The highest virtues it prized were loyalty, filial piety, and moral education. Setting aside the fact that I was a devout Catholic, I could still make use of that perception.
“You! Glorious subjects of the Han! Will you swear your loyalty once more?!”
“…”
For a moment, silence fell.
…Is this going to fail?
Just as that thought crossed my mind, the ground trembled.
““Yes!””
““Yeah!””
““Yessir!””
““Loyalty! We swear our loyalty!””
They were untrained, so their answers spilled out however their mouths formed them, but the sentiment was roughly the same. Without loudspeakers, the Yellow Turbans at the back had to pass the words forward one by one. The responses continued for half a shichen, but at least my head would remain attached until morning.
“What?! Zhang Jue’s army broke through the encirclement?!”
As was typical for information in this era, several days passed before news of Zhang Jue’s escape reached Dong Zhuo and Huangfu Song. By then, Gongsun Zan had already received the loyalty oath from a million-strong army on the plains of Laling, and several more days had gone by. The million Zerglings, now under the influence of the hive-mind emulator, had begun to scatter across You Province and Ji Province like a new Gettysburg… no, like a new wave of locusts.
“Where?! Where did they flee to?!”
“North, sir. It seems they have dispersed into Ji and You provinces to bide their time…”
“Urgent report! Gongsun Zan, Administrator of Liaodong, has slaughtered Zhang Jue’s million Yellow Turbans with only ten thousand troops and brought back his head!”
Gongsun Zan had naturally tried to stitch Zhang Jue’s shattered skull back together in some recognizable human shape before sending it to the Generals of the Household. The result was so grotesquely twisted that it could hardly be called a human face. If he had been good at art, he would have served in Austria instead of Afghanistan during his military days; that much was obvious. The eyes, nose, mouth, and ears were barely in the right general area, but the burns and the countless gouges left by metal shrapnel could not be patched. The severed head looked far more like a monster than a man. The messenger carrying it in his pack took one look and fell over backward in shock.
“Ahem…”
Of course, generals of Dong Zhuo and Huangfu Song’s caliber—human blenders who had already piled mountains of corpses once or twice—found this level of “mystery” merely surprising. In fact, it became an occasion to admire Gongsun Zan’s creativity in producing such a spectacle.
“His rage at the traitor must have pierced the heavens… Ahem.”
“Y-yes… Quite so, General Huangfu.”
“They call him the reincarnation of Han Sui and the incarnation of Chiyou… I don’t know about the first, but the second seems accurate.”
In truth, Gongsun Zan had done his absolute best to create a death mask. Yet his disastrously poor handicraft had only ended up adding to his aura of “mystery.” Had he been present, he would have lamented it bitterly.