You Are Being Kidnapped
You are being kidnapped.
So far I had been using the Jincheonroe like grenades, but the Jincheonroe was an IED—an improvised explosive device. Its structure was absurdly simple: pack an iron sphere with gunpowder and metal shards, then light it and let it rip. Because the design was so basic, I could slip a fuse cord in and use it like a hand grenade, or rig it with a flint for something closer to a booby trap. The area was bright as midday from all the torches, so there was no shortage of fire. I unraveled one side of the rope ladder to fashion a usable fuse, cut a long section, and turned it into a crude time-delay cord.
In this era without reinforced concrete, the pillars were wood. They had been treated through multiple processes to reduce fire risk, but they could still burn. It was early winter, so piles of dried leaves had been gathered everywhere. I planted the Jincheonroe among those piles and gathered all the fuses in one place.
“Huu…”
I could already see it: burning leaves riding the wind, spreading countless flames. The fire could be put out, but I had no idea how much damage it would cause in the process. At least Luoyang was a city of high officials, administrators, and the taverns built to serve them rather than ordinary citizens, so not that many commoners lived inside the walls. Still, if a blaze broke out, those few civilians would be shoved to the bottom of any rescue list. Their chances of survival would be slim.
What I want is a disturbance, not a massacre. What I want is a disturbance, not a massacre. A disturbance. Not a massacre.
I agonized over the fuse cord for a long time, then slapped my own cheeks hard several times and moved every Jincheonroe to the base of the outer walls instead. East, west, south, north. Five charges on each wall, twenty in total. It had taken far too much time and I had burned extra charcoal for the escape, but I felt no regret. If things got dangerous I could always cut loose and paraglide down with the parachute. These were all the Jincheonroe I could carry on the hot air balloon—my “trump card” for unforeseen situations—but with no way to pinpoint the Emperor’s exact location, I had to use them.
I lit one end of the fuse cord, climbed into the fully inflated balloon for maximum visibility, and waited for the Emperor to appear. The rope ladder, now nothing more than a thick line, was tied securely around my ankle. I would have only one chance. If the boy’s stamina was even average, the odds of success were very high.
BOOM!
Flames erupted from all four walls of Luoyang.
“Wh-what is that? Lightning?”
“It’s Gongsun Zan! Gongsun Zan has come!”
“How could someone from Liaodong possibly appear in Luoyang? It’s lightning—a natural phenomenon!”
The area outside the sleeping quarters erupted into chaos. Emperor Liu Bian cracked the door open and took in the scene. Far beyond the palace roofs, a massive red torch burned against the night sky. Guards charged back and forth carrying water and sand from the garden. Had lightning struck and started the fires? Yet the sky was bone dry; not a single drop of rain had fallen. Lightning from a clear sky was possible, but if it happened often the idiom “a bolt from the blue” would never have been coined.
“What is going on?”
“Go back inside… No, come out! Lightning has struck the outer palace wall and started a fire. The sky is clear—how could this happen…”
Liu Bian was short. At only fourteen years old it was natural he stood smaller than most generals and high officials. He was used to looking up at everyone. Whenever he tried to study a person’s face, the sky always filled the space behind them. That was why he noticed it.
That was why the Emperor saw the black sphere floating in the sky and the long tail dangling beneath it.
A voice like thunder shook the earth. The guards instinctively scanned the walls where the voice had come from, never realizing the tail descending from the sky was heading straight for the Emperor.
Let me repeat: Emperor Liu Bian was fourteen. A normal boy his age would just be entering puberty. A black orb, a tail stretched long like a dragon’s neck, and words he could not understand. The boy ran forward without hesitation and seized the dragon’s tongue. It was large. And warm.
I confirmed the boy emerging from the building I had guessed. I could not be one hundred percent certain it was the Emperor, but the only child in this palace was either the Emperor or one of Dong Zhuo’s own. The guards’ formation was better suited to surveillance than protection, so it made more sense that they were watching the Emperor rather than daring to watch their commander’s family.
I descended quickly in the basket, untied the anchor rope, and once we had gained some altitude I lowered the sail and drifted toward the Emperor. The rope ladder—now just a thick hemp line—was lashed tightly to my ankle. I threw the middle section out of the basket.
Hiss… This is more nerve-wracking than I thought.
Could I climb back into the basket while carrying him? I had no idea. I would only know after trying. My diet had trimmed my weight considerably, but I still massed three hundred geun—roughly seventy kilograms in modern terms. Add the charcoal and equipment, and if the Emperor weighed more than two hundred fifty geun (about sixty kilograms), the balloon would never rise. We would crash in the middle of Luoyang.
If that happened I would have to shed every ounce of weight, rip out this cage-like basket, and hang from the rope for an hour. After shedding this much muscle, I doubted I could last with another sixty-plus kilograms attached to me.
What, can’t the Emperor just hold on? If he couldn’t, it would be the immediate opening of the Emperor Pancake Shop. Straight to treason. Shooting a traitor who had killed the Emperor was no great crime, and a balloon rising slowly over the course of an hour would make an easy target. Even if I escaped by parachute, I had to abandon any naïve hope that people of this era could not track me. No matter how high my title as Duke of Yan, I would not keep my head.
The Emperor was both my objective and the insurance policy that would stop them from shooting the balloon down.
I threaded the thick rope behind my knee, wrapped it once around my ankle, then gripped it again with the same-side hand. The extra-thick line I had prepared held my weight solidly and left one hand free. I had adjusted our course, but we were still a short distance apart. There was no choice but to use the most primitive and reliable communication method available.
I inhaled air warmed by the fires and roared, drawing the Emperor’s full attention. Whether by luck or because he had already been looking, our eyes met.
Speaking down to the Emperor was not proper, but I could endure a scolding later. If I wasted time on polite language the guards might reach him first. In the instant before Dong Zhuo’s minions could react, the Emperor sprinted forward and seized both my hands. For the ruler of a nation, his body was far too light.
Emperor Liu Bian realized that what he had grabbed was not a dragon’s tongue but a human hand. He also realized his body was rising into the sky. The guards who had always looked down on him now craned their necks upward, staring blankly as he ascended. A few raised bows, only to be slapped by the men beside them and lower their weapons.
The imperial palace—the giant cage that had imprisoned him—had all four walls ablaze, continuously pumping out hot air. Hot air rises; that was the principle of yin and yang. The large black lantern carrying Liu Bian drank in that yang energy and shot skyward.
“Hold my shoulders tightly. If you slip you will fall, and it is not as if His Majesty the Emperor has wings, is it?”
“I-I understand. I shall do so.”
The voice sounded somehow familiar. The man was covered head to toe in black leather, so his face was impossible to see, but the callused, scarred hand reminded Liu Bian of his uncle He Jin—the Grand General who had acted as a father in place of his own late father Liu Hong. For the first time in a long while he felt someone was treating him like an ordinary child. The outfit looked far more like an assassin’s than a rescuer’s, but he had met far too many assassins dressed as saviors. Liu Bian clung tightly to the man in black.
“…No, I meant piggyback. Not to be held in my arms.”
“S-sorry. I… lost my senses for a moment… W-wait. My feet do not touch the ground—how am I supposed to get on your back? Could you help me… Ack!”
The man let out a deep sigh, lifted Liu Bian onto his shoulder with one arm, then used both hands to climb the rope.
“We are flying straight to the Yellow River like this. It may be frightening, but endure it. I have prepared a boat on the river, so please hold on until then.”
“I-I will. I am sorry once more.”
“An Emperor does not apologize. Especially not to his kidnapper.”
“…I see. Then thank you.”
“It is not something that requires thanks, however…”
“No, it is. You have taken me from Dong Zhuo’s grasp… Hmm… No, let us speak of the rest later.”
“Wise decision. If you squirm while talking you will fall and… well, splat.”
Beyond the man’s shoulder, the burning palace came into view. It was a sight he had once tried desperately to prevent, yet somewhere in his heart a voice shouted in relief.
This… was the Emperor? This was the Emperor?
He was too light for a fourteen-year-old boy. Even in the hell of my previous life, the starving child soldiers had not been this light. Yet here was the ruler of a hegemonic state, light enough for me to lift one-handed. No matter how thin his nightclothes, how normal it was for people of this era to be shorter than modern standards, or how ruined his country was, this was simply too light.
The sensation in my hand as I lifted him was all skin and the hard press of bone. When I placed him in the basket and cast off the rope, the balloon rose more easily than when it had carried the Jincheonroe.
When a country falls into chaos, the first to suffer are the old and the children. In an era with far more limited means of preserving knowledge than the modern world, the elderly were at least valued as repositories of wisdom. But the prevailing attitude that “you can always have more children” made a child’s life even harsher. Un had been forced to fight bandits with a spear at the age of a middle-schooler. Zhang Fei had roamed battlefields at the age of a high-schooler. The King of Bohai had declared he would sacrifice himself for the nation at the age of an elementary student. And now this Emperor, who looked even lighter than the King of Bohai despite being only a middle-schooler himself.
If a chaotic age was hell for the common people, for children it was the end of the world.
On the basket I stroked the head of the Emperor as he stared blankly at the burning palace.
“I am Gongsun Zan, Duke of Yan. I have come to rescue Your Majesty from the hands of the traitor Dong Zhuo.”
Well… stroking the Emperor’s head could probably be considered an act of lèse-majesté, but a Duke is the Emperor’s teacher, is he not? A teacher may stroke his student’s head. If anyone complains, we can settle it with a duel in the Yanzhou style.
The wind blowing from the southwest was guiding us toward the Yellow River. It was coincidence, yet it seemed I always left Luoyang riding its current.
“What did you say? Say it again!”
“H-His Majesty the Emperor has ascended to heaven!”
Lightning had struck all four sides of the palace and fire had spread. Every soldier in the palace was mobilized to fight the blaze and they managed to bring it under control within an hour. Dong Zhuo went to the Emperor’s sleeping quarters to explain the situation, only to hear the guard spouting nonsense about the Emperor rising into the sky.
“I-it is true! A black dragon took His Majesty and ascended!”
People of this era had no concept of a hot air balloon. The red haze from the flames made the black balloon floating above nearly invisible. Only the Emperor in his white hemp pajamas had been clear enough to see. In the end their brains performed emergency corrections using common sense and existing knowledge, leaving only the memory of the Emperor grabbing a black dragon’s leg and ascending to heaven.
“The imperial seal! Where is the imperial seal!”
The Emperor had been Dong Zhuo’s puppet. The spirit of the age might revere the Emperor, but in truth the absolute hypnosis app of this era was any document bearing the imprint of the national seal. Only the Emperor could wield that seal.
“His Majesty… took it with him.”
And so the Emperor had ascended to heaven carrying the national brainwashing device with him.
“Call Li Ru! Bring Li Ru at once! Order Li Jue and Guo Si to enter the palace immediately! This is an emergency. If we are not careful a second Yellow Turban Rebellion could break out. Since Liu Bian has vanished, bring that child Liu Xie!”
Dong Zhuo was a warlord. He possessed the ability to seize power but not to maintain it. He knew this himself and had been barely clinging to control by actively using the Emperor as his hypnosis app. In the world order Dong Zhuo had created, an enormous hole had been torn that could not be filled.