An Irrevocable Misunderstanding
Dong Zhuo had abandoned Lu Bu. That single phrase became the ultimate propaganda slogan that tore the Bingzhou army in two. Of course, Lu Bu’s death had actually been caused by him charging alone into the Yan state’s fortress line instead of striking Cao Cao’s Yanzhou, but human nature prefers to blame others’ flaws rather than admit its own mistakes. The Bingzhou troops kept shouting about “jungle difference,” insisting that if only they had followed orders and dove when they were supposed to, they could have at least crushed the lane.
Naturally, Dong Zhuo’s strategists ran in every direction trying to clear up the misunderstanding and restore unity, but the Xiliang army—led by Li Jue and Guo Si—only grew louder and sharper instead of listening. “Bullshit! If that idiot Lu Bu had just guided us properly, we could have finished Cao Cao and opened the sea route! It wasn’t Grand Commandant Dong who abandoned Lu Bu—it was that worthless bastard who betrayed us!”
“General Li Qiyan, please! This is no time for those of us in Luoyang to be fighting among ourselves. The late Emperor’s funeral rites are not even finished—”
“Shut your mouth! I never liked that scoundrel Lu Bu from the start! Just because he caught the Grand Commandant’s eye, he acted like some lawless thug. He couldn’t even hold Hulao Pass properly and spent months lying in bed like a cripple!”
The Xiliang troops who had followed Dong Zhuo from the beginning wanted special treatment for their seniority. The Imperial Guard expected elite privileges. The Bingzhou soldiers resented the Xiliang troops for constantly dumping menial tasks on them while demanding respect. The chaotic age had not ended, and Dong Zhuo tried desperately to bridge the growing rift between the three factions, but Lu Bu’s death was a massive bomb that detonated the tangled emotions they had barely held together.
In truth, whether Dong Zhuo had betrayed Lu Bu or Lu Bu had betrayed Dong Zhuo hardly mattered. The Bingzhou soldiers simply hated how “a mere surrendered general kept trying to act like a senior officer.” The Xiliang soldiers hated how “those who enlisted just a few years earlier kept throwing their weight around.” The Imperial Guard hated how “those Luoyang pretty boys kept acting superior.” And both the Xiliang and Bingzhou troops hated how “half-breed horse-riders dared to put themselves on equal footing with us.”
The Xianbei mercenaries’ rampage had been nothing more than a small spark. The outnumbered Bingzhou soldiers underwent a Copernican shift in thinking.
“It’s true that General Liu Xuande defeated Lu Bu, but the fight itself was a fair frontal battle. He returned the body without mutilation or taking the head, so maybe he didn’t actually want to fight?”
Whether the term “Copernican shift” was appropriate here was debatable, but the transformation from “mortal enemy who killed General Lu” to “the enemy of our enemy… so can we be friends?” was such a radical reversal that the difference was largely academic. The emotional rift deepened. A heavy tension that felt ready to explode at any moment hung in the air. Yet the person who ultimately lit the fuse after the calm before the storm was someone from outside Dong Zhuo’s faction.
“I—I already have a husband!”
“A husband… I see. I made sure none of my maids had husbands, yet you claim to have one. Who is he?”
“G-General Lu.”
To relieve the stress of cleaning up the ruined Han dynasty and managing a faction split into three sides that did nothing but political infighting every day, Dong Zhuo had taken many women. One day, a maid he intended to embrace revealed that she was Lu Bu’s de facto wife. Since Lu Bu had no formal wife back in Bingzhou, it was reasonable to consider them married even without a formal ceremony.
Her eyes were as large and clear as a doe’s. Her long black hair flowed like silk. Her lips were small and beautifully pink, like cherry blossom petals, and beneath them lay a voluptuous figure the likes of which even Dong Zhuo had never seen.
“So she was my son’s woman… Tsk. I have wronged you. Come, sit down.”
“…Pardon?”
“No matter how much I favor women, I would never touch my son’s. Fengxian is gone now—how hard it must have been for you, all alone…”
As the ruler of Luoyang, Dong Zhuo could have had any woman he wanted. This girl’s beauty was indeed overwhelming, but he had no desire to deal with the aftermath of claiming her in a moment of lust. He seated her across the table and called for a maid to bring tea and snacks. Given his personality he would normally have preferred wine, but he was not so tactless as to drink in front of a woman he would not embrace—especially one who had belonged to his dead adopted son.
She’s like a poisonous rose. The term “kingdom-toppling beauty” fits her perfectly.
“Grand Commandant, what will become of me now?”
“What will become of you? You may continue as before, or live off the wealth Fengxian left behind. Do you have some worry?”
“As you must know, Grand Commandant… the mood among those who followed General Lu is growing dangerous.”
The woman took a sip of tea. Her hand trembled violently, revealing the depth of her grief.
“I am well aware. They say I abandoned Fengxian, don’t they?”
“…”
“Listen, daughter-in-law. This Dong Zhongying has many generals under him, but only one did I ever accept as an adopted son. I may be a cunning and treacherous man, but I am not the kind of trash who would abandon his own child.”
He had stationed Lu Bu at Hulao Pass because he trusted the man’s peerless martial prowess. When Lu Bu fell victim to Gongsun Zan’s sorcery, Dong Zhuo had gone to great lengths to summon Zhang Zhongjing—the finest physician in the Central Plains—to treat him. Despite protests from Li Jue and Guo Si, who had followed Lu Bu for years, he had allowed his adopted son to rest until fully recovered. None of that would have been granted if he had not thought of him as a son.
“I don’t know what kind of sorcery could drive my son to madness… but I intend to kill Gongsun Zan and avenge him. If necessary, I will even join hands with that coward in Yizhou.”
“…?! No!”
After his long speech, Dong Zhuo lifted the teacup to moisten his dry lips. The woman sprang up and struck his hand away.
“You crazy—!”
Her movement was not particularly fast, so he still swallowed half a mouthful, but most of the tea spilled down his face.
“What is the meaning of this!”
“That’s not tea—it’s from Yizhou… I… cough! It’s Hwayeomyong—Poison Fire Coral—I brewed it… cough! You mustn’t drink—”
With every cough, red blood stained the woman’s lips. Tears streamed from her eyes. With a blood-smeared finger she weakly traced the character for “Wang.”
“The Grand Commandant… cough! framed General Lu… as having been abandoned… crime… small…”
She collapsed with a thud.
Dong Zhuo, whose massive frame was three times her size, did not fall immediately. Yet the blood clots tickling his throat and the searing, knife-like agony ripping through his stomach made it clear that the loss of consciousness was only a matter of time.
“Someone—! Cough! Anyone… guh… ugh…!”
Dong Zhuo had taken countless women to relieve stress, and whenever he embraced one he dismissed his guards to enjoy private time. As with most men of power, strange and grotesque noises often emerged from his chambers. The guards stationed far from the bedroom simply assumed the current screams were another example of “His Excellency’s refined tastes.”
There was no incident of a wick being stuck in a corpse’s navel as in the original history, but the Poison Fire Coral mushroom—considered one of the most dangerous toxic fungi even in modern times—completely dissolved the proteins in its victim’s stomach, causing necrosis. The victim suffered the sensation of their entire body burning, followed by organ failure, acute sepsis, and blood that seemed to boil. The internally boiling blood tore through vessels throughout the body. Both Dong Zhuo and the woman collapsed, their bodies covered in scars resembling severe burns.
It was a pitifully hollow end for Dong Zhuo, who had united Luoyang and built the strongest faction of the chaotic age. Yet when one considered how he had seized power, the word “retribution” fit perfectly.
---
“Did you confirm that the girl from the Choseon Pavilion attended to Grand Commandant Dong’s bedchamber?”
“…Yes. It was unexpected that he chose tea instead of wine, but… we successfully delivered the water brewed with Hwayeomyong—the Poison Fire Coral mushroom.”
Wang Yun, leader of the Clean Stream faction, holder of the position of Minister of Education, and one of the Three Excellencies, listened to the reports from his scholars and the woman inside a small secret room deep within Luoyang.
“Hmph. A traitor who knows nothing of Confucian duty cannot rule the world for long. If even his adopted son’s wife came to me seeking an opportunity… the regime has already reached its limit. It is a fitting end for the man who fed poison to the Emperor.”
It would have been better if they could have used the imperial poison, but the moment Dong Zhuo purged the Ten Eunuchs he had burned every zookeeper and their beasts alive. They had been forced to pay a fortune for the poisonous mushroom from Yizhou. Unlike the nearly undetectable imperial poison, this one could not hide its bitter taste and scent. Yet unlike the imperial poison—which had a neutralizing agent in the form of mare’s milk wine—the Hwayeomyong was a lethal toxin with no antidote. There was no chance Dong Zhuo would survive after drinking it.
“Minister, shouldn’t you flee now?”
“Do not worry. I have already secured the support of the Imperial Guard and General Huangfu. Without Lu Fengxian, those Bingzhou bumpkins are nothing but a disorganized mob. Once Dong Zhuo’s death is confirmed tomorrow, every scholar and guardsman across the Central Plains will rise with us.”
Though Luoyang had become a paradise for terrorists, Wang Yun—the spiritual pillar of the Clean Stream faction—had suffered no harm. It was true that Dong Zhuo had used the chaos as an excuse to suppress him severely, but even a cornered Dong Zhuo could not attack one of the Three Excellencies without ironclad justification. Wang Yun had turned the hardship he suffered at Dong Zhuo’s hands into a bond that tied the scholars even more tightly to him.
“Exterminate the nine generations of the traitor Dong Zhuo and send word to the State of Yan. We shall welcome His Highness the King of Bohai. The Mandate of Heaven for the Han has not yet ended.”
In reality, it was nothing more than a prettily wrapped declaration that they intended to use the child emperor as a puppet and establish their own “Wu-style autocracy” in place of Dong Zhuo’s. Everyone gathered in the secret room belonged to that “us.” There were no objections. The Confucian Taliban gathered their bows and swords and began converging on the imperial palace.
The sight was caught by the eyes of Bingzhou spies planted throughout Luoyang. Once armies split into two or three factions, planting spies in each other’s ranks was only natural. Upon receiving the report of the scholars’ movements, the Bingzhou forces persuaded the loyalists—represented by Gao Shun—and began marching toward Pingyuan. The Imperial Guard was too busy storming the palace alongside the Clean Stream officials to respond. The Xiliang army was occupied blocking the imperial troops and the Clean Stream scholars and could not stop the Bingzhou soldiers.
Coincidentally, the four city gates began to burn in exactly the same places where Gongsun Zan had set fires on that winter night long ago.