Cabbage and Tofu Miso Soup Is Hard to Resist
It's hard to resist miso soup loaded with cabbage and tofu.
"Strike down the minions of the traitor Dong Zhuo! Dong Zhuo, Li Jue, Guo Si, Li Ru, and Dong Yue—these five are great criminals who poisoned the Grand General and plotted to overthrow the dynasty! Do not let them meet an easy death!"
"Gao Shi, Wang Fang, Wu Bu, Hu Che'er, Wu Xi! These five oppressed the common people and the scholars who followed the Confucian way on Dong Zhuo's orders! Execute them on sight and take their heads!"
"Dong Bai, Dong Min, Dong Yue, Dong Huang! These four are corrupt officials who received their positions solely because they were relatives of Dong Zhuo and engaged in extortion and exploitation! For the sake of a peaceful era, execute them all!"
With Dong Zhuo's death confirmed, Minister of Education Wang Yun stormed the palace with tens of thousands of the Cheongryupa and began sweeping away every political rival who wasn't part of the Clean Stream faction. Not only the Takryupa who had lived by leeching off the major power holders, but also the eunuchs newly selected out of necessity after the purge of the Sipseangsi, and the maternal relatives including Empress Dowager He and Empress Dowager Dong were all branded as political enemies—that is, "treacherous rebels who conspired with Dong Zhuo to plunge the Han Dynasty into chaos." They were imprisoned, wanted notices were issued for the Xiliang army, and troops were dispatched.
"Minister! It is true that the Dirty Stream faction joined hands with Dong Zhuo, but if we arrest every high official right now, the Han Dynasty will collapse! Please consider the bigger picture in your governance!"
"Silence! When you pull weeds, you must rip them out by the roots! Set out for Xiliang at once alongside General Huangfu's army and exterminate Dong Zhuo's entire clan!"
"Minister! You must not. If you raise an army in spring, there will be no peasants left to tend the fields!"
Surprisingly, Minister of Education Wang Yun came from a warlord background. When the Yellow Turban Rebellion erupted, he had taken up bow and sword like most of the Clean Stream faction and fought for the Han's ancestral shrines. With that merit he entered Luoyang. After arriving in the capital, he slowly worked his way toward the center of power through the usual mutual back-scratching common among the Clean Stream scholars. He rose high enough to offer opinions directly to Emperor Ling, and at the same time as the Sipseangsi chaos, he received the recommendation of the Clean Stream faction and was appointed as one of the Three Dukes—the Minister of Education.
Of course it had been a measure to counter the tyranny of the Ten Eunuchs, and once Dong Zhuo suppressed their rebellion the post became little more than an empty honor. Still, only five years earlier Wang Yun had been a general who drew his sword and strode across battlefields.
A general's profession allowed only those who never missed an opportunity to survive, and Wang Yun was a man who never missed an opportunity. He recruited Huangfu Song, Wu Guang, and He Jin's son He Xian, secured the backing of the imperial guards, and led the scholars who had hoarded resentment through long years of humiliation and oppression. They stormed the palace and purged Dong Zhuo's minions one by one.
"I know that! But the chance to uproot the traitors is now! We can import grain from the State of Yan! Worry about that later and pour every effort into crushing the traitor Dong Zhuo!"
The fortress line serving as the border with Sili Province and Pingyuan Commandery had seen its primary phase completed, yet work continued without pause—demolishing sections of the wooden palisades and rebuilding them with stone and sandbag ramparts. The gaps between fortresses were linked by trench lines, and the empty ground between those trenches had been turned into military farms planted with turnips and soybeans. Turnips were essentially the same plant as cabbage, differing only slightly in appearance, so both root and leaves were edible. Boil them together with tofu, eggs, and green onions and you had a perfectly decent meal. Add carbohydrates like blood rice or millet and it became genuinely delicious army chow. Depending on the season there might be mackerel, salmon, or hunted game, but without refrigeration the limits were obvious. Tofu, which could be dried and stored for over a year, remained our army's primary protein source.
Add a spoonful of miso and it would taste exactly like home. I couldn't make real miso, so I had to make do with fish sauce for seasoning.
"It's a shame about the miso, but this is still pretty good…"
"Miso? Gao Balgi eats that stuff all the time, doesn't he?"
"What? Hey! Balgi!"
"It's Gao Balgi. What do you want now?"
"You know about miso?"
"Strain the broth from the Joseon sauce and you get soy sauce. The leftover dregs become miso. Why are you asking all of a sudden?"
"Then do you have any extra miso?"
"I do have some, but the men complain about the smell so I only keep a little in my own quarters. Is there a problem?"
"No. Don't you think it would taste great if we stirred some into this?"
"That… is true. But is it all right to do this right in front of the Bingzhou troops?"
"What do you mean? They came here to survive. The least we can do is feed them. Let's not be stingy with our own kind."
Yes, the reason I was sitting here rambling about army rations was because the roughly ten thousand Bingzhou soldiers who had defected to Pingyuan were devouring the provisions in the warehouse like ravenous ghosts. Of course, with the granaries of You Province and Ji Province producing steady supplies, an extra ten thousand mouths wouldn't break the logistics system. Still, an entire division had fallen out of the sky, so the adjutants responsible for supply and administration had surrendered their leave and were now buried under mountains of paperwork, clutching their heads.
"Now that you've mostly eaten, why don't you tell me what kind of mess happened in Luoyang?"
"…Grand Commandant Dong was poisoned to death. The assassin was said to be General Lu's wife… but the whole situation feels off."
"Feels off?"
"Yes. It is true that after General Lu's death his wife harbored a grudge against Grand Commandant Dong… but a woman who held no high office, merely a minor palace position, could not possibly have evaded the eyes of both the Commandant and his guards to administer poison. Also, the gathering of General Huangfu and Minister Wang's party the night before the death was even announced seemed suspicious…"
Poisoning… poisoning. Dong Zhuo had been poisoned…
It was a strange story. Dong Zhuo was a warlord who at the very least knew how to protect his own health. The Han Dynasty was not some fledgling nation only a few decades old; of course there were established procedures for detecting poison in food. And a man who had become the Clean Stream scholars' personal Antichrist could not have been ignorant of the danger. Lu Bu's wife was no professional assassin. The poisons an ordinary person could obtain and use were limited to arsenic, lily of the valley, or pufferfish toxin at best. Arsenic could be detected with a silver spoon. Lily of the valley was banned throughout Sili Province and therefore unobtainable. Luoyang, far from the sea, could not easily acquire fresh pufferfish. And even if infrastructure existed to refine pufferfish poison, if such an organization already existed it would be far cheaper and more reliable to simply hire a proper assassin.
Yet instead of using an assassin, a woman who had been little more than a low-level secretary had swallowed poison alongside Dong Zhuo and died? After bypassing every poison-detection ritual handed down through generations in the Luoyang imperial palace? An impossible tale.
"There must be a separate mastermind who procured the poison—one in a high position with deep access inside the imperial court."
"Exactly! Someone like that old bastard Wang Yun would have connections across the country and plenty of money squirreled away from his official career. Obtaining that… Hwayeomyong (Poison Fire Coral mushroom) wouldn't have been difficult at all."
"Hwayeomyong?"
"Ah, one of my subordinates is from Yizhou. He says even the local mushroom hunters refuse to touch it. One bite and you die covered in burn-like marks all over your body… and the traces matched the condition of Grand Commandant Dong's corpse perfectly…"
The man named Zhang Liao, who was cheerfully unpacking his entire collection of stories despite having surrendered, gave off a rather pleasant impression. His hair carried a slight bright-brown tint, and his face wore an affable smile. In a word, he reminded me of a talk-show host from an American television program. Beside him, Gao Shun sat quietly with the exact opposite aura. His black hair was streaked here and there with white, yet his face still looked youthful. While not as impressive as mine or my master's, his physique was clearly well-trained. Every inch of skin visible outside his clothes was covered in scars, and his pitch-black eyes evoked a calm night sea. How to describe it… he had the air of the quiet, competent platoon leader who simply does his job well—the kind every unit seems to have one of.
"You're Gao Shun, correct?"
"…Yes."
"From the look of you, I doubt you'd switch your loyalty easily once given. So why surrender to me, the man who killed Lu Bu?"
"…"
"Not willing to speak?"
"It was the only way I could protect General Lu's honor."
"Honor… It wasn't a duel. I shot him with an arrow from the wall. Hardly an honorable battle."
"…Even so, Your Excellency did not desecrate General Lu's corpse. Wang Yun would have dragged the body out and hacked it apart without hesitation if it meant satisfying his grudge. The only path that allowed us to properly collect the remains of both General Lu and Lady Diaochan was to come to you."
"That's right! That rotten Wang Yun dragged out Grand Commandant Dong's corpse and chopped it up with an axe! No matter what kind of man Dong Zhuo was, how could anyone insult a dead body like that?"
"I perform accompanying executions myself quite often, you know?"
To win a battle quickly with minimal casualties, breaking enemy morale was paramount. Without guns or bombs, instilling terror was essential. In that sense, the "Mysteries of the Human Body Lecture" was content rich in both violence and propaganda value, a highly effective tactic against bandits or irregular forces. If the "mystery" old man Wang Yun had wielded had been sufficient, these two would have had their spirits broken and joined the imperial army instead of surrendering to me. Instead, his actions bred resentment and drove them into my arms. In the end, the old man's plan had failed.
"We heard about that. But wasn't that deliberate cruelty meant to minimize unnecessary casualties? It's completely different from hacking a corpse with an axe out of personal spite."
"Yes. As General Wenyuan says, it was neither tactics nor politics. It was nothing more than an explosion of inferiority complex from a man pushed aside by Dong Zhuo and kept from the forefront of politics—an insult to the dead. There was no visual violence, no cruelty capable of breaking a person's will. Li Jue and Guo Si, now labeled traitors, have not surrendered; they have retreated to Chang'an to bide their time. Wang Yun is conscripting peasants who should be farming and using them as arrow fodder. Yuan Shu of Jingzhou cannot even overcome his own greed and is already plotting to seize Jiangdong. Liu Yan of Yizhou is nothing but a coward cowering inside Pa촉. I was never Dong Zhuo's subordinate—I served General Lu. As General Lu's man and a general of Han, the only way to oppose Minister Wang's tyranny is to come to Your Excellency."
"…Complicated. We're heading to Liaodong, so only one of you will accompany me. Go prepare to repeat everything you just said."
"Are we going to meet His Highness the King of Bohai?"
"That too. This is not a matter I can decide alone, so I'll need to hold a meeting with my staff. You also need to manage your troops, so one of you stays behind to look after the men while the other follows. Any objections?"