Consolidation (1)
The march took far longer than I had anticipated.
No man can walk all day long without rest and without a single meal, after all.
So whenever our route brought us through a city, I halted briefly to give the soldiers time to stretch out their stiffened bodies.
"S-so, you truly did bring the Nanman tribes under your banner."
Yi Province was in turmoil, thrown into chaos by external incursions and infighting among the great clans. In Chengdu, the province's central city, Liu Tan had been doing his best to hold things together—and the moment he laid eyes on Meng Huo standing near me, unmistakable shock flashed across his face.
Feeling a touch mischievous, I addressed Liu Yan's second son.
"Mm. Does that mean you did not trust me, then?"
"…No, my lord! How could I ever entertain such a thought!"
At my question, Liu Tan jolted in fright and dropped flat to the ground before me.
I chuckled and helped the prostrate man back to his feet.
"It was a joke. Don't take it to heart."
"……"
"Still, that little display just now was rather rash of you."
In this land, where etiquette and formality were taken with the utmost seriousness, what subordinate anywhere would look at a superior returning from a campaign and blurt out, Whoa, you actually pulled it off?
I could say this with confidence: had this been the Imperial Palace, Liu Tan would have landed himself squarely in the Emperor's disfavor on the spot.
I patted him on the shoulder a few times.
"I understand your surprise well enough. But from now on, keep such thoughts behind your teeth."
"Th-thank you, my lord."
Liu Tan lowered his head slightly, a dazed expression on his face.
Well, he was still green and fumbling for lack of experience—I supposed it fell to me to be understanding about it.
After exchanging a round of pleasantries with Liu Tan, I moved on to the real business at hand.
"Our soldiers are exhausted from the long march. Would it be permissible for us to remain here for a few days?"
"This land was, from the beginning, the possession of the Han."
Liu Tan turned the matter over in his head for a moment before answering in a deferential voice.
"How could I, of all people, behave as though I were the master of Yi Province while Her Majesty still lives?"
"Hm…"
"I shall devote my every effort to seeing that the Grand General wants for nothing during your stay."
Huh.
He's actually pretty good at this.
I slid my eyes sideways toward Zhuge Liang, and she, catching my glance, gave a calm, measured nod.
During the march, Zhuge Liang had requested a private word with me and made a single proposition.
'My lord, in the interest of leaving nothing to chance—why not test Liu Tan's true colors?'
'Test him, you say?'
'Yes. Liu Tan surrendered only because the situation left him no other choice. If he judges the circumstances favorable once more, he may well shut his mouth like his father did and set himself up as an emperor.'
So if the odds looked decent, he might go the way of his father—clam up and play sovereign. It was not an impossible scenario, and it did nag at me a little.
I spoke to the white-haired little strategist.
'That's fine, but how exactly do you propose I test him?'
'I will render the judgment myself. You need only follow what is written here, my lord.'
Ugh. Memorizing lines is poison to me.
But when our little strategist asks so earnestly, I can hardly refuse.
So, following Zhuge Liang's script, I threw myself into the lines with all the devotion of Liu Bei weeping her heartfelt tears.
…For all that resolve, though, what Zhuge Liang had written down amounted to barely a line or two.
'A man betrays the intentions he harbors in his heart without ever meaning to. Given a clue—his expression, his bearing, the atmosphere of the room—it is not difficult at all to read the verdict.'
Zhuge Liang, hiding the lower half of her face behind her White Feather Fan, smiled thinly as she watched me perform.
…Even with clues, that's not exactly easy, is it?
Zhuge Liang, Kongming.
Both in the official history and the romance, he was a master of psychological warfare who could see straight through to whatever a man was thinking.
When an enemy spied an opening and attacked, Zhuge Liang had already anticipated it, and they were beaten back in turn; when they shrieked enough, enough! and fled pell-mell, he had prepared yet another trap to snag them by the collar and keep pounding away without mercy.
There was a reason Zhuge Liang never lost a single open-field battle—field engagements, that is, apart from sieges, urban combat, and fortress assaults.
Granted, there was the mountaineer who ignored orders, climbed a mountain, and botched the Northern Expeditions, and there was that master of defense who popped up out of nowhere and forced a strategic withdrawal—but never once had he suffered a crushing defeat on the scale of Chibi or Yiling.
Normally, an army reeling in retreat suffers its greatest losses at exactly that moment—yet even then, he was capable of cutting down an enemy commander.
Even Sima Yi, the final victor of the Three Kingdoms, had been so thoroughly trounced by Zhuge Liang that the moment anything smelled faintly suspicious, his first instinct was to be on guard.
When Zhuge Liang flung the gates wide open and plucked at his zither while running the Empty Fort stratagem, Sima Yi muttered this is Kongming's trap and slunk quietly away; and when the perpetually overworked Zhuge Liang seemed to have finally died of exhaustion and he charged in—only for a wooden effigy of Zhuge Liang to appear—he nearly leapt out of his skin and bolted for his life.
At this point, one almost suspects he had some manner of mind control running.
In any case, I tested Liu Tan as Zhuge Liang had proposed, and his answer appeared to clear her bar for approval.
But what would have happened if he had failed to clear it?
"……"
I suspect things would not have gone pleasantly for him.
This was the same Zhuge Liang who, dealing with the corrupt inspector Zhang Song, had instructed Gan Ning to relieve him of his head under the pretense of an accident.
Would she really leave untouched a man who, mishandled, could ignite an uprising across all of Yi Province?
No doubt she would have scattered Liu Tan's followers to posts in every direction, seized the title of Provincial Governor outright, and reassigned him to some meaningless sinecure in the middle of nowhere, erasing his political influence entirely.
Whether to call that a mercy, I couldn't quite say, but it seemed Liu Tan would at least keep the governorship.
Though he would never get away with what Liu Yan had done—passing the title down within his own family.
"Then I leave Yi Province in your hands."
"O-of course, my lord…."
Liu Tan, utterly unaware that he had just been tested, could only answer in a voice tight with nerves.
…So now, just as in Nanzhong, am I supposed to go touring all of Yi Province while the soldiers rest?
God, give me strength.
A land being too vast was its own kind of exhausting.
"……"
After parting ways with Liu Tan, I granted the others free time and set off without a moment's hesitation.
Because, as it happened, someone had come to mind.
Before long I arrived at a certain estate, where I caught one of the maidservants loitering in plain sight.
"You there. Would you tell the master of this house that the Grand General has come to call?"
"Y-yes? Eh?"
The maidservant, who had been leisurely sweeping the courtyard with a broom, turned utterly flustered the moment she recognized that the very architect of Yi Province's recent uproar had appeared in person before her.
Her whole body had frozen stiff—her mind had, quite literally, stopped working.
It's the exact face a soldier makes when some senior official on a surprise inspection shows up without a word of warning.
"……"
"……"
Several seconds crawled past.
"U-understood! P-please wait just a moment!"
The moment the maidservant registered that the eyes of Lü Bu, standing beside me, were anything but ordinary, she abandoned her broom where it lay and scurried off in a panic.
I gazed after the poor, masterless, forsaken broom and spoke.
"Why do you have to scare people like that?"
One wrong move, and the household might conclude I had come here with hostility toward its master.
If that happened, things would take on a shape very far from my original intentions, wouldn't they?
But Lü Bu snorted haughtily, as if she bore not a shred of fault in the matter.
"Hmph. What am I supposed to do when I don't like the way that idiot keeps gawking at Jeong Reung?"
"……"
"And the reason's obvious, isn't it? Anyone with eyes can see she's fallen for you."
Good grief. So that's one way to read it, huh.
The love-blindness here was blind with a capital B, and I pressed a hand to my forehead for a moment.
"You're spouting nonsense again. How many times have I told you not to jump to conclusions?"
"Umbebebebek?!"
Pinched on the cheek for the first time in a while, Lü Bu let out a truly bizarre noise.
That soft, endlessly stretchy feel, like a fresh rice cake pulled taut—still exactly as I remembered.
Embarrassed to be seen like this out in the open, Lü Bu spoke in a hurried, garbled rush.
"Nho, nho ha ard! Nhi ha nalnahehd ha!(No, let go! I was wrong!)"
"…Well, if you say so."
I lingered on that strangely addictive texture for a good while before finally letting go, and Lü Bu, kneading her flushed red cheeks, muttered under her breath.
"Nnngh… no matter how I think about it, I was right…."
"……"
Seo Yeo, who had been watching the whole scene in silence, gave a slow nod as if she, too, agreed with Lü Bu's opinion.
No, you two are the strange ones here.
From where they stood, was I somehow the peerless beauty Yu Ji of the Farewell My Concubine, or the kingdom-toppling Diaochan herself?
They say love blinds a person—and with Seo Yeo and Lü Bu, the condition seemed to be exceptionally advanced.
Apparently the standard for the world's one and only peerless beauty had been permanently staked on me.
"…You all seem to be on very good terms. How reassuring."
"Hm?"
At a familiar voice drifting from nearby, I turned my head.
A woman of perfectly ordinary looks—in a world positively drowning in beauties, that alone made her remarkable.
"This humble Zhang Song pays her respects to you, my lord."
The strategist who, holding up the fate of Inspector Zhang Jue as an object lesson, had pressed Liu Tan toward surrender, bowed before me with practiced courtesy.