A Capable Minister in Peace, a Cunning Hero in Chaos (7)
I had spent a long time — stretching all the way back — agonizing over how to handle Cao Cao. Not in the sense of debating whether she was enemy or ally; I mean quite literally wondering how best to put her talents to use.
Would it be best to keep her running as a force under my command, the way she had been until now? Or should I absorb her faction outright and operate it myself, even if that came with a bit of friction?
In Romance of the Three Kingdoms game terms, it came down to this. Would I appoint her to a Second Legion and run her territory as a vassal state? Or would I, as the sovereign, personally inspect and manage every last detail myself?
In a game, the limits of the AI meant I would watch a vassal for a few turns before my blood boiled and I demoted them to hauling supplies. But this was reality, plain and simple — which meant, at the very least, I would never find myself raging, why does that idiot keep bungling everything?!
Precisely because it was reality, however, there were things that demanded even more care. Namely: looking to the future, was it truly right to heap that much power onto a single person?
This was not me worrying that Cao Cao might one day raise a rebellion against me. If she had genuinely set her mind to it, I would have been stabbed in the back so many times by now that my skull would have cracked open.
Then was I worried that a descendant wielding enormous inherited power might cause trouble someday — a repeat of the War of the Eight Princes, one of the great black marks in Chinese history?
That wasn't it either. I mean, they were the Eight Princes, weren't they? How could anyone who wasn't a king start a war of princes?
Hadn't I brought this up before? Thanks to the Oath of the White Horse, sworn by Emperor Gaozu Liu Bang together with the talents under his command, no one outside the Liu clan could ever ascend to a throne. After Gaozu's death, Empress Lü rose to the regency and seized the reins of government — and Lü Zhi, numbered among the three great villainesses of Chinese history, appointed her own Lü kinsmen as kings on private whim, only for her entire clan to be later wiped out by founding heroes of the Han like Zhou Bo and Chen Ping. That is how unbreakable the discipline surrounding the title of king was — four hundred years of Han history's worth.
It wasn't for nothing that Xun Yu and the other great ministers had opposed Cao Cao when she tried to take the seat of King of Wei.
They say history is humanity's notebook of wrong answers. When the answer key is spelled out in bold — do not do this — there is no reason to go copying the mistake. It wasn't as if thorns would sprout in my mouth for failing to sit in some lofty seat. If anything, given half a chance I would have tossed the General-in-Chief's office right out the window.
The Han, after all, was never a feudal state. It ran on the commandery-county system: the entire realm divided into smaller units called commanderies and counties, each ruled directly by appointed officials serving fixed terms at the emperor's pleasure. Appointed officials. Fixed terms. Anyone who had lived in the modern era would find that administrative structure awfully familiar. Swap "commanderies and counties" for provinces and districts, trade the word "emperor" for something a touch more modern — and, ta-da. There it is: the political structure we all know and love.
In other words, no one could pass an office like Provincial Governor or General-in-Chief down to their children on the strength of bloodline alone — just as the mayor of Seoul cannot will the mayor's office to her son or daughter. And if anyone tried? The emperor, sovereign of the realm, would personally brand them a traitor for daring to challenge the throne and exterminate their three clans to the last man. A structure that concentrated every shred of power at the very center. Just think of Europe, a hot mess of feudalism clear through the Middle Ages.
Seen in that light, Qin Shi Huang — the first to introduce the commandery-county system back in antiquity — really was a capable man. The problem was that he started going quietly mad as he aged. What is it about power, honestly...
The causes of the War of the Eight Princes were simple enough. The biggest was some bizarre, ugly woman kneading the state like dough however she pleased, but Sima Yan deserved plenty of blame too — the man who revived feudalism on the logic that we are not like Wei, the dynasty we destroyed, and installed kings over every region. Well, he certainly did accomplish something different: he produced the Five Barbarians and Sixteen Kingdoms, China's single greatest historical catastrophe. Looking at what happened after Sima Yan died, Wei starts to look like paradise itself.
If power struggles break out even under the commandery-county system, it means the emperor was monumentally incompetent — like Sima Yan just now, or Er Shi, the Second Emperor who inherited Qin Shi Huang's throne. And that, well, was hardly a domain I could do anything about. All anyone could do was wait in the afterlife with a club at the ready and beat each incompetent emperor within an inch of their ghostly life the moment they crossed over. Emperor Ling — who more than earns the title of worst emperor of Later Han — is probably getting absolutely wailed on by Emperor Guangwu right about now. In a world where every manner of god and demon actually exists, you think thrashing a ghost in the afterlife is impossible?
Anyway — I didn't have to worry about some incompetent commander botching the work, nor about power struggles erupting in later generations, thanks to the commandery-county system. So what exactly was the problem I kept worrying over?
Simple. Cao Cao's personality — the fact that no one could ever predict when, how, or where it would snap.
Cao Cao Mengde. Leadership, martial prowess, intellect, statecraft, charisma... She was, quite literally, a genius with no weak point anywhere. Her command sense — dragging victory out of one disadvantageous battle after another — goes without saying. Even with her home base seized by Lü Bu, she turned around and drove him out; even against Yuan Shao's forces, which outnumbered hers several times over, she pulled off a comeback victory. And her martial might? When soldiers mutinied in her camp, she cut down dozens of them single-handedly with a sword. There is even a record of Cao Cao bagging more than sixty pheasants on a single hunt, so she was evidently as deadly with a bow as with a blade.
Her intellect couldn't be left out either. After the Battle of Guandu, when Yuan Xi and Yuan Shang fled at last to Gongsun Kang, who ruled Liaodong, Cao Cao predicted that pressing Gongsun Kang would only drive him to ally with the two brothers — so she deliberately turned her army for home, letting Gongsun Kang nervously weigh his options until he killed them himself. Beyond that, there was the statesmanship to govern the entire vast territory of Wei, and the charisma that won the loyalty of brilliant talents like Zhang Liao and Xu Huang... Judged on ability alone, Cao Cao was the equal of Emperor Guangwu, the ultimate munchkin emperor of Later Han. It's not as if she shows up in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games with a perfectly filled pentagon of stats for nothing.
So why on earth did a person like that fail to unify the realm?
The reason was very simple. The psycho streak in Cao Cao's personality — the one that surfaced now and then. No, let's be honest: surfaced quite often.
Just when everything seemed to be going smoothly, something in her would abruptly flip, and she would cause a catastrophic accident. It happened more than once.
The Xuzhou Massacre. Do I really need to elaborate? The singular event that branded Cao Cao a villain in the eyes of the world. Worse, it was carried out twice — proof that this was no spur-of-the-moment act of rage, but the planned slaughter of hundreds of thousands for no better reason than venting her anger. That was the terrifying shape of Cao Cao's character. It became the reason Zhuge Liang and Lu Su, both gentry of Xuzhou, turned their backs on her — and above all, it handed her lifelong rival Liu Bei a justification to keep standing back up against her, again and again. In the end, this very sin brought her crushing defeat at the Battle of Red Cliffs. Karma, coming home to roost.
And there were plenty more anecdotes laying Cao Cao's character bare. Xun Yu, who had poured out endless effort on her behalf, opposed Cao Cao's bid to become King of Wei — and for that single act, she earned Cao Cao's hatred and was driven to drink poison and end her own life. The moment Cao Cao judged someone's usefulness spent, she discarded them without mercy, no matter how devoted they had been. Ruthless, through and through. Facing death, Cao Cao said the only thing she regretted was losing her eldest son, Cao Ang. In other words, she felt no guilt whatsoever for the countless innocent lives she had erased along the way.
Even now, I thought it was a breathtakingly precise description of Cao Cao. I ought to have my own face read one of these days, if the chance ever came.
A giant bomb that could go off at any moment, in any place, in service of who-knew-what grand design. That was why I had kept turning over and over in my head how to manage the one and only flaw Cao Cao possessed: her personality.
After all that agonizing, I arrived at a single decision. I would keep her at my side and tame her personally... Ahem. Manage her personally, I meant.
Cao Cao turned oddly docile whenever I was around, so I intended to make use of that. Even now, formidable women like Seo Yeo and Lü Bu were being kept nicely in check simply because I was there, weren't they? In game terms, I planned to faithfully play the role of the inhibitor. Of course, the moment the inhibitor falls, every minion in the lane turns into a super minion... and honestly, picturing that was a little terrifying.
"Um..."
"Hmm?"
I was still deep in my thoughts when a timid voice spoke up nearby. It was one of the little-chick strategists who, like Sima Yi and Zhuge Liang, had grown by leaps and bounds since the day I first met them. Pang Tong was gazing up at me with those fresh, bright eyes of hers, and I smiled faintly as I asked,
"What is it? Short on money for books again?"
"N-no! It's not that!"
Huh. Not it, then. The way she kept sneaking glances at me looked exactly like her old please buy me something routine. Blushing, Pang Tong hesitated once, then finally threw her question at me.
"Th-the General of Agile Cavalry..."
"..."
"Could you tell me why you gave Cao Cao the seat of General of Agile Cavalry...?"
"Ah, that?"
Apparently there had been all sorts of talk about me handing Cao Cao an office far too high. Fair enough — it was a shocking appointment. Cao Cao's original office... what was it again, General Who Conquers the East? General Who Conquers the South? From there, I had vaulted her clean over the four directional generals, the General of the Guard, and the General of Chariots and Cavalry — a staggering promotion. If I was the number one of the military, Cao Cao had just become number two.
I nodded along, thinking it a perfectly natural question.
"If you're going to hand out a title, might as well hand it out big."
"..."
"And she has the ability to match."
In the original history, Cao Cao was a person who could have gone beyond king to become emperor outright. She simply chose not to. You need only look at how Cao Pi, who succeeded her, received the throne as an 'abdication' from Emperor Xian. She made the imperial house a puppet and yet, in the end, never actually seized the throne itself. Sima Yi must have found that deeply moving, because she acted in much the same way years later.
"I see..."
Apparently unsatisfied with my answer, Pang Tong began glancing little by little behind her. ...No matter how I looked at it, she seemed to be checking whether someone was watching. Could someone else actually be there?
"Hmm..."
"...?!"
The moment I started walking, step by deliberate step, Pang Tong jumped in fright. Someone was hiding there, wasn't they. I looked toward the corner on the right, and well, what do you know.
"...Ah."
Our little tsundere strategist had been eavesdropping on the entire conversation. I let out a short laugh and addressed Sima Yi.
"What, were you jealous?"
"N-no, I wasn't!"
Uh-huh. Sure you weren't. What could possibly be so sensitive that she had to eavesdrop like that? She'd been through her coming-of-age ceremony and all, but I supposed a kid was still a kid. At this rate, Zhuge Liang was starting to feel like the most grown-up of the lot...
Thud!
"Ow!"
What now. So you were here too.
"..."
"..."
I held my silence, staring down at the little white-haired chick who had tried to sneak away and instead flopped flat onto the ground. It was the first time I had ever seen Zhuge Liang get caught out like that.