Ye Province (2)
With my course of action settled, I set about drawing up the plan itself first.
"A way to take Ye Province peacefully, you mean?"
"That's right."
My Little Strategist, who had been poring over paperwork as always until I called for her, scrunched up her face ever so slightly.
"Hmmmm... It's not that I don't have a method, but taking it without spilling a single drop of blood? That'll be difficult."
"Hm?"
When I tilted my head, Sima Yi looked back at me with those jewel-bright violet eyes.
"The Yellow Turbans."
"......"
"Those people won't even entertain the notion of negotiation, you know."
Hearing her out, I clutched my head.
So this was what they meant about people with conviction being frightening. Just how rabidly had they foamed at the mouth against the Han all these years, that even Sima Yi judged them a faction diplomacy simply couldn't reach? I'd assumed they might mellow a little with time, but if anything, their venom had only thickened.
"Still, it's not all bad news."
Sima Yi, who had been watching me writhe, picked the thread back up.
"We share a public enemy in the Yellow Turbans, so winning the cooperation of Gong Ju, the Inspector of Ye Province, or Prince Yu Chong of Chen should be easy."
"Mm..."
"If we announce that we've come bearing an imperial edict to resolve their headache for them, welcoming us will be the only option they have."
Having said her piece, Sima Yi flashed a faintly sinister smile.
"And then, as we tour the province, we pin a few crimes on the pair of them and lop off their heads... Ow!"
"There you go again with the weird ideas."
Just as I'd feared, I delivered a firm knuckle-rap to the head of the girl who kept spitting out horrifying schemes. Of course, my punishment did not end there.
"My dear Little Strategist. Didn't I tell you not to say scary things?"
"Hohowa—ahi-heo-hung! I'm nod ah 'widdle'— ahi! ...Stahp... tweating me wike ah kid...! (I am not a 'little' strategist...! Quit treating me like a child...!)"
Even with her cheeks stretched taut between my fingers, this was a girl who always got her point across. Quite unlike Zhuge Liang, who would do nothing but wail "ow, ow" and flounder helplessly the instant I seized her cheeks.
Having confirmed the resentful glare she was leveling at me, I released her cheeks.
"We don't even know what kind of people these two are yet. Insisting we just up and kill them isn't right."
"Tch... But it's still the most certain, complication-free method there is..."
Sima Yi grumbled her reply in a blunt mumble. Rude, if you looked at it one way—but I knew exactly why she had proposed such a scheme in the first place, so instead of scolding her further, I chuckled and patted her head.
"I know. You came up with it because you're worried something might happen to me, aren't you?"
"......"
"And I'm grateful. So—want to grab a bite together on your break?"
"...Hmph. What makes you think that would soothe my anger?"
As I cooed and stroked her head, Sima Yi whipped her face away and declared,
"I want pastries."
"Deal."
Her anger, it seemed, had already settled.
Granted, I had given Sima Yi a noogie and yanked her cheeks, but that hardly meant her plan was a bad one. An army under the General-in-Chief, armed with an imperial edict and claiming to be on official state business, asking leave to enter your land—who in their right mind would bar the door? And if such a person did exist, no one could fault me for adding them to a watchlist as something deeply suspicious.
Honestly, neither Gong Ju, the Inspector of Ye Province, nor Prince Yu Chong worried me much. The Inspector was in no position to accomplish anything on his own anymore, and going by the assessments of everyone around him, the Prince was no madman who would commit some catastrophic outrage in a grab for the throne. What was it they said, again? While other officials did nothing but tear wealth from their people's hides and neglected the business of governing—leaving famine to spread through every corner of the Han—the Prince's territory alone knew nothing but bumper harvests. Not that he had conjured them with sorcery or anything of the sort; it meant he governed his lands fairly and well, so his people worked hard, and the earth rewarded their labor. The number of Yellow Turbans was a telling barometer of how corrupt a region's officials were—and within Chen State, that number was vanishingly small.
If a man of such ability ever raised a banner out of sheer lust for power, things would become a genuine headache. But even that didn't worry me greatly—and why would it? He was a vassal king. A vassal king. In terms of official rank alone, he was a personage so exalted that even I, the General-in-Chief, could hardly treat him carelessly. A vassal king could build an entirely independent power base within the territory the Emperor conferred upon him and live wanting for nothing. The War of the Eight Princes—one of the greatest black marks in all of Chinese history—erupted into a total mess precisely because the court went overboard installing such kings. Even Han Xin, hailed as a peerless pillar of the state, whined and begged to be made a vassal king, and got thoroughly cut down by Emperor Gaozu for it, didn't he? A position lacking neither honor nor power—when someone stirred up trouble from a seat like that, the fault lay with the man, not the seat.
...The real problem was that an awful lot of men turned out to be exactly that kind of trouble. But going by everything I'd heard, Prince Yu Chong was not one of them. Besides, if the plan went smoothly, I would face Yu Chong in person anyway, and it wouldn't be too late to judge him then.
Which left precisely one problem outstanding.
⚔ The Azure Sky is already dead; the Yellow Sky shall rise in its place! ⚔
⚔ When the year of Jiazi arrives, great fortune shall fill the world! ⚔
Chants I had heard more times than I could bear back when I was still sparring with the Black Mountain Bandits in Bing Province. The cry of several hundred thousand commoners who had gathered beneath a banner pledging to burn the Han down and raise a new nation upon its ashes. The siege of Julu, waged under Huangfu Song's command, had been the last time they showed anything like their old vigor—but the name Yellow Turban, which had once shaken the Han to its roots, was carved deep into everyone's memory. At the very least, there was no one left who dismissed them as a mere rabble of bandits. Those who had, after all, all been cleaved neatly in two back when the rebellion first ignited.
An elite force so formidable that even Sima Yi had shaken her head and pronounced diplomacy impossible... And yet, wasn't that very person sitting within my faction right now?
The spiritual anchor who had led the Yellow Turban host. The Great Good Master, Zhang Jue.
A Yellow Turban commander had once come calling at Luoyang, and this was what she had said: "If he is the lord you have chosen, then we have no choice but to follow."
Gwan Hae, if I recalled the name correctly. The commander who, in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, had crossed blades with Guan Yu herself for a good several dozen exchanges. If it were me facing Guan Yu, I'd be quite confident of ending up just like Hua Xiong or Yan Liang—split in a single stroke, clean down the middle. Jeong on one side, Reung on the other.
...Though these days Guan Yu couldn't bring herself to cut down the husband she loves, so I suppose it would have to count as a draw?
At any rate, a fighter of that caliber would have stood a cut above even within the Yellow Turban ranks—yet she had declared she would follow our faction without a flicker of hesitation. Come to think of it, perhaps that was why the Yellow Turban remnants remaining in Ye Province glared at the surrounding powers through gritted teeth. Our own territory, after all, had never once suffered so much as a scratch at the Yellow Turbans' hands. Quite the opposite: back when I was being beaten black and blue by the coalition with Yuan Shu at its head, it was they who set the coalition's main camp ablaze and hammered them hard from behind.
With a faction that friendly, absorbing them should have been entirely within reach—if only I could do it without anyone noticing. If word spread that the General-in-Chief had taken in a group stamped "beyond negotiation," someone was bound to find it strange... Honestly, given the standing I commanded now, it would probably cost me nothing. But there was always the chance of "what if."
"...And so that is why you have come to see me?"
"Yep."
In the private clinic set aside for her use, the brown-haired woman who had been idly sorting medicinal herbs from poisonous ones now paced her kitchen with the ease of long habit. Before long she drew a tin of tea leaves from the cupboard and answered in that calm, unhurried voice of hers.
"I don't imagine it will be all that difficult."
"Why not?"
"Because the Yellow Turbans still active today number only a handful."
Brewing me a cup of tea carrying a warm, fragrant aroma, the woman carried on.
"A few thousand at the very most."
"......"
"In open battle they can bridge the gap in numbers with ambushes and raids, but a siege is beyond them. Which means, in the end, they drift from place to place with no fixed home. And if the Inspector of Ye Province had the skill to run them down, an incident would have broken out long ago."
The woman who had once warred against Dong Zhuo and the Han's punitive armies for years on end—and won more than a few of those battles—smiled softly.
So, in other words: tell a decent lie, and nobody would notice a thing. Then again, a few thousand was hardly a negligible number either. But I supposed that in a land where the baseline unit of warfare was ten thousand men, it counted as relatively few. When the Yellow Turban rebellion had first erupted, their numbers had swollen into the hundreds of thousands, so from Zhang Jue's perspective, a few thousand probably looked like pocket change.
Waiting for my tea to cool, I tossed out another question.
"And Prince Yu Chong?"
"Hmm... More capable than the Inspector, but his situation is much the same."
Zhang Jue explained that the Prince devoted himself above all to protecting his own lands and people, and thus never moved proactively.
So he wouldn't strike first—but the instant anyone laid a hand on him, he'd wipe out their entire line. That about covered it, didn't it?
"In that case, we simply pretend to sweep the whole of Ye Province while absorbing them as we go."
"Indeed."
With the plan now settled to perfection, I gave a few satisfied nods and raised the cup set before me to my lips.
"......"
Hold on. Why is this so bitter?
Did she put something in here besides tea leaves?
"I experimented with adding a few medicinal herbs said to be good for the body. And your review, if I may ask?"
Astonishing, that something loaded down with medicinal herbs could still smell so fragrant. Watching Zhang Jue ask her question with such mischievous delight, I put on a look that said, well, that's certainly novel.