The System (4)
"So, if I understand you correctly... you wish me to sit in the examiner's seat and unearth talents for you?"
"That's right."
I turned my gaze on the man who had posed the question, blinking at me with wide, guileless eyes.
Bang Deok-gong.
Uncle of Pang Tong, and a celebrated scholar whose name rang throughout Jing Province.
He was the one who had hung the moniker 'Master Water Mirror' on Sima Hui, and the one who, seeing worth in a child no one else had bothered to notice, had named the young Pang Tong 'Fledgling Phoenix.' They even say it was Bang Deok-gong who first called Zhuge Liang the 'Sleeping Dragon.'
Look at all that — how could anyone deny this was exactly the talent I'd been searching for? A discerning eye, a quick mind, and never once a whiff of wielding power for private gain.
"Hahh..."
See that? Even now, with quite the formidable amount of power newly in his grasp, he looked less delighted than put upon. Even a casual once-over revealed the reluctance written plainly across his face and bearing. And yet he lost not a shred of dignity — which, I had to admit, was rather marvelous to behold.
Just then, having evidently been racking his brains for a way out, Bang Deok-gong opened his mouth.
"I am, truly, most honored by the offer. But rather than a man of such meager ability as myself, might it not be wiser to seek out someone better suited to the task...?"
"I see."
Not exactly an answer I hadn't anticipated. When we had first met, after all, he had plunked down a single Pang Tong and tried to slink away before I could ask for anything more.
"Well, then. If you insist, there's nothing to be done."
Naturally, I — who had come prepared for precisely this situation — let my disappointment show, thick and unmistakable, as I murmured,
"I had been planning to give your request to retire some very serious consideration, you see — assuming things went well and a great flood of talent came pouring in."
"It has long been my dream to unearth talents hidden away from officialdom, just as my dear friend does."
That was an awfully quick about-face, wasn't it? Well... I had dangled that plump, appetizing bait precisely because I knew what he was like. Still — 'my dear friend,' was it? Surely he didn't mean Sima Hui, the man famed as the Master Water Mirror. With someone like him overseeing the examinations, I doubted I would need to worry about recruiting talent for at least a few years.
"Um... General-in-Chief? There is one thing I find myself curious about..."
"Mm? What is it?"
"Might I ask how many this 'great flood of talent' is meant to number?"
Oh, come on. He had already spotted the trap I had dug for him. Sharp as ever, I suppose.
To Bang Deok-gong's careful question, I answered with a smile.
"Hmm. How many do you think?"
"..."
"It might help to recall the old tale of Han Gaozu and the scholar hailed as 'without equal in all the realm.'"
At the hint, delivered alongside my little example, Bang Deok-gong murmured under his breath.
"...Dada-ikseon."
The more, the better. Even moderns with only the haziest grasp of the Chu–Han struggle knew at least this much.
It came from a question Liu Bang — the man who crushed Xiang Yu, the Hegemon-King of Western Chu, and founded the Han dynasty — once put to Han Xin.
"In your estimation, how many soldiers could I command?"
"At the very most, some hundred thousand."
"...And you? How many could you lead?"
"For me, the more the better."
Doesn't that sound just a touch insolent, heard all the way through like that? In truth, Han Xin was the sort who blundered through life with zero situational awareness, whining all the while about how he deserved a kingship — so even if the story had ended right there, with one more stack added to his purge counter, no one would have found it strange. Relations between the two were already plunging toward rock bottom when this exchange took place, after all... The man had been convicted on one treason charge after another and stripped of his royal title, thrown all the way back to square one.
And yet Han Xin, uncharacteristically, added one more remark and brought the anecdote to a surprisingly heartwarming close.
"Your Majesty may be no general of soldiers — but you possess the gift of a general of generals."
"That is surely Heaven's own doing, and no ordinary man could ever hope to stand against Your Majesty."
And Liu Bang, utterly delighted by this towering compliment...
Keep saying 'Liu Bang, Liu Bang' and it starts to sound like something I shouldn't be saying out loud. Let's just call him Han Gaozu.
Anyway, the story goes that Han Gaozu, having heard this extravagant assessment, threw back his head and laughed.
Still, you had to hand it to Han Gaozu — Han Xin had rated him at a hundred thousand men, after all. In fact, when Ying Bu raised his banner in revolt, declaring that he too would have a crack at the imperial throne, it was after Han Xin and Peng Yue were dead — and with Han Gaozu grown old and racked with illness, Ying Bu boldly proclaimed that no one alive could stand in his way. And yet that same Ying Bu took a thrashing from Liu Bang, fled to Jiangdong, and died to a friend's betrayal.
Truth be told, Han Gaozu was a genuinely capable man — he had only been pummeled until his eyes swelled shut because his opponent happened to be Xiang Yu. Oh, sure, the brilliant chancellor Xiao He kept feeding him supplies and soldiers from the rear like a man playing with cheat codes, but could anyone without real ability have held out against Xiang Yu at all? Xiang Yu was a human slaughter-chariot; point him at an incompetent foe and he could grind hundreds of thousands into paste in a single night. Han Gaozu learned that the hard way, letting his guard down once and losing 560,000 men to a mere 30,000 at the Battle of Pengcheng.
Back to the matter at hand: Bang Deok-gong, having caught my meaning, had gone faintly pale.
Reading my face, he ventured with great care,
"I... upon further reflection, I fear my abilities would indeed prove insufficient."
"In other words, you're telling me you lied?"
"Gah—!"
"How should I put this... Yes. I'm deeply disappointed."
At that light application of pressure, cold sweat began streaming down Bang Deok-gong's face. Behind me, no doubt, Seo Yeo and Lü Bu — standing their eternal guard — were fixing the poor man with their most murderous stares. If there was one thing those two never failed at, it was divining exactly what I wanted.
I went on gazing, calm and unblinking, into the eyes of a man who plainly did not want the job.
"Are you truly the sort of man who swallows back the very words that have left his own mouth?"
"...Hahh."
Realizing he had been driven into checkmate, Bang Deok-gong heaved a long sigh.
"You are a truly fearsome man, General. I do not believe I would feel this afraid even thrown to a tiger."
"..."
That last part, I suspected, was on account of Seo Yeo and Lü Bu standing behind me. In fact, anyone meeting me for the first time flinched visibly at the sight of those two. In game terms, you would say they came with a Fear aura — their mere presence was enough to snap the morale of every enemy nearby. The same applied to every interview I sat, so the usual spectacle was whoever faced me spending the whole meeting anxiously reading my face.
At length, as though he had finally wrestled every last doubt to the ground, Bang Deok-gong answered me in a voice of perfect courtesy.
"The task you have entrusted to me, General-in-Chief — I shall carry it out with all the strength I possess."
"Good. I'm counting on you."
That settled the civil side, which left only the military. The military was a trade of the body, so for the most part you could judge what stood before you. Of course, we would still need to weigh how a man commanded soldiers and won battles — but outside a handful of exceptions, those were things forged by experience. Even a man who passed the military exam would begin as someone's adjutant, cutting his teeth before anything else; no matter how sweetly he could recite The Art of War from memory, the real battlefield was another animal entirely.
So the exam's true purpose was simply to sort the vanguard type, who charged the front lines shoulder to shoulder with his soldiers, from the commander type, who orchestrated the field from the rear and moved his men like pieces on a board. It doubled as a filter, too, for weeding out the hopeless cases who didn't know the first thing about strategy.
You know the type. Like that one great 'crusader of self-sufficiency' who declared that humans were herbivores and grass would do fine for rations, then marched his army on empty stomachs and starved tens of thousands of his own men to death.
In any case, whoever graded the military exam needed only to be loyal, hardworking, and seasoned by a fair stretch of battlefield experience. The trouble was that finding someone who cleared that bar was anything but easy.
...Though, all that said, I did happen to have just the man in mind. Perhaps because I had gathered talent so greedily, whatever situation arose, a little quiet thought always turned up someone who could meet it.
Ju Jun — once one of the Zhonglang Generals who had crushed the Yellow Turban Rebellion. He had since stepped back from the front lines, but none disputed his devotion to the Han or his considerable ability.
I had considered Huangfu Song and Lu Zhi as well, but they were simply too advanced in years, so I passed on them. If I remembered right, in the original history both men died of illness around about this time. We did have Hua Tuo, the Divine Physician, in our ranks, but one could never be too careful.
And why Ju Jun, you ask? In the history I knew, after Dong Zhuo's death he had rebuked Li Jue and Guo Si, been taken prisoner for his trouble, endured every humiliation they could devise, and died of sheer indignation — which meant that here and now, the man was still hale and hearty.
Somehow my roster of examiners was filling up with nothing but old men, but there was nothing to be done about it. The young ones, civil or military alike, were all run off their feet, dashing from one post to the next. Even Jia Xu, our chief overseer, had mountains of other work stacked up.
For one thing, it would take time before the examination system could truly get under way. We would need laws for every contingency, and — as Cao Cao had pointed out — safeguards to ensure no examiner ever turned his authority to private ends. Even so, someday the preparations would be finished, and the day would come when the examinations began in earnest. When it did, I would have to go watch at least once — partly for old times' sake, to reminisce about exams of my own. Not that I would understand a word of whatever the examinees wrote on their papers.
"Whew, it's cold."
A chill wind swept past me, and I shivered for a moment. Winter would have to end before I could head down there. I sank into thought, picturing the Yangtze far, far to the south.