Jiaozhou (4)
"General-in-Chief, how do you intend to treat them?"
"Ah. You mean the Shi clan?"
Liu Bei asked me this after our meeting with the Shi family, whom Shi Xie had sent, had concluded—the two of us having observed them from a short distance away. Now, whatever fate befell them would hinge entirely on how I answered. With so many capable people gathered around me, whatever I proposed stood a very good chance of being carried out to the letter.
The Shi clan, quietly harassed and saddled with one disadvantage after another... Something about that image left me with a feeling I couldn't quite put into words, and I simply shrugged.
"Assign soldiers to keep watch on the Shi household, but see to it that they're treated no differently than anyone else."
"I shall carry out your orders."
Hearing my answer, Liu Bei lowered her head in respectful acknowledgment. If the Shi clan had glared at me with eyes full of resentment and behaved suspiciously in every possible sense, then I would have matched that attitude in kind. But they had grasped the reality of their situation perfectly and bowed their heads to me instead. For all intents and purposes, they were people who had surrendered to me—so treating them too shabbily was worth reconsidering as well.
"Um... Jeong Reung?"
"Hm?"
While I was still lost in thought about the Shi clan, someone just outside my field of vision spoke up. Not that more than one person in this world called me by my bare name.
When I turned my head, Lü Bu was fidgeting, hemming and hawing as she spoke.
"Well... there's something I want to ask."
"Go ahead."
At my gentle prodding, she blurted it right out.
"D-don't tell me you're planning to go all the way down to Jiaozhou yourself?"
"...?"
A question mark floated up over my head. It wasn't that I failed to understand what she was saying—but what on earth was her intention in asking me this?
So even Lü Bu mixed up Jiaozhou and Jiaozhi, huh. Honestly, I couldn't blame her.
When I acknowledged her slip while at the same time letting my puzzlement show, Lü Bu's flustered eyes darted every which way.
"Well... how should I put it, it's been such a long time since we left Luoyang...?"
"......"
"We've worked hard for months now, so I was thinking it's about time we headed back..."
"I see."
Watching her keep talking through all that stammering, I read every last thought behind it and nodded along.
"You miss our Yeo Hwa, don't you?"
"...Yeah."
At Lü Bu's words—she wanted to see the little one growing up back in Luoyang even now—I couldn't help but chuckle. Come to think of it, it had been a long while since I'd seen my daughters' faces either.
'Dada!'
The children who beamed from ear to ear and welcomed me every single time they saw my face. The sight of them, still too young to even babble properly, was more than enough to melt any parent into a helpless smile.
I turned to another figure standing nearby.
"What about you, Seo Yeo? Do you miss our Seo Hui?"
"I..."
Seo Yeo opened her mouth to answer, then clamped it shut again. Don't tell me she's embarrassed. Isn't that usually the look of a stiff, undemonstrative father—the kind who's terrible at showing affection?
"......"
Briefly recalling how Seo Hui used to behave toward me, I couldn't shake the feeling that our roles had somehow gotten swapped. A father who wore his love for his child openly on his sleeve, and a mother who was unnaturally stiff about it... Not that households like that don't exist, I suppose.
Guan Yu, who had slipped away with Liu Bei a moment ago, was surely agonizing on the inside too, even if she hid it behind that stoic face. And if my guess was right, the youngest of the Peach Sisters would have borne my child by now as well. As for Cao Cao, currently off leading a separate detachment, there was no need to even bring her up. According to the reports, she'd been sweeping through Jiangdong and smashing every bandit and Shanyue tribesman she came across to smithereens.
Right now, Cao Cao was probably less in her Red Cliffs "casual mode" and more in her Guandu "hardcore mode." That was the trademark of the Cao family: the more cornered they became, the greater the hidden strength they unleashed. What surprised me was that this same trait manifested as maternal instinct—a ferocious drive to see her own child again.
Having finished sizing up the situation, I nodded and murmured.
"It really has been a long time, hasn't it."
"Then...?"
"Yes."
I gave my answer to Lü Bu, who was watching me with a hopeful expression.
"Let's go home. We'll visit Jiaozhi some other time, when the chance comes around."
"Really?! No taking it back!"
The moment the words left my mouth, the restless Lü Bu's eyes lit up. I wondered if she wasn't getting a little too excited—but then, picturing our daughters waiting in Luoyang, it didn't feel like strange behavior at all.
Originally, the plan had been to head for Jiaozhi, see how the region actually operated, inspect the sea trade routes I'd only ever heard about in passing, and rack my brains over whether direct silk trade with Rome was even feasible... Well, one glance was enough to know that wasn't a plan that could be wrapped up anytime soon. No matter how much time you spent aboard a ship, trading with Europe—sitting clear on the other side of the planet—was an undertaking that demanded an enormous stretch of time. I wasn't exaggerating; a single round trip would easily swallow several months.
And when you factored in Tianzhu—India—which kept insisting our trade goods were the hottest thing around and told us to stop by on the way, and Anxi—Parthia—which intended to plant itself squarely in the middle and skim profits off every transaction as the middleman, it would hardly be strange for the journey to take even longer. There was also a country called Guishuang, the Kushan Empire, but they were wedged between the two nations I'd just mentioned, which made them rather difficult to reach. The steppe lands to their north belonged to the Xiongnu, who spent their days picking their noses and waiting to see if there was anything left to plunder, so the people of Guishuang, in order to trade with China, ultimately had no choice but to cross that godforsaken mountain range—an immense undertaking.
Can't picture what that godforsaken range might be? Would it help if I said the Himalayas? That's right. The range with Mount Everest in it. Even the Mongol Empire, overflowing with human weapons, had failed to cross that filthy, accursed wall of stone, and so they left India alone and beat the living daylights out of everyone else instead. It wasn't that the Mongols never picked a fight with India at all—but the invasion routes were so hopelessly limited that, as I recall, the whole affair ended in nothing but repeated defeats. A perfect case study proving that in this era, attacking India overland was a non-starter. If you truly wanted to conquer the place, your best bet would be sailing down around the south and fighting your way ashore. ...Not that the Han Empire, which couldn't even govern the territory it already held and was springing administrative gaps left and right, had any reason to try. Unless you simply hated India for no reason at all, trading with them and pocketing the profits was the better arrangement for everyone.
So. That left only one question: whom to dispatch to keep watch on Shi Xie. In the original history, Shi Xie lived an extraordinarily long life even by modern standards. I couldn't remember exactly how old he'd been when he passed—all I recalled was that it was somewhere around ninety. The climate of Jiaozhi was a different beast entirely, rife with endemic diseases that were sheer poison to the people of Han. Surviving to ninety in a place like that told you he managed his health with ruthless discipline. The Shi Xie of this world was in his early sixties, so it was reasonable to expect him to hold out for at least another thirty years.
Which raised the question: who could stand at his side for that entire span, watching him while also—since they'd be there anyway—judging how Jiaozhi was actually being run? ...We'd just have to rotate people through, wouldn't we? Thirty years was nothing to sneeze at. It was long enough for the mountains and rivers—said to transform in a mere decade—to change three times over. An ordinary person of Han would fall ill and waste away dead long before then. Shi Xie was the anomaly, the man who adapted to an alien climate and lived to ninety.
Hmm... So this was why distance was such a headache—central authority simply couldn't reach that far. If people who could govern a province well, without getting drunk on power or stirring up trouble, had been common, the Han would never have sunk to the state it was in. For now, a man like Shi Xie happened to be sitting in that seat at a convenient moment—but even Shi Xie was no immortal who would live forever.
'It'll work itself out somehow.'
Tapping my knee with a finger as I mulled it over, I shrugged. Why else had I entrusted the Civil Service Examination System to Jia Xu and set out to recruit fresh talent? It was all for moments exactly like this one. Everyone was too busy overhauling the system right now, but the first examination would be held within a few years at the latest. Shi Xie still had plenty of years left in him, so given time, the problem would resolve itself quite naturally.
I turned my head to check the weather outside and murmured to myself.
'...It's autumn already?'
How many months had passed since I marched out of Luoyang to take Jiangdong? You could call it a long time, in a sense—but weighing all the factors, this had actually been settled remarkably fast. I had rectified in less than a year the problems of Jiangdong that the Kingdom of Wu of the original history had spent decades slowly grinding through. Of course, fully stabilizing and developing the region would take far longer still, but for now, every major problem visible to the eye could be considered solved.
"If you've decided, then let's hurry back! I don't want to wait!"
"All right, all right."
Urged on by Lü Bu, I chuckled softly, thinking of the many, many people waiting for us in Luoyang.