Upheaval (5)
Strength to pluck up the mountains, a spirit to shroud the world.
Li ba shan qi gai shi
A figure who had turned the meaning of the title Hegemon-King completely on its head — and the general who gave birth to the four-character idiom Match for Ten Thousand.
Take Match for Ten Thousand at face value and it means one capable of standing against ten thousand men, but it never truly meant that a single person could cut down ten thousand.
It was a figurative idiom, used to say that no one alive dared measure themselves against them.
But the sight unfolding before my eyes right now...
...genuinely looked as if one person truly could hold ten thousand at bay.
SHRAAAK——!!
"Aaaaargh!"
"Guhk!"
Countless nomads went floating through the air as if they'd been run down by a truck.
I never imagined I would live to see a hit-and-run in this era.
"Halt, this instant——!!"
A general of the Mongol Empire bellowed, as if he could not believe the spectacle of his own men being flung every which way like bowling pins.
Judging by how thoroughly the helmet and armor were kitted out, the man radiated the air of a high-ranking officer.
That general hurled himself at Seo Yeo with horsemanship that looked anything but ordinary, even at a glance.
"You shall never lay a hand on the Great Khan—!"
SHRRK—!
Aigoo. That one's dead.
The general who had stood bravely alongside his rank and file took a blade across the chest in one clean diagonal and dropped straight out of the saddle.
"General?!"
"Impossible...!"
To see nomads who never so much as flinched no matter what befell them now wavering in disarray — he must have been someone quite famous.
"...Nngh."
Sitting meekly in place with my hand wrapped around my wound, I fumbled through my pouch as the blood surged up once more.
My stomach had been pierced clean through, so apparently one elixir wasn't going to settle it.
Just as I was shoving a second elixir into the wound, someone appeared nearby.
"...Hwahyeon."
"Hm?"
At the familiar voice, I drew back the arm I'd been reaching behind me and answered levelly.
"Oh, Cao Cao. Don't you have troops to command?"
"Everything has been settled, so there is no need to worry."
Soaked in blood from head to toe as she was, she had clearly fought her way through something, but...
"From the very start, they all came boiling out toward a single point, hell-bent on saving their lord."
"..."
Hearing that explanation, I fell silent for a moment.
She had a point — the bulk of the force under Cao Cao's command was infantry.
Horse archers who fought at a distance anyway could simply scamper off, and the foot soldiers would be left staring blankly after them like a dog chasing a chicken.
They might loose three or four arrows, but honestly...
That much would yield nothing of any worth.
To finish a fleeing enemy with a single arrow, you would have to aim for the horse's head or put one through the nomad sitting in the saddle.
Horses born and raised on the Mongolian steppe were so hardy that an arrow or two in the rump didn't make them budge an inch.
Cao Cao settled down beside me and went on.
"I have ordered the remaining officers to lead the Tiger and Leopard Cavalry in pursuit, so they will see to it themselves."
"...I see."
Calling to mind the Xiahou sisters — Dun and Yuan — and the wealth of generals beneath Cao Cao's banner, I nodded in quiet agreement.
I had already snapped up the likes of Zhang Liao and Seo Hwang for myself, but even setting those two aside, Cao Cao's ranks were thick with outstanding talent.
With people like that leading the Cao faction's most elite cavalry into the field, there was truly nothing left for her to do.
As I bobbed my head, realizing the battle was sliding into its final stretch, Cao Cao spoke with an air unlike her usual self.
"...Hwahyeon."
"Hm?"
"Does it not hurt?"
I broke into a small smile at the worried question.
"It does. But the medicine's taking care of it."
"..."
Though it felt like it might be working a little too well.
The elixir Hua Tuo had handed me wiped the pain away entirely — and with it, every other sense had gone faint and blurry.
My head was foggy too; walking alone right now, I might well go oops and tip straight over.
Not that falling would hurt, with the medicine in me.
...Was this even medicine? It wasn't some kind of narcotic, was it?
No hallucinations of dinosaurs springing up before my eyes, and though my mood floated a little light, my judgment stayed intact — the side effects didn't seem serious, at least.
"..."
Cao Cao gazed steadily down at my wound and said nothing at all.
There was something in her bearing that defied description — an air utterly unlike the woman I knew.
The sheer weight of that gaze left even me overwhelmed.
Just as I was starting to feel cornered by this Cao Cao stripped of every trace of mischief, she opened her mouth.
"I have a question."
"...A question? About what?"
"If you should win this war, what do you intend to do with them?"
An obvious question, if ever there was one.
Well, this time it was a colossal war, nation set against nation.
If the Han Empire emerged victorious over the Mongol Empire, the options split into two.
Cross the mountain ranges, drive out onto the boundless steppe, and strangle every nomad's line so completely that they could never rise again.
Or call an end at some reasonable line and extend a hand of reconciliation to the enemy nation.
There was no doing both.
A decision neither one thing nor the other would assuredly summon the worst of outcomes.
I couldn't say whether it was exaggeration or plain fact, but they say a nomad learns to sit a horse before learning to walk.
Such was the harshness of their world that survival meant wrenching whatever was lacking from someone else's hands — a people who lived their whole lives at close quarters with the blade and with blood.
In other words, every last subject of the Mongol Empire was effectively a warrior. To trample such a nation past any hope of rising again, a massacre on the scale of an entire people would have to unfold.
The way Rome, in seizing Carthage, put hundreds of thousands — millions — to the sword so it could never stand again: nothing less than outright genocide.
And once such a thing began, it could never be undone.
I die, or they die — it would leave one of two outcomes and nothing else.
And choosing slaughter meant advancing, inevitably, to that Mongolian steppe in the far north — where an even crueler war would be waiting.
It was the very ground where Emperor Wu of Han, summoning the full might of the empire in its golden age, fought for a staggering forty years and more.
And even after all that fighting, he had only narrowed the northern nomads' sphere — never erased them.
And I was supposed to drive north now, with the wreckage of the chaotic age still not fully cleared away?
To seize land that was worthless — nowhere to put it to use?
Well — if we truly gave it everything, wiping them out entirely wouldn't be impossible.
Our faction had its Matches for Ten Thousand, after all, and strategists to support them overflowing besides.
But we would have to prepare ourselves for at least a few years of it.
Factor in the lands of the Xiongnu, the Wuhuan, the Xianbei, even the Jurchen who had barged in without warning, and we would be ranging back and forth across a truly monstrous stretch of territory — if that came together neatly in a short time, it would be a wonder.
You might ask whether Genghis Khan hadn't simply brought every last fighting nomad with her — but even in the original history, when Genghis Khan warred against the Jin, a rebellion broke out back in Mongolia.
There was even an instance of one of the Four Steeds and Four Hounds dying in the field while crushing that uprising.
That alone told you how teeming the Mongolian steppe still was with nomads.
...But even with all those strategic factors set aside, I had decided in the end to choose reconciliation.
The reason was simple.
I am thoroughly sick of war by now.
"You probably know this already, but I'm not particularly fond of words like 'extermination' or 'massacre.'"
Someone once put it this way, didn't they.
To those who have never known it, war is a sweet thing.
Perhaps it looked odd to think that now, but even after all the long years, I still despised watching people die like insects.
Besides, even if I endured every hardship under heaven and wiped the Mongol Empire from the map, in time another nomad people would come settle that land.
"Then just rule the steppe too," you might say — but as I'd said before, Han was a country that couldn't even govern the territory it already held, leaving administrative voids yawning open.
Look at Gangdong — until I set my hands on it, it had been all but untouched wild country.
KWA-BOOM——!!
I gazed out at Seo Yeo, boring a highway straight through a battlefield packed with tens of thousands.
"If blood is repaid with blood, and that blood with yet other blood, war will never end."
Truthfully, it was no overstatement to call the whole of East Asian history a repetition of precisely that.
Nomads raided the settled peoples to refill what they lacked; the settled peoples subjugated the nomads to prevent it; the nomads attacked the settled peoples once more, again to live...
That was how the Sixteen Kingdoms era came about, and even afterward the same chaos repeated — settled folk and nomads tumbling over one another in an endless scramble, as under the Ming and the Qing.
If killing brought the same result and sparing brought the same result, then the proper road was the one that spared.
"I intend to cut this vicious cycle at some fitting point, and go searching for a new road."
"...Do you have a way?"
Hearing my answer, Cao Cao asked in a low voice.
"Those nomads, too, raised their war because they wished to live. Even taken captive, they would sooner choose death."
She had a point.
When I first spoke with Genghis Khan, she told me she could not abide her people's lifelines being grasped and shaken about by another country.
That was the limitation of a nomad nation — one that could not hold itself up without trade or plunder.
"As it happens, I have a plan laid aside for exactly that."
"...If that is so, I shall not dissuade you."
At those words, Cao Cao answered in a composed voice.
"But remember this one thing."
"Hm?"
"The moment anything befalls you — even the faintest chance of it — I will erase those northern curs, every last soul, from this world."
"..."
A thin cold sweat beaded up at Cao Cao's frost-edged declaration.
One wrong step, and the Great Xuzhou Massacre of Filial Piety would be staging an encore.
...Except this wasn't Xuzhou, and it had nothing to do with filial piety either.
I put on a helpless smile, hoping Hua Tuo would hurry over soon and plug the hole in my gut.