The Coalition Army (1)
The winter of 188 passed, and the year 189 arrived.
The Anti-Dong Zhuo Coalition — the early-game main event that anyone with even a passing interest in Romance of the Three Kingdoms knows by heart.
The year that coalition, formed when the lords of eighteen routes banded together, marched on Dong Zhuo was none other than 190.
With 190 now breathing down my neck, I sank deep into thought.
Granted, compared to Dong Zhuo I'd been conducting myself like a veritable angel — but there were bound to be men who regarded me as an enemy all the same. Their reasons would all differ. Some would be terrified of having their power stripped away. Some would bristle because I stood in the way of their ambitions. And if not that, then perhaps they simply couldn't stomach the sight of me riding high with the Emperor at my side.
Every warlord under heaven had his eyes fixed on my every move. It was only natural — while the rest of them were groaning, unable to hold even a single province, I alone was sitting on three of them.
Never mind that two of those three were wretched stretches of land: poor terrain, half-developed, and raided by barbarians day in and day out. They were still more than enough to make people nervous.
...They are enough, right?
Thinking it over made me feel a little pathetic.
"How have our domestic affairs been faring lately?"
"Everything is proceeding smoothly. Not a single problem anywhere."
Jia Xu, standing at my side, answered without a moment's hesitation.
My hard work seemed to be paying its dividends, for Bing Province and Xiliang were slowly beginning to settle. While we kept cleaning up the nomads still running rampant, I leased land to the common people and set them to tilling it, and after roughly three years of this, the cities were finally gaining real momentum in their growth.
As for Sili — yes, Chang'an had been battered into ruin by Dong Zhuo, but Luoyang, the most prosperous city in the realm, still stood. The wealth of Chang'an that Dong Zhuo had plundered and stockpiled in Tianshui was funneled back, in its entirety, into rebuilding the ruins. On top of that came the imperial funds Her Majesty had released, along with the countless refugees who had been forced from their hometowns by the chaos of war. All of it streamed into the gutted city, and the reconstruction raced ahead faster than anyone had predicted.
The imperial treasury, meanwhile, was visibly shrinking with every passing day. If money could buy back time, then the obvious move was to hurl the entire fortune at the rubble and be done with it. If the late Emperor Ling, watching from the world below, could see this scene, he would likely weep tears of blood.
"And how do you read the situation from here?"
"Soon, I expect... an event is coming that will shake the whole world to its core."
An event big enough for Jia Xu to call it that. What on earth could it be?
"A coalition army."
"..."
"Sooner or later, the warlords who fear you, my lord, will link arms with one another and come attacking."
I asked about the thing that puzzled me.
"What justification would they have for this coalition?"
A just cause is everything in war. If one man simply beat down another for no reason at all, what would everyone watching think of him? Naturally, they would distance themselves from him. Not because of any lofty moralizing — "how could a human being do such a thing?" — but for something far more fundamental. They would keep their distance because they feared that the man being struck down without cause today might be themselves tomorrow.
"The justification? As I explained before, my lord — one simply manufactures it."
Jia Xu answered my doubts with perfect equanimity. And just as she said, in this maddening era a just cause was something you could force into existence through sheer nerve.
"A man who snatches up the seat of General-in-Chief in a single stroke and burns through the imperial treasury as he pleases — to those who love to bare their teeth and tear into flesh, that is a justification tailor-made to their taste."
Jia Xu bowed her head with courteous precision.
"Let it be said that Your Lordship wrung all of this from Her Majesty by holding her hostage — and behold, they have every pretext to raise their banners against a traitor to the throne."
"Even though Her Majesty granted all of it of her own accord?"
"However false it may be, my lord, once enough people believe it, it becomes the truth."
Winning with cowardly agitation and forgery, of all things.
Fight me fair and square! Beat me with facts!
"Even the warlords who know the truth will likely shut their eyes, feign ignorance, and join the coalition anyway."
"Because they can't stand me?"
"Very likely, yes."
Was I really that detestable? The malice of the human heart is a frightening thing.
Whatever the reasons, there seemed to be no realistic way to sidestep the colossal battle now galloping toward me.
As for troops — well. I had been pouring effort into recruitment of late, but the geography of Bing Province and Xiliang made it impossible to concentrate every soldier in one place. We could have fought on while accepting that the borderlands would be picked clean by raiders, but then what had I been breaking my back for all this time? If it came down to a situation where I had to keep losing and keep swallowing that just to claw out a victory, I might as well sit still and surrender quietly.
Deep in my brooding, one question drifted up out of nowhere.
The Anti-Dong Zhuo Coalition had risen under Cao Cao and Yuan Shao's leadership — so was their destiny, in the end, to stab me in the back and then turn on each other?
189. Nanyang Commandery, Jing Province.
One day, a certain man who had received an imperial edict went red in the face, huffing and puffing without pause.
"Do you honestly think this makes any sense?!"
The man flung the edict he'd been holding to the floor. Yuan Shu could not swallow his fury.
"A country bumpkin from Bing Province is handed the General-in-Chief's seat, and I — the rightful heir of the Yuan house that gave the realm Three Excellencies for four generations — am fobbed off with General of the Rear?!"
"..."
The man standing at Yuan Shu's side held his respectful posture and said not a word.
An arrogant wretch who measured a man's worth by his bloodline alone. Perhaps because it was the only merit he had to his name, Yuan Shu had always been obsessively fixated on pedigree. He seemed utterly blind to the fact that the sole reason he — a man who had accomplished precisely nothing — could claim one of the Four Generalships was that very noble birth of his. Did he truly not know, either, that the favorable opinion of the central officials, who had rated him highly for fleeing rather than letting Dong Zhuo buy his loyalty, had also played its part?
It was hardly something he'd done with any foresight, but had Yuan Shu allowed himself to be courted by Dong Zhuo after all, Yuan Shao's uprising would have been snuffed out even faster than scheduled. Yes — perhaps everything would have ended before the present General-in-Chief, the man who turned Dong Zhuo back, ever had the chance to prepare his countermeasures.
"'General of the Rear,' my ass! Doesn't it just mean kneeling beneath the General-in-Chief — an office held by a Bing Province peasant!"
What, then — was he saying the throne ought to grant him the chancellorship, the very summit of a subject's career? No... even if the Emperor truly lost her senses and bestowed the chancellorship on Yuan Shu, this was exactly the kind of man who would then fly into a rage over serving under an incompetent sovereign.
His residence was so colossally opulent one might have mistaken it for an imperial palace. He sheathed his enormous carriages in gold leaf, and even the horses that drew him were a pageant of splendor.
Had anyone been asked to name the man living in the greatest luxury in all the world, they could have answered "Yuan Shu" without an instant's hesitation.
"That Yuan Shao bitch squatting fat in Jizhou sticks in my craw — and that Jeong Reung cur, who stole the General-in-Chief's seat off the back of a single victory, sticks in it twice as deep!"
Griping. Grudges. Whining.
Yuan Shu was a man whose ability was a wretched match for his ambition — the textbook specimen of a fool destined to be devoured by his own arrogance and come to a swift, miserable end. Anyone hoping not to die alongside him needed to put as much distance between themselves and Yuan Shu as quickly as possible; that was the only correct answer.
"...And yet I cannot deny that his faction is the mightiest in the land at present."
For once in his life, Yuan Shu began to actually turn his brain over.
"That Yuan Shao whore I can trample into the dirt whenever it pleases me. But as of today, not a soul alive can face that peasant's faction alone."
"..."
With Jeong Reung excepted, Yuan Shu commanded the strongest power in the world at this very moment. Yet even that power, measured against Jeong Reung's, lagged a long way behind — and that was simply fact.
"I hear he's been run ragged tending to domestic governance of late. Let this moment slip through our fingers and the gap only widens. Have you a good plan for me?"
"...My lord. Might I be permitted to speak?"
A civil official with a beard groomed to precisely the correct degree of cunning stepped forward, and Yuan Shu's face brightened as he waved the man on.
"Oh — is that not Yang Hong? Good. Speak, then. Let me hear it."
"I am honored."
Yang Hong bowed low to his lord before continuing.
"What weighs on Your Lordship's mind this hour is, I daresay, the very same worry pressing on every warlord under heaven."
"Precisely. However far beneath me they may be, surely even they have the brains to grasp as much."
Had that man contracted some disease that would kill him unless he belittled somebody at least once an hour?
The man at Yuan Shu's side heaved a long, silent sigh.
"To check the mightiest power under heaven — and, should the opportunity arise, to tear it out by the roots."
"..."
"If that is a purpose we all share, could Your Lordship not forge a coalition with the warlords of this world?"
"Magnificent!"
Yuan Shu slapped his knee and sprang up from his seat.
"If I myself stand at the forefront and found this coalition army, all the others who've done nothing but watch and wait will come flocking to my banner!"
"Just so, my lord."
Well, of course they would — when one man cheerfully volunteered to shoulder every ounce of the risk himself, what idiot would pass up a free ride? And to be fair, should the punitive campaign succeed, Yuan Shu would reap the lion's share of the spoils, so it was not a wholly stupid idea.
"Circulate a proclamation to every man under heaven, this instant!"
Yuan Shu roared from where he stood.
"Declare that I, Yuan Shu, shall personally chastise the witless traitor who bullied the throne into handing him the General-in-Chief's seat and has since squandered the wealth of the imperial house!"
He had, it seemed, been spoiling for war with the General-in-Chief from the very start — the false justification was already fully manufactured and waiting.
Whether that justification was true or false was beside the point. What mattered was this: the General-in-Chief's power had swollen far too great, and every other power in the land was watching him with wary eyes.