Movements (2)
Someone once said that upheavals always strike without warning.
Since I had come all the way up to Jizhou anyway, I had meant to settle things with the Gongsun Zan faction, which had grated on me like an aching tooth — but before winter had even ended, an unexpected report reached my ears.
“Gongsun Zan has shown himself?”
“That is correct.”
Yuan Shao answered my disbelief-laced question in a courteous voice.
“According to our intelligence, Gongsun Zan — who had done nothing but hole up in his tower — has begun to act with real initiative.”
“……”
“What prompted him to stop wallowing in his fate and start moving again, we cannot say…”
“But one thing is certain, then: the defenses of Yijing Tower have grown stiffer still.”
“Yes, my lord.”
This was giving me a bit of a headache. Why the hell had that bastard Gongsun Zan suddenly snapped awake? Did he get handed protagonist plot armor or something?
Of course, this was no situation where one man's change of heart could flip the war on its head. A gap in strength has to be within reason for a fight to even be worth having — how could Gongsun Zan, clinging to Beiping and Beiping alone, hope to stand against a colossus that had swallowed most of the realm?
In my previous life, there had been a thing called an infinite defense map — a scenario where you held a single city and did nothing but repel an enemy AI's endless offensives. The difficulty was, naturally, brutal. An AI that never knew fatigue kept hurling armies of hundreds of thousands at your one lone city, and unless you resorted to cheap exploits that abused the machine's blind spots, holding out was simply impossible.
Gongsun Zan's situation now was that map's spitting image.
Only one thing worried me. If a sobered-up Gongsun Zan dug in at Yijing Tower and committed to a total turtle defense, there was no telling how many years this fight would drag on.
Even in the original history, with Gongsun Zan having let go of his sanity and repeated one incomprehensible outrage after another, it had still taken four full years to crack Yijing Tower open. So what would happen if the man called the White Horse General drew fully on his experience of barring the northern frontier against foreign tribes and threw himself into defense?
“……”
He'd probably clear five years without breaking a sweat.
True to the man who had declared he would shut himself away in one place and watch how the great currents of the world would flow, Gongsun Zan had built Yijing Tower into a fortress of staggering scale. He had stockpiled a full three million seok of grain — starving him out would take an age.
Three million seok might not mean much on its own, so what did it come to in units a modern person would recognize? One seok was roughly 150 to 200 kilograms… which put the total somewhere around 450 to 600 million kilograms. The reason the figure bounced around so wildly was that a seok weighed differently from grain to grain — unhulled rice, if I remembered right, had been the heaviest.
He had even made farming possible inside the fortress itself, so even as his stores dwindled, they would do so at a glacial pace.
For all his unbroken string of defeats, a great many soldiers still remained under Gongsun Zan's command — White Horse General and all. Training, standing watch, and on top of that tilling fields — I couldn't even begin to fathom the toll on those men.
…Was that bastard honestly planning to grow old and die inside Yijing Tower?
Like Dong Zhuo, who had once raised Meiwu Castle and meant to seal himself within it, Gongsun Zan looked for all the world like a man intending to loll about like a king inside Yijing Tower until the day he died.
“What am I going to do with him…”
Yuan Shao's report left me with no choice but to sink into thought. Assaulting the fortress would cost us dearly; laying siege and starving him out would take an eternity.
Word had it the bastard had no intention of ever opening his gates — he'd had molten iron poured over them, sealing the doors themselves shut. Thanks to that, any soldier or officer of his hoping to desert had to somehow get down a twelve-meter wall. Or burrow out of the ground like a mole. Frankly, the digging sounded like the likelier prospect.
Of course, desertion has been a tabooed crime in armies East and West, ancient and modern — the moment you were caught, it was summary execution. The modern age treats deserters leniently if they're willing to serve again, but no such mercy existed back then.
“There is no need to worry yourself, my lord.”
Just as I was racking my brains over what to do with Gongsun Zan, Zhang Jue, standing at my side, spoke up.
“Before long, a great upheaval will strike Gongsun Zan's camp.”
“A great upheaval?”
Had anyone else said such a thing, I would have brushed it aside without a second thought — but coming from Zhang Jue, it earned my full attention.
What manner of woman was Zhang Jue? This was old history now, but she had once been so versed in the mystic arts that the word Great had been affixed to her very title. Whether one ought to call it sorcery or Daoist arts, I couldn't say — but when it came to reading heaven's secrets and divining what was to come, none dared claim to be her match.
“I cannot say what exactly will occur, but I am certain he will not be able to hold out for long.”
I heard her out, then asked, “Still — if you have some rough idea, what do you suppose it will be?”
“Hmm…”
The brown-haired woman deliberated for a moment, as though picking her words with care, then murmured:
“A wind will blow before long.”
“A wind?”
Was she saying a typhoon was about to blow in or something? Though a typhoon strong enough to carry off Yijing Tower would blast the rest of us to pieces right along with it.
I all but hung a question mark over my head, but Zhang Jue only offered a serene smile, as if to say she could reveal no more.
“My lord. It is just about time for your meal.”
“…Already?”
It hadn't even been a few hours since I last ate, and it was mealtime again?
Ever since holes had been punched clean through my body and the aftereffects had taken hold, Zhang Jue had taken to hovering at my side, all in the name of taking charge of my health.
“Ah — and today's medicine is prepared as well. You may take it after you eat.”
“…Understood.”
At the words of this woman who was, for all practical purposes, my personal physician, I pulled a sour face. Not that I could defy her advice — and the reason was a simple one.
The moment my condition worsened by so much as a hair, far too many people would kindle twin flames in their eyes and start carving up our pricey hostage.
He's gotten so gaunt again…
……
Ugh, I really can't take this. That Jebe — Bebe? — whatever that bastard's name is, I'll chop him into pieces and…
Enough.
Lü Bu, day after day, would turn my body this way and that, checking me over and weighing me the whole while. She looked exactly like what I'd picture a social worker tending underfed children to be.
Just as Hua Tuo had said, I genuinely was suffering the aftereffects — weight loss, abdominal pain with no discernible cause — so keeping it hidden was never an option. In the end, telling myself it counted as exercise, I made a habit of going to check on the prisoners' condition nearly every day.
Let's see… still alive and well today, I see.
……
Taciturn as he was, Jebe had never once opened his mouth — save for a single exception. And what was it he had said to me that time?
“If you truly wish to spare my life, then deal me a fitting punishment.”
“Hm?”
“When I shot dead the dun horse the Great Khan was riding — a yellow steed with black hair along its spine — every general under her sought my life. What, then, of one who has wounded her very person?”
The divine archer of the Mongol Empire, the man who had once stood against Genghis Khan and loosed an arrow at her, regarded me with clear, unclouded eyes.
“Sever my arm or pluck out my eye — it matters not. Only deal me my punishment.”
“…There is also the way of surrendering to Han, earning merit, and washing your sins away.”
“I cannot betray the Great Khan.”
He was an exceptional general who stood out even among the Four Steeds and Four Hounds. Jebe — who in the original history had swept the Middle East, Europe, and Russia alongside Subutai as one of the Mongol Empire's finest commanders — had clearly already grasped the position he was in.
…Honestly, I couldn't speak for anyone else, but to calm Her Majesty down, someone would have to be punished as an example.
By now every last scrap of news should have long since reached her, yet her unnatural quiet gnawed at me more than I could say.
BANG—!
“My lord! Chow time!”
Just then, Zhang Fei kicked the door open and swaggered in.
“You can't skip a single meal! Come on, let's go eat— GYAAAHK—!”
“……”
Her clamorous entrance was, of course, promptly struck down by Guan Yu, but the flow of the meeting had already been well and truly severed. I sat in silence for a moment.
“…Let's end the meeting here for today.”
I rose from my seat and said in a level voice:
“As Zhang Ye mentioned just now, we hold position until something breaks in Gongsun Zan's camp. Understood?”
“Yes, my lord.”
Yuan Shao, having delivered her report on Gongsun Zan, bowed politely at my order.
“Benchu. Didn't I tell you? At times like these, the correct answer is to press in boldly.”
“Be quiet, Mengde.”
Watching Cao Cao go on pestering Yuan Shao like only an old friend could, I turned my head away.
“So what's on the menu this time?”
“You said you wanted chicken, right? So I went and killed one!”
“……”
Killing it was never the problem — someone still had to cook the thing, no?
Guan Yu, taking in my dazed reaction, let out a faint sigh and stepped forward.
“…As you instructed before, I simmered the chicken in water together with a variety of ingredients.”
“Oh?”
When it came to chicken baeksuk — a whole bird gently simmered into a clear broth — I had no defenses whatsoever. Mouth watering like a certain pink beaver out of a children's cartoon, I started walking.
I could eat and eat and never gain an ounce — was I supposed to count that as a blessing? …Mm. Still, a donut settling around my belly would be going a bit far.
Under the eyes of everyone gathered around me, I left the meeting chamber.