The Wheels Turn (3)
Several days had passed since Gongsun Zan underwent a dramatic change of attitude so theatrical he could have starred in his own television drama.
Which, in a way, was only natural — and during those days, nothing of note happened.
...Well, no. Come to think of it, exactly one thing did.
Gongsun Zan threw himself, as he always had, into rooting out traitors — and that single-minded purge sent a jolt of fear through an army whose discipline had rotted to the core. When failure to do your job properly meant losing your head, or taking a ropeless bungee jump from a tower perched twenty meters in the air, who was going to slack off?
As the soldiers snapped back to their senses and began standing watch in earnest, Yuan Shao's tunnel plan naturally ground to a halt.
"...Gongsun Zan is no fool, so of course he'd be on guard against a tunnel infiltration."
Yuan Shao, having noticed the snag in her own plan, murmured calmly in front of me.
Gongsun Zan. A man who had once crushed the northern nomads and carved out a massive power base for himself — no fool when it came to war, whatever else you could say about him.
Shutting himself inside Yijing Tower and refusing to budge might look laughable at first glance, but viewed strategically, it was hardly a bad move. With a general sitting there who could link up with any rival force at a moment's notice and stab you in the back, how could anyone dare dismiss him lightly? And yet breaking that fortress by force would cost far too much blood — which was precisely how years had slipped by with neither side able to do a thing.
Even when Yuan Shao herself had offered to end the fighting and reconcile, he had flatly refused. And all the while, down south, Cao Cao was thrashing Liu Bei and Lü Bu on the battlefield and swelling her power by the day...
Well. There it was.
Even with his mind half-broken by a string of defeats, that general had instinctively kept tormenting the enemy he hated most. Gongsun Zan may not have survived in the end, but he certainly succeeded in delivering one colossal insult to Yuan Shao.
"If we push any further, Gongsun Zan will surely realize what we're doing."
"I imagine so."
If the tunneling were discovered, he would simply wait for it and slaughter our soldiers wholesale. You know the thing I mean — how a hunter smokes out rabbits by driving them into a narrow burrow and setting a fire. Do that here, light a few fires and collapse the tunnel, and our casualties would balloon catastrophically.
A plan of you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours, so to speak. If it worked, we'd catch them utterly off guard and the war would tilt sharply in our favor — but if it failed, we'd have burned all that time for nothing and lost soldiers besides.
Even now, I murmured as I pictured Gongsun Zan perched up in his tower.
"What does he even do up there all day...?"
In the original history, he'd supposedly lived surrounded by his wife and concubines, so the odds were excellent he'd been enjoying a debauched existence at the top of that tower. A pointless speculation, now that Gongsun Zan had come to his senses.
"What of the trebuchets?"
"They attempt siege fire whenever there's an opening, but with no real results to show for it."
Naturally enough. The catapults of this era weren't the counterweight-powered trebuchets people think of — they were machines where men hauled on ropes, heave-ho heave-ho, hurling stones by brute manpower. Of course their accuracy and power fell far short of a trebuchet flinging each rock with uniform force, and their range was shorter still, no explanation needed.
The sight of besieger and besieged lobbing barely-aimed stones back and forth at each other was something no words could quite capture. And it wasn't as though I had the blueprints for a trebuchet in my head, so building one from scratch was out of the question...
Honestly, what good would it do a modern person to know that sort of thing anyway? All I could do was suggest, 'What about using a counterweight?' and then pour endless funding into the project until it bore fruit. With enough time and money, it turned out, anything could be built.
...Though whether we'd even need such things, who could say.
"So all we can do for now is harry them from a distance."
Their vigilance had shot up, the tunnel operation was shelved indefinitely, and flinging rocks from afar had marginal effect at best — but it was the only work available. With things as they were, all we could do was hold the line, bide our time, and wait for the 'wind' Zhang Jue had spoken of.
Winter had quietly given way to the warmth of spring, but the war itself dragged on and on.
Inside Yijing Tower, crammed wall to wall with defenders, a sudden wind stirred in the place where vigilance ran highest — the residence of Gongsun Zan himself.
One of Gongsun Zan's dwellings was a tower open to the sky on all four sides, so a gentle breeze blowing there was nothing to wonder at...
"Hup."
A girl abruptly bursting out of that empty air, however, was strange no matter how you looked at it.
Having strolled into a place no intruder could ever breach as if it were her own front yard, the girl scrunched her brows into a deep frown and thumped her lower back with both fists.
"Nnngh... To think there's someone who stays cooped up in a place like this all day long. Just what is wrong with his head?"
The central keep stood a full ten zhang high — twenty-three meters. Ten zhang. She had seen countless men expand their fortresses in the name of self-preservation, but never before one who climbed endlessly upward like this, without limit.
"Now then, let's see..."
Despite having ascended without the slightest effort, the girl let out one theatrical groan before straightening up and muttering,
"What kind of blockhead stirred up trouble on this scale this time?"
"...So it's the little brat of an immortal."
A voice drifted over from near the girl, who had been muttering to herself. An old man playing Go alone in the heart of the tower where Gongsun Zan resided smirked up at her.
"Your baby face hasn't changed, I see. Still being mistaken for a child by everyone around you, are you?"
"Shut your mouth."
At the old man's teasing, Nanhua Laoxian growled low in her throat.
"Has the mad old fool finally lost his wits to senility?"
A strange immortal whose years matched, if they didn't exceed, her own.
"A man who lived buried in some remote mountain village, pretending the affairs of the world meant nothing to him — what business has he taking Gongsun Zan's side?"
Nanhua Laoxian's face twisted at the sight of the old man whom later generations would call Liezi.
"Are you, of all people, plotting against one who defies Heaven, while prattling on about the Will of Heaven?"
"Ho? What nonsense is this?"
At her question, Lie Yukou simply stroked his beard.
"Before we debate who follows Heaven and who defies it — aren't the two of us, to begin with, beings who stand against Heaven ourselves?"
"......"
At that, Nanhua Laoxian fell silent for a long moment.
Immortals live without aging, without dying. That in itself was a violation of the natural order — mortals who ought to return one day to a handful of dirt defying the law of heaven and earth. In other words, for beings whose very existence flouted Heaven to go around invoking the Mandate of Heaven — they had reached for the entirely wrong argument.
Liezi continued in an even, unhurried voice, then added quietly,
"Exceptions exist everywhere, after all."
"...That much is true."
Perhaps because she had lately watched far too many charlatans unworthy of the title 'Daoist' strutting about, Nanhua Laoxian realized her temper had frayed without her noticing. Had her disciples Yu Ji and Zhang Jue witnessed it, they would have exchanged a look that said, and that counts as 'slightly' sharp? — but unfortunately, neither was present.
Nanhua Laoxian — or Zhuangzi, as she was also called — posed her question to the old man who had lived a good five hundred years and more.
"Then why are you taking the side of that madman?"
The girl's gaze fixed on Gongsun Zan, snoring away, oblivious to the intruder in his midst.
A man so consumed by gratifying his own desires that he had ruined countless lives. The way he plundered and slaughtered as though the people were merely holding his belongings in trust — he was no different from any of the tyrants she had watched across the ages.
At her question, the old man clicked his tongue.
"Tsk tsk. Too much time has passed, it seems — your judgment has turned as childish as your face. How pitiable."
"...Do you wish to die?"
As an unknowable force began to seep from the girl's eyes, the old man chuckled and waved a hand.
"Stretching my limbs after so long does sound rather diverting, but explanations first."
"......"
When Nanhua Laoxian held her silence, as if to say then explain, Lie Yukou spoke.
"I am not taking that idiot's side."
The immortal who had called Gongsun Zan an idiot murmured in a calm voice.
"On the contrary — I've been pondering how best to make his life a misery."
"What?"
"Think about it. While that man rages on, having lost his mind, how many people do you suppose are dying inside these walls?"
While passing his days in idle leisure as always, the old man had read the currents of Heaven — and learned that a colossal disaster would strike in the autumn of this very year.
Locusts. A vast swarm that would strip every field of grain in the blink of an eye. Should that calamity descend, a horrifying scene would unfold within Yijing Tower: people devouring people.
"Sit back and watch quietly. Do not interfere."
"...Tsk."
At the old man's words, the girl clicked her tongue once — but he hardly seemed to be lying — and dissolved into the wind, leaving no trace behind.