The Biggest Idiot in the Three Kingdoms
The Biggest Idiot in the Three Kingdoms
There was a boy wandering idly through a mansion.
Behind him trailed servants with looks of deep worry plastered on their faces,
but the boy paid them not the slightest scrap of attention.
Yes.
That was me.
The budding Honey Water Emperor of the future...
Or to be precise—
Yuan Shu, of the Three Kingdoms world, striving with all his might not to become the Honey Water Emperor.
The Three Kingdoms.
To say it twice would be redundant: the most familiar and famous period in all Chinese history.
The Records of the Three Kingdoms are renowned, but this is also the era widely known through Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, where countless figures and heroes reveal themselves.
The named characters in Romance of the Three Kingdoms alone number no fewer than 1,233.
Of course, many of them are disposable one-scene extras like Bao Zhong, who gets instantly slaughtered the moment he appears—I mean, Bao Zhong... hell, the man's name is basically "Bao." Still, even accounting for that, the Three Kingdoms is absolutely teeming with people.
Among them are those like Zhuge Liang or Guan Yu, whose very names have passed down through the ages as bywords for heroes of loyalty and righteousness.
Or Lü Bu, infamous for having three fathers, and Sima Yi, who perpetrated the Incident at the Gaoping Tombs and brought spring to Luoyang—people who became synonymous with capable traitors...
But at the same time, there also existed monumental fuckups so spectacular that merely comparing them to those heroes was a joke in itself.
Liu Shan, who let the kingdom of Shu—built by his father Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang shitting blood—go completely to ruin after getting swept up by the words of sycophants.
Cao Shuang, who spent his time pointlessly harassing Sima Yi out of jealousy, then right after Gaoping went "I dun wanna fight! Waaah!" and tossed away a genuine chance at reversal before getting himself killed and planting the first seeds of Wei's destruction.
Compared with the great heroes, these fuckups were enough to make anyone sigh.
And among these fuckups, there was one I personally considered the single greatest fuckup of the entire Three Kingdoms.
A man born into an excellent family, blessed with a fair share of dumb luck, who still managed to swallow up every last thing and flush it all away.
That was the son of a bitch called Yuan Shu, whose body I had now transmigrated into.
The legitimate son of the Yuan clan, the greatest family of the age.
From the very start, a brat who was literally born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
On top of that, his luck was disgustingly good.
Even after getting his ass handed to him at the Battle of Kuangting and being driven to the brink of ruin, he bounced back solely through sheer luck and swallowed up Yang Province in one gulp. And then, in the decisive moment, he was a man whose luck went so far as to place in his hands an Imperial Seal—a five-star super-rare artifact.
Yet despite all these advantages, his own competence lagged so miserably far behind his greed that in the end he put on every kind of spectacle—declaring himself emperor and whatnot—until at the very last he wailed, "Honey water! Give me honey water!!!" and was met with a farmer's bitter retort: "Ain't got no honey water—how about I ladle you up some horse piss instead?" He then burst a blood vessel in indignation, spat out blood, and died. A colossal jackass of the ages.
The aforementioned Liu Shan or Cao Shuang, I can at least see some room for objective re-evaluation there, but this bastard? My conclusion stands: "Nope, he's just a fuckup."
You might ask—what about the heartwarming story of Lu Ji, who was forgiven for stealing oranges out of filial devotion?
Right after that whole orange-gift incident, the son of a bitch who betrayed Lu Ji's father Lu Kang by cutting off his military provisions was none other than Yuan Shu.
And nowadays people are even running defense for Won Gyun, talking about re-evaluating him too... Come to think of it, he's also one of these Won bastards, isn't he? At any rate, if folks are trying to whitewash a washout general who nearly flushed a kingdom down the drain four hundred years ago, then surely over the nearly two thousand years that have passed, someone might have developed a taste for liking or pitying the man enough to tack a few touching anecdotes onto his name.
Especially since his incompetence was so severe that he never committed truly grand-scale atrocities like Dong Zhuo or Wang Mang.
And now,
at this point—about one week since I transmigrated into the childhood of that problematic Yuan Shu—
I was coming to feel, in my very bones, that this bastard had already been a bright-yellow, rotten-to-the-root little shit since he was a child.
Attendants who trembled and shuddered the moment I cleared my throat or so much as frowned, as if they'd laid eyes on a mass murderer.
When I told them I was fine alone and they didn't need to follow me, they slammed their heads to the ground asking what sin they'd committed—and I couldn't bring myself to stop them any further.
A scene that laid out with crystal clarity just how much of a tyrannical shit he'd been strutting around as on an ordinary day.
And as a bonus, the honey water that kept refilling itself in my cup every time it emptied, like some kind of automatic refill service.
From the standpoint of someone who'd slaved like a dog in a corporate job—where I had to walk on eggshells just to grab a single cup of filtered water, let alone honey water—I suppose you could call this a life of luxury...
But that didn't mean I could just kick back and take it easy in this situation.
The disasters set to begin in about ten to twenty years from now, by the Original Timeline's reckoning.
Starting with the Yellow Turban Rebellion, to the power struggle between He Jin and the Ten Regular Attendants, to Dong Zhuo seizing power in the midst of that, to the Anti-Dong Zhuo Coalition that rose against him, and on into the Age of Warring Lords—a whole sprawling clusterfuck of a free-for-all.
At the slightest misstep, I could end up not just with the Original Timeline's Honey Water ending, but if I was truly unlucky, I could be express-launched to the afterlife far sooner by some random blind arrow from gods-know-where.
Even if I had transmigrated into Yuan Shu's body, there was no guarantee I'd still possess the kind of luck that let him survive all those brushes with death and have the Imperial Seal come to him on its own.
For all my griping, this was not an era you could ever underestimate.
To survive in a chaotic age where heads could go flying the moment you stood still, I had to snap my mind into focus right now, while I was still young, and do everything in my power.
Fortunately, I was still young enough that I had time to build up the knowledge needed to live through this era,
and knowing the story of the Three Kingdoms meant I had a solid grasp of what was going to happen from now on.
No matter how much of a dumbass Yuan Shu died as—flipping it around, if I only played my cards right, I could truly live a life of drinking honey in comfort atop a rock-solid foundation.
And to accomplish that, what I needed was,
first, to hone my own abilities.
But even more critical than that was...
'As they say, I've got to invest in the future blue-chips. I could try recruiting Liu Bei or Zhang Fei in Zhuo Commandery later on, but the person I really need to pay attention to right now is...'
For someone who counted the Peach Garden Oath sworn brothers as his absolute favorites, it was an enormously tempting option—but unfortunately, Zhuo Commandery was a place far removed from here in Luoyang.
More than anything, at this point, while Yuan Shu was still a boy, Liu Bei and her sworn sisters probably hadn't even met, let alone sworn the Peach Garden Oath.
If I was to butt in here recklessly and cause a situation of "A what-now oath? dunno lol," that in itself would be a huge problem.
It would be far better to seek them out and extend a hand later, when the Yellow Turban Rebellion erupted and they began distinguishing themselves across the land.
Right now, rather than pouring time into something so uncertain, it was far more profitable to accomplish the things I could do immediately here in Luoyang.
Then, sure enough, the person I needed to be most concerned about at this stage was probably somewhere in this very mansion...
"Kyaaah!"
"Hm?"
A voice reached my ears.
At that cry, something akin to a scream, I cut off my thoughts and turned my gaze toward it.
The place the sound came from was a secluded corner inside the mansion.
There, three or four people in decent attire came into view.
Bastards holding what looked like switches or clubs in their hands.
From my week of observation, I already knew who they were.
They were distant collateral relatives of the Yuan clan living in a separate compound of the mansion.
As was only natural, the members of the branch families were treated as low in status compared to the main family,
and their roles likewise amounted to serving as secretaries or stewards assisting the main house—essentially just high-ranking servants.
The problem was the actions those "servants" were taking right now.
A young girl was being beaten with the clubs and switches in their hands.
Silver-haired, a girl who looked about the same age as me, and they were mercilessly beating her.
The scene, as if putting the savagery of barbaric ancient China on full display, stirred up a natural fury in me as a modern person.
"Hey there! What the hell do you think you're doing?"
"Huh?"
"The hell? What bastard dares— huk!"
The moment they turned with faces full of displeasure, their expressions froze into rigid stone.
Exactly like the servants around me who trembled the second I coughed on a normal day, they instantly dropped the switches and clubs they were holding and bowed their heads with exaggerated deference.
"Oh... Young Master Yuan Shu."
"Wh-what brings you here, Young Master?"
"What brings me? You're asking me that as if you don't know? Explain what the hell is going on here."
"Th-that is..."
The servants flinched and quivered like mice before a cat.
It was completely different from when they'd been enthusiastically beating the girl. Watching them grovel of their own accord put me in a slightly better mood.
Looking at it like this, I guess Yuan Shu's shitty personality actually comes in handy sometimes?
Just as that thought crossed my mind.
"Th-this child kept throwing tantrums, insisting we take medicine from the dispensary... We were correcting her behavior, Young Master."
"Indeed. This low, filthy creature dared to say she must bring it to her mother, and so..."
"Low, filthy creature? Who exactly is this child, that you'd speak of her that way?"
The girl was still collapsed on the ground.
Her attire, while covered in dust and old and worn, was unmistakably clothing indicating she belonged to the Yuan main family.
Incredulous that they would call such a child a "filthy creature," I asked,
and the servants replied—in a voice tinged, unlike a moment ago, with a strange sort of confidence.
"You, too, must surely have heard, Young Master Yuan Shu. This bitch is the one born from the belly of that slave woman!"
Regrettably, I had not heard of her.
I had transmigrated barely a week ago,
and I didn't particularly remember anything about the women of the Yuan clan from the original story either.
But I can't just flat-out say I don't know, can I?
For now, my only option was to play along while drawing the story out of them.
"A slave's daughter? You mean this person?"
"Yes, exactly!"
"A disgrace to the Yuan clan! Though the elders did take her in, they lost all interest in her long ago—isn't that so?"
"A low creature like this will only cause pointless strife later. We must stamp out the sprout before it grows. For your own sake, Young Master, in the times to come."
The bastards, even while reading my mood, kept giving sly grins at the corners of their mouths.
From the look of things, they had a perfect understanding of Yuan Shu's ordinary personality—eccentric and insufferably arrogant.
This was a world where a caste system was taken for granted.
Given Yuan Shu's nature, no matter if she was a woman or of the same Yuan clan, there would be no reason to shield someone with base blood.
"Right you are... I do need to stamp her out, as you say..."
"Haha... N-naturally, isn't that right? Thank you for understanding—GYAAAAAAAAAH!!!!"
That would have been true, of course, if it had been the original Yuan Shu.