To take the girl's body as promised...?
To take the girl's body as promised...?
The children were all rescued safely, and with the situation more or less settled, I decided to have a drinking party with Sun Jian.
I also set it up to formally introduce my subordinates Ji Ling and Xu Rong while I was at it.
And...
When Sun Jian arrived, she looked far more put-together than I'd expected.
She showed up in fine attire and heavy makeup, unlike anything I'd seen from her before.
If I had to compare, she looked like a college freshman who'd dressed to kill for her first drinking party.
Sure, this was a reasonably important occasion in its own way, but sensing an unexpected naivete from Sun Jian—who apparently wasn't used to these things—I smiled wryly to myself.
And as if proving my guess right, Sun Jian spent the whole party barely touching the food and radiating agitation.
The way she kept knocking back drink after drink, as though her insides were burning up, told me she was on edge for any number of reasons.
This wasn't a job interview. There was nothing to be so tense about. Still, was she still not quite comfortable with the idea of serving me as her lord?
To lighten the atmosphere a little, I casually lobbed a suggestion at my subordinates.
Say what you will, the fastest way to get friendly is a bit of entertainment.
And there was one simple game that worked at drinking parties the world over, in any era.
The classic, a drinking contest.
Barely had I floated the notion of pouring alcohol into your stomach like you meant to drink yourself to death when Ji Ling, beside me, jumped on it.
Even on an ordinary day she couldn't resist a drink, and since she'd been brewing her own and going on drunken rampages lately, Ji Ling tried to launch into it before I'd even finished explaining.
And Sun Jian, as if she understood perfectly despite my half-assed prompting, willingly took her up on it.
Right after that,
she stood up and flung off her outer robe.
She was suddenly lighter, with an attitude that radiated fierce resolve—like she was about to start a fight.
It was a little embarrassing that her upper chest was so plainly exposed,
but her enthusiasm was genuinely intriguing, and I promptly filled the large bowl in front of her to the brim with liquor.
"Here, drink up."
I offered the bowl as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
But...
"Ah... G-General? This is...?"
Sun Jian wore a slightly dazed expression, radiating deep bewilderment.
It was the polar opposite of her aggressive mood moments before. I smiled and said,
"Ah, is this your first time seeing this kind of drink? It's a brew of General Ji Ling's called Red Liquor."
The large bowl was filled with a vivid scarlet alcohol.
Because Ji Ling had brewed it with purple gromwell, a faintly mysterious red hue suffused the liquid, unlike ordinary wine.
"Found another batch she'd brewed on her own a while back. If we're having a drinking contest, we can't exactly use plain alcohol, now can we."
"A... a drinking... contest?"
"Consider yourself lucky. I put extra care into this, so it's something you couldn't buy with money—ghhmmph!!"
"Oh, she's real proud of herself. Proud. Didn't I tell you to knock it off? What kind of lunatic rips up the floor of the government office and brews ten crocks of liquor in there?"
As always, our Ji Ling, undeterred by any amount of scolding, frayed her lord's nerves again.
Once I'd dispensed a measure of 'chastisement' (half-giving up),
I looked at Sun Jian, who was staring at us with a blank look, and said,
"It's fine, so drink. As this idiot's lord, I can vouch for the taste."
"If you're not gonna drink it, gimme. I'll drink it all myse-uuurrghbhbhbh!"
"Xu Rong, you're up after Sun Jian."
"Understood, General."
"Hng-eeee it's toooo muuuuch!"
While I pulled Ji Ling's cheeks out as far as they'd go, same as always, I watched Sun Jian with reasonable interest to see what she'd do.
Then...
"I... ask just in case... but if I drink this much, won't I get terribly drunk?"
"You will. Didn't I say it? Today's the day we drink and die. There's no training tomorrow anyway, so don't worry about it and just keep going."
"B-But... if I do that, the matter of... relations..."
"Relations?"
"Huh? What relations?"
"... What?"
"...?!"
Sun Jian was making no sense.
Question marks practically materialized above my head and Ji Ling's.
Xu Rong, for some reason, looked startled and seemed to be blushing,
but before I could pay much attention to her, Sun Jian spoke in a trembling voice.
"What do you mean, what relations... Was this... not why you called me? To take this girl's body, as promised..."
"... Take... your body?"
"?"
"... Uh?"
The sheer wrongness of hearing "take my body" instead of "get drunk"—and one fact began to surface in my mind.
My brain, after a brief buffer, belatedly began to grasp that she was laboring under an outrageous misunderstanding.
And.
"...!? ... D-Don't tell me... it's... not?"
"It's not."
"..."
Just as my expression went slack at recognizing her delusion,
Sun Jian before me likewise realized her mistake, and her face began heating up in real time.
"... What's going on? Why'd everyone go quiet?"
"... Uhm..."
The room sank into a moment of silence,
and the only voice left was the ever-oblivious Ji Ling's.
An atmosphere that had chilled over in an instant, thanks to a preposterous misunderstanding.
And so, standing before me frozen mid-'striptease,'
Sun Jian left me with exactly one move to salvage the mood.
"... Hrm... Let's just drink. Don't think about anything."
"Y-Yes."
*
—Gulp! Gulp!
Sun Jian poured the liquor down her throat.
But however briskly she emptied her bowl,
Sun Jian's mind at that moment was nothing short of chaos, destruction, and total collapse.
"Hnnnnh..."
"Zzz..."
"Snrk..."
Ji Ling, Xu Rong, and Yuan Shu ended up dead drunk and sprawled across the banquet hall.
The drinking contest had continued somewhat forcibly afterward to rescue the mood, and in the end, Sun Jian was the last one standing.
She'd essentially drowned the atmosphere in a sea of alcohol and emerged the sole survivor.
But now, with her victory confirmed.
What filled the winner's head wasn't any thrill of triumph.
It was the excruciating cringe of knowing she had updated her dark history, right alongside "Tiger of Jiangdong."
Come to think of it, the fact that it was 3P... no, 4P from the start should've been a red flag.
No, looked at objectively, everything the process and its outcome had shown was not a scene of carnal union but the perfectly ordinary picture of a lord recruiting a general.
From the very beginning, what Yuan Shu had meant by "become mine" was serving as a general under his command, not as a woman.
The sexual element had been purely her own misunderstanding—or overreaction.
"Ah... aah..."
With the belated realization and the aftermath of her 'delusions' now crashing over her like a wave, here she was alone with everyone else collapsed.
"Uwhaaaaaaa!!!!!!"
The fact that she, the Tiger of Jiangdong, had been the only beast starving for lust sank in,
and with her face flushing redder than the Red Liquor still left in the bottle, she began rolling and rolling across the floor where everyone had passed out.
It was winter.
*
There'd been one absurd misunderstanding, but anyway, I had succeeded in formally recruiting Sun Jian.
With that as a turning point, the Yellow Turban suppression in Ji Province proceeded much more smoothly.
As if to prove she wasn't called the Tiger of Jiangdong for nothing, Sun Jian returned with news of victory practically every time she marched out.
She showed supreme ability especially when handling small independent strike forces, and her performance effectively gave our already victorious army wings.
Just like that, we swept the Yellow Turbans of Ji Province clean—the region where they'd originally based themselves and grown strongest.
The campaign took about half a year.
Now, as winter ended and spring began.
Feeling as refreshed as if I'd finally finished a mountain of backed-up laundry, I gazed at the land of You Province finally visible before me.
'At last... I'm here.'
Honestly, if I'd come with real determination, I could've reached this place within a few weeks at most,
and even routing Yellow Turbans along the way shouldn't have taken more than two months.
In fact, when I first headed for You Province, I'd expected it to take about that long.
But,
the unexpected recruitment of Sun Jian sated the raging thirst for talent I'd been suffering from and gave me a measure of breathing room.
And one more thing—
the incident involving her made me decide that I had to clean up the Yellow Turbans in Ji Province thoroughly before departing for You Province.
Part of it was wanting to make good use of the S-rank talent I'd just acquired.
But what concerned me more than that
was the "kidnapping" that had occurred while I was recruiting Sun Jian.
Even Sun Jian, who had a fair amount of strength and influence, had nearly lost her husband to the Yellow Turbans and almost lost her children too.
If it was this bad for her... what must life be like for ordinary people with nowhere to turn?
If I left for You Province right then to meet the Liu Bei sworn siblings,
and as a result the Yellow Turbans who were still causing chaos began to run even wilder,
the odds were high that—just like with Sun Jian—countless tragedies would unfold, with innocent families torn apart and heads of households and children dying.
It wasn't a post I'd sought out, but as General Who Conquers the North and the commander of the strongest military force in the region, I couldn't let tragedies like that happen to others for the sake of my personal business.
So began six months of "the big cleanup," pausing my steps toward You Province.
Ji Province was damned bigger than I'd thought, so it took a fair amount of time, but in the end we exterminated its Yellow Turbans as thoroughly as a pest control company wiping out roaches.
Ji Province—the so-called stronghold of the Yellow Turbans—ended up becoming the cleanest region in all of Han.
With my duty fulfilled,
standing here at last in the land of You Province and feeling wonderfully refreshed, I heard Ji Ling beside me ask in a voice full of anticipation.
"So, my lord, what now? Do we do a nice big cleanup here just like in Ji Province?"
"That would be the right course... but first we should send word to the Inspector of You Province."
Unlike Ji Province, whose administrative system had been wrecked when the Yellow Turbans nearly overran it, here in You Province the Inspectors and Governors and such were still relatively intact.
No matter that I was the General Who Conquers the North, I still had to learn the situation and get our stories straight before moving.
Above all, according to the Original Timeline, Liu Bei had been sweeping up Yellow Turbans alongside the local Governor here, so I wouldn't need to search for her everywhere—making contact there would let me track down Liu Bei easily.
At last I was savoring the thrill of my long-awaited reunion with the sworn siblings of the Peach Garden Oath...
"General!!! Ur-urgent report."
"..."
My hopes
were shattered less than a week after we crossed into You Province and began advancing north at a deliberate pace.
'Fuck!! Why is this worthless son of a bitch already dead and gone!!!!'
Spring, 177.
The twelfth emperor of the Later Han, Emperor Ling, had died suddenly.
It was a death twelve years earlier than the Original Timeline.