The Son of Heaven Who Uses Death as a False Accusation
The Son of Heaven Who Uses Death as a False Accusation
"Suddenly summoned? What in the world happened?"
"I'm not sure myself. General Sun, do you know anything?"
"From what I heard, something blew up in Luoyang, but I think we'll only know the details once we get there."
Ji Ling, Xu Rong, and Sun Jian made their way toward the command tent, questions hanging in the air.
At first there had been a fair amount of awkwardness, but after half a year grinding through a war together, they'd become reasonably close.
Ji Ling's naturally sociable personality helped, and since Xu Rong had saved her child, things had started off on a very positive note anyway.
At any rate, the three of them entered Yuan Shu's command tent.
The very next instant.
"Huh?"
"!"
"Ah!..."
The ease they'd worn just moments before vanished, faces freezing over at the sudden, ominous presence bearing down on them.
What met their eyes was nothing like the usual.
Their lord, seated and projecting an unmistakably sinister pressure.
It was Yuan Shu.
Normally, their lord was relaxed, easygoing — even a little careless. But right now, not a trace of that lightness remained.
The air around him was so grim and heavy, it was as if something black were oozing out of him.
Cold sweat beading on their skin at the ferocious pressure,
their earlier curiosity about what had happened sharpening into something far more urgent,
the three began warily gauging their lord's mood.
—Wh... what's with him? Why's he like that?
—I... I have no idea either. What in the world...?
—Colonel Ji Ling... you didn't get caught brewing liquor again, did you?
—N... no way, he's not the type to get that mad over something like that... and the snake wine this time wasn't even very much.
—So you did get caught.
—Mm...
The three of them lingered, voices barely louder than ants crawling across the ground. In the end, it was Ji Ling — the most senior here, and the one who regularly gave their lord the most grief — who opened her mouth.
"L... Lord? What's wrong? What happened?"
"... Hah."
At Ji Ling's question, Yuan Shu let out a deep sigh, then spoke, his voice dripping with icy fury.
"For now... all of you, sit. I have something to say."
"Y... yeah."
They sat, a bit hesitant, at their lord's command.
It didn't seem to be about the liquor, after all...
They wondered if they'd unknowingly done something catastrophically wrong, but unfortunately, nothing came to mind right away.
To the three of them, sitting there wracked with anxiety,
Yuan Shu spoke, his voice laden with an emotion utterly unlike him.
And.
What he said far exceeded anything they had imagined.
"The Emperor... is dead."
"Huh?"
"Wh... what did you say?"
"N... no... why, all of a sudden?"
The words were so far beyond anything they'd expected that the three of them could only feel bewildered. Even Ji Ling, who was hardly sensitive to this stuff, was stunned.
And no wonder — the current emperor was barely in his mid-twenties, and there'd been no word of him suffering from any illness.
News that a man like that had abruptly dropped dead could only come as a shock, whether large or small.
*
Word of the emperor's death had flown in far faster than in the Original Timeline.
I held out the letter Yuan Shao had sent me to the three of them, who sat there with stunned looks.
"According to this letter from my sister, after holding a banquet to celebrate the Yellow Turban Rebellion Suppression, he went into his chambers with about forty consorts, didn't come out for a week, and then abruptly died. Well... the meaning's clear enough, judging by that kind of cause."
"Ahem..."
For some reason, as I spoke, my gaze drifted toward Sun Jian, as though pulled there. She turned her head slightly and averted her eyes, as if a dark history she'd rather forget had resurfaced.
Even after all this time, the memory of that moment still hit hard. Even now, when our relationship had settled into a reasonably smooth lord-and-subordinate dynamic, it left a lingering awkwardness.
Cao Cao cut into the awkward silence.
"Honestly, what kind of excuse is it for a so-called emperor to croak from excessive pleasure? Anyway, so what? What's his dying got to do with us?"
"It's not... something we can ignore," Xu Rong said.
"Huh? Why? We're a hell of a long way from where the emperor is, aren't we? Can't we just grab some popcorn and watch the show from the sidelines?"
"That's..."
Xu Rong started to answer Ji Ling, but I spoke up instead.
"The emperor is dead, so naturally the next emperor will ascend. But both of his children are far too young. The eldest, the Prince of Hongnong, is barely seven. The youngest, the Prince of Bohai, is still just a two-year-old baby. With heirs like that, the enthronement process itself will be mired in difficulty, and no matter who takes the throne, the court will be unable to find its footing for a good while. It'll be staggering."
Still, compared to the Original Timeline, the two had been born earlier, so at least their father's swift death hadn't erased their existence. But the only silver lining was that their existence hadn't been erased — with the throne falling vacant far earlier than in the Original Timeline, I could easily foresee that the road ahead of them would be even more brutal.
"On top of that, with the emperor — who was essentially their backer — dead, the Ten Regular Attendants and the Turbid Stream Faction that had been riding high will be drastically weakened. They're bound to clash head-on with the Pure Stream Faction, led by General-in-Chief He Jin."
"Hmm... hearing it like that, it definitely isn't something we can just shrug off. The Pure Stream Faction — that's the faction Sister Benchu and Sister Aman belong to. And when you think about it, our lord's also Pure Stream, so..."
Only after Xu Rong's additional explanation did Ji Ling's face finally show that she understood.
With the court about to descend into chaos far sooner than I'd expected, we had to start our own preparations immediately.
Especially considering the string of events that, in the Original Timeline, would erupt one after another around this time... before long, a summons from Luoyang would almost certainly reach us.
In order to respond to a political landscape about to shift overnight,
despite having come all the way to You Province, I had no choice but to scrap every plan and turn back.
To Ji Province — which was close to Luoyang and had, at this point, practically become my home base anyway.
Damn it... I finally had a chance to at least see Liu Bei's face, and now this shit luck right up to the bitter end...
*
The emperor's sudden death.
For the Ten Regular Attendants, who had wielded power freely with the emperor as their backer, this was nothing less than a bolt from the blue.
"To think he had to go and drop dead so suddenly, of all times..."
"That's why I told you before! No matter how much we benefit from the emperor being lost in carnal pleasures, you should've kept it within reason!"
"Didn't he catch flak for that last time? If anything, you were the one who shot down the suggestion to reduce the number of consorts."
"Now, now... what's the point of dredging up that kind of talk now? This isn't the time to assign blame — it's the time to think about what comes after."
"He's right. Your squabbling can wait until after the situation is resolved."
"Mmm..."
"Tch..."
They still had things they wanted to say, but the crisis looming viscerally before their eyes shut their mouths for the moment, at least on the minor points.
Nobody knew better than the Ten Regular Attendants themselves just how spectacular the litany of their misdeeds was.
Which, to put it another way, meant that if the Pure Stream Faction seized power now, they would have more than enough justification to round them up and wipe out their entire clans.
What mattered most right now was, above all, their own survival. To secure that, they had to somehow seize the vacuum of power left by the emperor's death.
"There are two things of immediate importance. One: we must seize military authority for ourselves, by any means. Two: we must persuade Her Majesty Empress Dowager Dong to pass the throne to the Prince of Bohai, by any means."
At their leader Zhang Rang's words, the Ten Regular Attendants nodded, though skepticism remained on their faces.
The importance of military authority needed no explanation. In an emergency like this, the most reliable thing, in the end, was military force.
But the Prince of Bohai, Liu Xie, was a baby girl whom Empress Dowager Dong had been raising ever since her mother Lady Wang died. Even if necessity demanded it, they had to question whether enthroning her was possible at all.
"The Prince of Bohai is a baby who just turned two, is she not?"
"How can we place a child who still can't even speak properly on the imperial throne?"
"Even with Empress Dowager Dong's help, it will not be an easy undertaking."
The opposition of General-in-Chief He Jin and Empress Dowager He was a given, and the court ministers were highly unlikely to go along with it either.
By all appearances, it sounded like nothing more than a reckless gamble.
However.
"Even so, at present we have no other way. You all know that if the Prince of Hongnong ascends the throne like this, we are finished."
"Ugh..."
"Ahem..."
Not only would they lose their power — one wrong move and their entire families could be exterminated.
To prevent that, they had to stop the Prince of Hongnong — Empress Dowager He and He Jin's own blood — from taking the throne, by any means necessary.
"If there is one thing fortunate for us, it is that the emperor died without designating a successor. Moreover, Empress Dowager He and He Jin are originally of lowborn butcher stock, whereas the deceased mother of the Prince of Bohai was a person of noble status, was she not?"
"Besides, since both candidates are young children just the same, age might not actually be that large an issue."
"It's true... there's at least some kind of pretense of legitimacy. And if Empress Dowager Dong's influence is added on top of that..."
"But to carry this out, we will need power regardless. Military power, I mean."
Even if they could secure a minimal pretext, the ultimate decider would be a simple dynamic of force. In the end, the outcome would inevitably depend on who seized military authority here in Luoyang.
"As for military authority — do we not have the Eight Colonels of the Western Garden, created only recently? Since I, Jian Shuo, hold command over them, there is no need to worry about the situation inside Luoyang."
Jian Shuo spoke with brazen confidence, but Zhang Rang slowly shook his head.
"That alone is insufficient. Because of the negotiations with He Jin, a fair number of Pure Stream scum are mixed in among the Eight Colonels of the Western Garden. And more than anything, the troops under He Jin's direct command are a force we absolutely cannot ignore. If you weigh the de facto strength, at best we are at a disadvantage — at no point are we clearly superior."
"Hmm..."
"Th... then what must we do?"
"There is a way. In a situation like this, do we not have a capable hunting dog we can make use of?"
"A hunting dog, you say..."
"Surely you don't mean...?"
One name abruptly rose in their minds.
A figure who, throughout the Yellow Turban Rebellion Suppression, had faithfully obeyed their commands.
With the power that person wielded, the Ten Regular Attendants judged, flipping the current situation around would be entirely feasible.
"As it happens, a message came just beforehand: in barely more than a year, they've nearly finished mopping up the rebel forces."
"Whether the Yellow Turbans or this current matter, if it's that person, they can more than suppress He Jin and his faction."
"Good. Then I'll take it we are all in agreement. We shall put the plan into motion immediately. Right now, we will summon her to Luoyang under the pretext of bestowing rewards for the suppression of the rebels."
"Understood, Lord Zhang Rang."