If you keep that up, you'll die in ten years
If you keep that up, you'll die in ten years
"You filthy wretches! How dare you do this to me!"
The woman vented her rage with no restraint.
Empress Dowager He.
Yet despite the fury of the Emperor's own mother, the man seated arrogantly on the bed at this moment—
The Ten Regular Attendants... or rather, now that only three remained, the Three Regular Attendants. Their chief, Zhang Rang, did not so much as blink before speaking.
"You are terribly noisy. You are Empress Dowager now; I suggest you conduct yourself with some decorum, Your Majesty."
"Silence! To repay kindness with enmity—are you even human, behaving like this!"
"Kindness with enmity... Haha, well, that's rich, coming from you. Butcher He Jin!"
"!"
Zhang Rang rose from his seat with those words.
As Zhang Rang's overwhelming bloodlust pressed down on her, Empress Dowager He found herself retreating step by stumbling step without realizing it.
"Your He clan are the ones who repaid our kindness with enmity! We took lowborn wretches like you, made one an empress and another the General-in-Chief, and you dared stab us in the back?"
"Ngh..."
Watching that, Zhang Rang swiftly reined in his blazing fury. Then, his voice even again, he said:
"Stay quiet, if you please. What will the servants say if Your Majesty loses her temper over what is, after all, finished business? Should you cause any more uproar, I too may find myself wishing to avenge my fallen comrades. You do understand... what I mean, don't you, Empress Dowager."
"Tch..."
"In that case, I shall see you later. May you depart in peace."
"..."
And so the Empress Dowager departed, enduring Zhang Rang's courteous farewell.
Immediately afterward, Zhang Rang sat down, his face blank.
'I've suppressed her for now... but patching this over won't be easy for a while, I see.'
Stripped of all real authority, Empress Dowager He had gone, venting her rage freely.
It was the futile tantrum of a foolish bitch who knew nothing of political reality, but as she was indisputably the Emperor's mother, he could not simply dismiss her.
Though it rankled, he felt the need to quell that anger somehow. For now, Zhang Rang decided, he would give the situation time and see how it played out.
It was then.
"Lord Zhang Rang, your guest has arrived."
"Oh! Show her in!"
Unlike a moment ago, Zhang Rang let his pleasure show quite openly.
Immediately, the 'guest' he had been waiting for appeared before his eyes.
"It has been a long time, Lord Zhang Rang. I, General Dong Zhuo, have come at your lordship's command."
"Well come, well come. You've had a long, hard journey. Come now, sit."
"Yes, Lord Zhang Rang."
She bowed her head respectfully and took her seat.
General of the Left, Dong Zhuo.
As he regarded the honored guest who had answered his summons—come all this way at his call and no one else's—Zhang Rang smiled deeply.
"Forgive me, Lord Zhang Rang. I hurried all I could yet have arrived late, it seems. You must have suffered profound upheaval in the interim."
"Not at all. Did you not come all the way here from distant Liang Province? Indeed, you have come quite fast, all things considered."
"You are too kind, Lord Zhang Rang. Yet the affair is already concluded, is it not? There appears to be nothing specific that warrants my presence."
"No, no, that is not the case. It has been scarcely three days since He Jin was executed. This city, Luoyang, is still in utter turmoil. At such a time, I can only set about securing my own power base in peace with a trustworthy loyal servant like you at my side."
Dong Zhuo's earlier words still carried a note of regret.
Seeing Zhang Rang reply with touches of consolation and apparent sincerity, Dong Zhuo asked, with added caution:
"But is General Ding Yuan not already here? From what I heard, this capital has already fallen into your lordship's hands and that man's."
"Mm... well, yes. I was able to reclaim my position with his aid."
With that, Zhang Rang took a small sip of tea.
Immediately after, however, Dong Zhuo noticed a faint shadow creeping across his face.
"Yet how can one easily repose trust in a person with whom one has concluded only a single transaction? Trust, as you know, is fashioned over many transactions. As it is with someone else we both know."
They had joined hands out of a shared purpose, but being inherently enemies by birth, there was no real faith between the two factions.
In that respect, Zhang Rang had far more reason to trust Dong Zhuo than Ding Yuan. Dong Zhuo belonged to the same Turbid Stream faction, had sent bribes for years, and had always been thoroughly pliable.
Not, of course, that he could extend more than a certain measure of trust even to this woman.
"You honor me beyond my deserts. But, speaking of which... was that person who just left Her Majesty the Empress Dowager, by any chance?"
"Indeed she was. Well, she is naught but a powerless figurehead now. I mean to ignore her for the present, and later, either soothe her properly, or else... sweep her away."
Zhang Rang spoke with the tone of a man discussing the sweeping of a room.
As Dong Zhuo refilled his teacup,
she spoke up, her voice quiet as ever, yet seeming to burrow into his ear.
"... You've softened a great deal, Lord Zhang Rang."
"Hm? What do you mean?"
"Is it not so? For Lord Zhang Rang, who has always resolutely eliminated any political foe who posed a danger, to show such mercy. Perhaps a recent string of events has brought you to some realizations?"
Finishing her words, Dong Zhuo set the teapot down and looked at Zhang Rang's face.
Meeting that characteristically cool gaze of hers, Zhang Rang chuckled lightly and took another sip of tea.
"Well... certainly, watching colleagues who were like family to me die has made me somewhat more thoughtful... but I would not say I've softened. Is she not, after all, an Empress Dowager with neither real power nor anything else? When the mood in the Imperial Capital is already so unsettled, I merely do not wish to needlessly scratch at a scab and raise a boil."
"No. I was not speaking of the Empress Dowager."
"Hm? What... do you mean? If not the Empress Dowager, then who could you...!"
Amid the ominous talk, a single thought abruptly surfaced in Zhang Rang's mind.
The smile at the corners of his lips began to fade.
And watching him, Dong Zhuo delivered the confirmation.
"You are thinking of precisely the right person, Lord Zhang Rang."
"... Do you realize what it is you are saying right now?"
"If I did not, there would be no reason for me to refrain from speaking that individual's name from my own lips."
"... Mm. I shall pretend I did not hear this. No matter how one looks at it, that is far too drastic a measure."
"Of course, I think so too. Yet I also see that within ten years, Lord Zhang Rang and his family will be unable to escape the annihilation of their entire clan."
"Wha—what did you say?"
Zhang Rang displayed his consternation at a remark far more extreme than he expected.
Before him, Dong Zhuo filled her own teacup and spoke in an elegant voice.
"Is it not inevitable? To Her Majesty, you are the enemy who cruelly murdered her uncle before her eyes. Moreover, the Empress Dowager and the He clan are surely pouring hatred of you and the eunuchs into her ears even now, young as she is. Even with my limited insight, I can foresee what Her Majesty will do to you once she comes of age."
"... Mm."
A future with ample reason behind it...
No, one that seemed certain to unfold just that way.
To Zhang Rang, who still could not give an answer rashly despite this, Dong Zhuo poured him more tea and continued.
"She is, in any case, an emperor hastily enthroned to placate He Jin. Now that He Jin is dead and the vast bulk of his faction has fallen into our hands, there is no further need to mind her."
"... Yet if we were to do so, would the lords of every region not rise up, invoking a campaign against traitors for their justification? Right now, even Yuan Shu, who is positioned directly before us, commands a full army of fifty thousand. If a dozen or more such lords were to come swarming in..."
"What is there to fear, when General Ding Yuan and I are here? At this very moment, in Luoyang alone, more than one hundred thousand troops under Ding Yuan are garrisoned, and on top of that, another forty thousand of my own subordinate soldiers are currently on the march from Liang Province."
"Mm..."
By now, most of the outside warlords He Jin had summoned were either preparing to return under 'the Emperor's command' or had been partly absorbed into their faction.
Among those still remaining, Yuan Shu's forces were, admittedly, formidable, but by 'the Emperor's command,' his main army was situated forty li outside Luoyang.
Yuan Shu himself was staying at the Yuan clan's main residence inside the walls of Luoyang, accompanied only by the few hundred soldiers permitted entry to serve as his guards.
"Above all, Lord Zhang Rang, do you not possess a weapon you can still wield for now, even if you later discard it? You, of all people, will know better than anyone how to put it to use..."
"..."
At Dong Zhuo's words—that he could use the figurehead Emperor just as he had always done—Zhang Rang finally nodded slowly.
As for justification, they needed only to recycle what he had already devised when he planned to enthrone the Prince of Bohai.
And if they used Empress Dowager Dong—the late Emperor's mother, still sitting in the background—the affair itself would, unexpectedly, not prove very difficult.
Thus, for the sake of his own future and his clan's safety,
Zhang Rang at last nodded slowly.
"Very well. We shall do as you say."
*
"Guaaagh!!!"
"Hit him harder! A soldier sworn to defend the country molests a woman in broad daylight? Beat him soundly, so no one dares try this again!"
"Yes, General Yuan!"
A display of the bitter taste of the law, right in the middle of Luoyang's main thoroughfare.
The old saying has it that the law is far and the fist is near, but at this spot, the law was nearer than the fist.
A fist you could take in some secluded corner and that would be the end of it, but the law—this was a public humiliation that laid out a man's crimes before dozens of onlookers while flogging him half to death.
Thus, having dealt with yet another soldier from the Eight Colonels—one who'd been rampaging around as if he had no idea how high the heavens stood—we promptly turned our steps toward the next location.
"I keep thinking about it, but this reminds me of the old days. You did similar work going around back when you were Colonel of Changshui, didn't you?"
At Ji Ling's remark, I answered with a light grin.
"Well... isn't this what a soldier's job was originally created to do? Punish the wicked, help those in trouble. Though the ones under Ding Yuan seem to have the whole thing backwards."
"I concur."
"The rabble from Bing Province are a problem, but the ones who were originally Imperial Guards or part of the Eight Colonels are especially troublesome. If anyone tried this in Jiangdong, they'd lose a hand on the spot..."
Exchanging remarks like that, we were busy as always managing Luoyang's public order.
Throughout this work, however, I had been harboring a private question inside.
'Strange... I get that their troops' discipline is a complete mess, but we've been throwing our weight around this hard and still hear nothing from the other side.'
We were crushing every thug we found without caring who was watching, whether Bing Province soldiers or Imperial Guards.
Even if my own aggressive moves didn't lead to actual combat, I'd expected at least a protest from Ding Yuan's side by now. But contrary to my expectations, they had yet to show any reaction at all.
'Honestly, I figured that if I kept prodding them like this, people like Lü Bu, Zhang Liao, or Gao Shun would come bursting out soon. Is their patience surprisingly deep? Or is there some other purpose...'
With Zhang Rang—the closest thing they had to a brain—on the other side, I could not easily predict their next move.
In that regard, I was beginning to feel that if they stayed this quiet, I might soon need to throw a few jabs of my own—to prepare in advance for the storm that would soon arrive.
*
"They got hit again?"
"Yes, General. One of the officers was caught by General Yuan Shu and beaten like a dog on a scorching summer day, they say."
"... Haah."
At her subordinate's report, the woman could only sigh.
Lü Bu.
Watching her, the woman with the long, braided brown hair,
Zhang Liao, asked, a note of question in her voice:
"You're just going to let it go again? How many times is this now? Shouldn't we step up and clash with them ourselves?"
"..."
"Gah, this is maddening! Fine, if you won't, then I will. I'll go right now—"
"Enough, Wenyuan."
Lü Bu shot an icy glare toward Zhang Liao as she moved to stand.
Knowing full well that when Lü Bu's face took on that look, a thing was truly forbidden, Zhang Liao had no choice but to sink back down.
"It happened because our own soldiers messed up. Filing a protest would just be ridiculous."
"Lord Ding Yuan told you to ease up on them, remember? And it's one thing if it's the others, but now even our own kids are coming back stripped to the bone, and you expect us to just sit here and watch? At least go and lodge a complaint yourself!"
"Haah..."
"Seriously, what is with you? Don't tell me the great Lü Bu is actually scared of that Yuan Shu, or Honey Water, or whatever that man calls himself?"
"..."
"... Huh? Wait... you really are?"
At the careless remark, Lü Bu gave a small shudder.
The sight left Zhang Liao thoroughly bewildered.
Was this not Lü Bu? The mightiest general she knew, the person she thought best suited to the title "Strongest Under Heaven."
She had never once seen that Lü Bu tremble like this before.
'No... just how great is this Yuan Shu, for even Lü Bu to react that way.'
Amid her mounting questions, Zhang Liao could do nothing but swallow her anger and leave the matter be for now.
And there, before Zhang Liao's eyes,
Lü Bu—her hands shaking—tightened her grip on the black military coat she always wore.
It was then.
"G-General!"
A moderately youthful-sounding boy came in through the door.
Gao Shun.
About the same age as Lü Bu, yet elevated to the rank of deputy commander equal to Zhang Liao by sheer ability alone,
he came tumbling into the room as if his small body was doing somersaults.
"Fuck... what is it this time?"
"T-Terrible news, General. General Yuan Shu is here."
"What?"