A strange tension had settled over the Tang court, though the shift in mood came entirely from the Emperor. Li Shimin, hailed by the future as General Tiance, the greatest military commander in history, sat on his throne radiating smug satisfaction.
His golden dragon robes shimmered under the torchlight. He had unified the realm. He had broken the Turks. He had ushered in the Golden Age. Surely the Light Screen would now honor his brilliance.
Instead, the first voice to break the silence was Hou Junji. The man was a sharp tactician, but when it came to sensing danger in a room, he was blind as a bat.
"Your Majesty, why in heaven's name does the screen call the greatest commander in history by that ridiculous name? Erfeng? It sounds like something you would name a fat duck."
The grand smile on Li Shimin's face froze. Then it cracked, like dried clay under a blazing sun. The air in the hall dropped so sharply that even the palace guards forgot to breathe.
Zhangsun Wuji, standing just off to the side, shot Hou Junji a look. Oh, boy. I cannot save you from this kind of self-destruction.
Sensing the danger, he cleared his throat with enough force to rattle the rafters and bellowed with forced enthusiasm:
"Let us celebrate, Your Majesty! A commander who moves troops like the gods, his name still sung a thousand years into the future! What does a mere nickname matter when your legacy is carved into the stars?"
Hou Junji turned his head, utterly confused, and was met with a spectacular array of expressions from his fellow ministers.
Wei Zheng glared at him.
Fang Xuanling stared at the ceiling as though searching for divine help.
Du Ruhui massaged his temples in pure exhaustion.
Li Shimin let out a quiet sigh from the depths of his soul. It was bad enough the Light Screen insisted on praising him. Now it had stripped him of his glorious surname and left him with a nickname that sounded like something a street vendor would name his special.
Fortunately, the quick-witted ministers of the Zhenguan era swiftly steered the conversation away from the awkwardness of Sun Quan's succession bloodbath. He had named both his sons as candidates and then sat back to watch them tear each other apart. That drama was four centuries old and frankly lacked the spice of the modern commentary they had grown used to.
"The descendants of the future are a playful," Du Ruhui said, stroking his beard with a soft chuckle.
Fang Xuanling nodded. "There is mockery in their tone, certainly. But the fact remains. A ruler from more than a thousand years ago is still remembered and still talked about. If Sun Quan were here today, I dare say even he would crack a smile."
The rest of the court murmured in agreement. When all was said and done, how many emperors could claim their tomb would stand untouched and famous a thousand years after their death?
Li Shimin leaned forward, his eyes fixed on the glowing image of that future university admission letter. A deep sense of wonder washed over him, tangled with a sharp and burning curiosity.
"I truly wish I could see the core teachings of their science and technology," he murmured. He leaned back, a hint of self-satisfaction creeping into his voice. "It seems even in the distant future, they still rely on the imperial examination system to select their talent."
Du Ruhui, however, was not about to let the Emperor indulge in unfounded assumptions. He stepped forward, his voice calm but firm.
"Your Majesty, the Light Screen made it clear that this university is only one of the top institutions. That means several others stand at the same level, to say nothing of the countless schools that did not even make the list. The number of students pursuing higher learning in the future is something the Great Tang simply cannot match."
Li Shimin fell silent. A strange and heavy feeling settled in his chest. It was one thing for the future to have more schools. But the knowledge those students carried was centuries beyond anything this era could fathom. Where did such world-altering knowledge come from? How did mortals learn to command the very elements and read the stars?
[Lightscreen]
[Compared to Sun Quan, who at least gets a few offerings and a tourist visit at his tomb, his chief commander Lu Meng had a much harder time.
In the 1990s, the people of Funan, Lu Meng's hometown, erected a bronze statue in his honor. But two years later, the statue was smashed to pieces and unceremoniously removed. Why? Because his famous 'white-clad crossing of the river' to backstab Guan Yu ruined his reputation among the business community.
In the south, many people worship Lord Guan as the God of Wealth. The local merchants didn't take kindly to a general known for breaking alliances and stabbing allies in the back.
Guan Yu, it seems, got the last laugh from beyond the grave.
The historical verdict on Sun Quan came down fast. When Chen Shou compiled the Records of the Three Kingdoms, he was famously stingy with words, spending them like gold.
Cao Cao gets the full treatment—Surname Cao, given name Cao.
Liu Bei is recorded as the Former Emperor, surname Liu, given name Bei.
But Sun Quan? Brutally casual. Sun Quan, courtesy name Zhongmou. That is it.
Their deaths are handled with the same sharp distinctions. Cao Cao's passing is an imperial death.
Liu Bei's is equally grand.
Sun Quan gets the bargain-bin label, the Prince's Demise, the kind you slap on dukes and petty warlords.
Then comes Chen Shou's direct assessment. He says Sun Quan swallowed humiliation just like Goujian, the legendary king of Yue. Do not mistake that for a compliment.
It is a passive-aggressive stab of the highest order.
Goujian's crowning glory was destroying the State of Wu. Compare Sun Quan to him, and you are basically saying he was born to be devoured by his own ambition.
And just like Goujian, Sun Quan had a habit of using his best men and then discarding them the moment they were no longer useful. The hound gets no thanks once the rabbit is dead.
Chen Shou's final verdict is brutal. Suspicious. Ruthless. A man who, by his own hand, dragged his state to ruin.
But as we said before, Sun Quan was blank silk through and through. Whoever stood closest gave him his color. And his grand commanders? They knew exactly how to handle their side of that arrangement.
Take Lu Xun. Early on, he wrote memorials singing Sun Quan's praises, giving him full credit for the realm Sun Ce had built with a single stroke.
Later, when Sun Quan got it into his head to attack Gongsun Yuan, Lu Xun turned into a master of diplomatic babysitting.
My Lord, you are simply too brilliant. You beat Cao Cao at Red Cliffs.
You smashed Liu Bei at Yiling.
You stabbed Guan Yu in the back at Jingzhou.
These legends never stood a chance against you. So why waste your energy on some nobody warlord in Liaodong? Is he even worth rolling out of bed for?
Translation: You are the boss, so we have to pretend you are a genius. Now please, for everyone's sake, sit down and stop coming up with ideas.
A few hundred years later, during the Southern Song dynasty, the poet-general Xin Qiji perfected this exact flavor of sarcasm.
He wrote a famous verse who could truly match the heroes of ancient days, concluding that a son should be like Sun Zhongmou. On the surface, it is a glowing tribute to Sun Quan, but in reality, it was a bitter attack on the cowardly, pleasure-seeking rulers of the Southern Song.
Everyone reading knew the subtext: the foolish son of Liu Biao was a pig and a dog next to real man.
Xin Qiji did not necessarily admire Sun Quan all that much. He was just using him as a stick to beat the cowards who were running the court.
That said, one man during the Song dynasty genuinely admired Sun Quan. Su Zhe. He praised Sun Quan as better than Cao Cao and declared Liu Bei worse than Sun Quan.
But Su Zhe was also the kind of scholar who could churn out thousands of words justifying why handing the Yanyun Sixteen Prefectures over to the Khitan Liao was actually a great idea.
His argument, delivered with a perfectly straight face, boiled down to this: the Song dynasty would reap all the benefits without the embarrassment of losing territory. Let that sink in. It is safe to say that even Sun Quan would not want that man's endorsement.]
In Chengdu, Liu Bei turned to his staff with a curious look.
"Zizhong, what do you make of this analysis?"
Mi Zhu, the faction's chief financial officer, stroked his chin. He understood exactly what the question was driving at regarding Lu Meng's reputation among merchants. A bitter and knowing smile crossed his face.
"Lu Meng used the guise of a merchant to launch his surprise attack. He seized a victory for Jiangdong but destroyed the very trust that commerce is built on. Ask any merchant. The contract comes first. Break your word, and you are no longer welcome anywhere."
The implication cut clear. Breaking alliances and shredding treaties were not the marks of a civilized state. The advisors and generals around him began murmuring, eager for the moment they could ask Lu Meng directly what he thought of his own shortsighted choices.
"We must find a way to capture Lu Meng alive when the time comes," Zhang Fei muttered under his breath.
The generals nearby shot him puzzled looks. Was Third General planning to deliver a lecture on moral philosophy before taking the man's head?
Liu Bei, for his part, was rather pleased with Chen Shou's sharp tongue. He came out looking quite good in the historical record.
Kongming could barely contain his amusement. He pressed a hand to his mouth, his eyes bright with mirth. "Comparing Sun Quan to Goujian."
He shook his head and decided to keep the rest to himself. Pang Tong, however, moved with a phantom's stealth and materialized right beside him.
"It seems you have figured out how to handle our so-called allies in the south," Pang Tong murmured, low and conspiratorial.
"Naturally," Kongming said. His gaze stayed fixed on the distance. "Since our Lord shares a bond of family with Sun Quan, we will simply guide his thoughts back toward the restoration of the Han Dynasty."
Pang Tong gave a satisfied nod. He did not bother asking for details. So long as Kongming stopped letting the Wu faction shove them around, he was content. More than that, Pang Tong nursed a dark thought he chose to keep to himself. If things ever went wrong, we could always withdraw into the mountains of Shu, wait for Sima Yi to tear the north to pieces, and outlast every last enemy.
Zhang Fei, meanwhile, had finally untangled the knot of Xin Qiji's poetry. He sat back, genuinely astounded by the sheer complexity of the literary roast. These future scholars were not just farmers and papermakers. They were absolute masters of the art of destroying a man without using a single foul word.
But the mood inside the tent soured fast as Zhang Fei processed the mention of the Yanyun Sixteen Prefectures. His eyes flared with fury.
"What do you mean my homeland was given away?"
He did not know the exact geography of the future Yanyun Sixteen Prefectures, but he knew the region of Yan and Zhao. He knew Youzhou was part of it. A single glance at the tactical map displayed on the Light Screen was enough to confirm his worst fear.
His home was gone.
"The Light Screen said before that the Song Dynasty was locked in a stalemate with the Mongols at Xiangyang," Zhang Fei roared, his voice rattling the tent. "I thought they had simply lost the land in battle. Are you telling me they handed it over willingly?"
"And then they dressed up that shame with ridiculous flattery and called it a benefit? If I had been there, I would have used my serpent spear to skewer the minister who wrote that alongside the Mongol cavalry!"
Zhao Yun sat in silence, his face pale. He was fairly certain his own home in Changshan was just as exposed to the northern invaders thanks to that catastrophic surrender.
"Those Song emperors have no spine," Zhang Fei growled, crossing his massive arms. "Big Brother, the only right way is to fight our way north and take it back ourselves."
Across time, the Emperor of the Great Tang was just as appalled. Li Shimin stared at the screen, his jaw tight with disbelief.
"Are you telling me the officials and the ruler of the Song Dynasty were this shameless?"
He could not wrap his mind around the thinking that produced such a document. He wanted to read the justification with his own eyes.
"You give up the Yanyun Sixteen Prefectures, and the northern cavalry rides straight into the heartland without a single obstacle in their path. How is anyone supposed to sleep at night?"
He rubbed his temples, frustration coiling behind his eyes. Watching the Emperor sink into thought, Hou Junji quietly shuffled over to Fang Xuanling and Du Ruhui to ask what exactly this mysterious Song Dynasty was all about. Wei Zheng, standing nearby, tilted his head to listen in.
"Flourishing culture. Completely useless in a fight," Fang Xuanling said, summing up his impression.
"The emperors are worthless, and the loyal generals have nowhere to turn," Du Ruhui added with his usual bluntness.
Li Shimin raised his head from his brooding and added a quiet, somber note. "In the end, their dynasty was wiped out by a foreign race. Their soldiers and civilians drowned themselves in the sea. A heroic end, at least."
When he had first seen that slice of history, he had assumed the Song was a martial power and the foreign tribes were simply unstoppable. Looking at it now, it was clear they had brought the disaster down on themselves through sheer incompetence.
Wei Zheng, having pieced together the situation, let out a sneer of unfiltered contempt.
"The Light Screen calls these men the Three Su, which tells us they were famous officials of the Song Dynasty. If the men who coughed up such treasonous nonsense are considered great scholars and ministers, then that country was beyond saving from the very first word."
The rest of the court murmured their agreement. If handing over sixteen prefectures could be spun into a glorious victory for the state, then Li Shimin's own humiliation at Weishui Bridge could just as easily be rewritten as the greatest triumph of his reign. Nobody in the hall was foolish enough to say that out loud in front of the Emperor.
Du Ruhui, however, could not resist a dry aside. "If we look at it this way, Sun Zhongmou might have passed for a brilliant ruler if he had been born in the Song Dynasty."
The ministers shook their heads. A thought experiment too strange to follow.
"Du Ruhui, you are stretching it," Li Shimin chuckled, waving a hand.
[Lightscreen]
[If Boss Cao had had so many nice things to say about the young Sun Quan, what about his own son, Cao Pi?
Well, time to bring back everyone's favorite master of the backhanded compliment, Chen Shou.
Gifted with literary talent, writing chapters with a stroke of the brush, knowledgeable, and gifted in the arts! These are all wonderful compliments describing a talented young scholar rather than a capable emperor.
But this is exactly how Chen Shou evaluated Cao Pi.
Along the way, Chen Shou also described what an ideal emperor looked like in his mind. He used words like broad-minded, fair, and devoted to the path of virtue.
But unfortunately, the connecting word between these two descriptions is 'if we add to this.'
It is very similar to Fu Xuan's evaluation of Liu Ye. On the surface, it sounds like a sigh, but in reality, it is a polite way of calling someone an idiot to their face.
In other words, Chen Shou was saying that Cao Pi was a great poet, but completely useless as a ruler. He was neither broad-minded nor fair, lacked ambition, and had terrible character.
To be fair, Cao Pi held the highest rank among ancient scholars. He was probably the best food critic among emperors, and the best writer among food critics.
More importantly, he is one of the few emperors in history known to have died of diabetes. Perhaps because his father had praised Sun Quan, Cao Pi had a rather complex relationship with the Jiangdong ruler. The two exchanged quite a few gifts during their reigns.
In one of his letters, Cao Pi sent Sun Quan a fine steed, a sable fur coat, five hu of stone honey, and a thousand dried fish.
Sun Quan was equally polite, sending back a batch of southern oranges. Unfortunately, the oranges were so sour that Cao Pi complained that out of a hundred oranges, not a single one was sweet.
Cao Pi ate many fruits in his life, but when it comes to the ones that truly shaped history, we have to talk about sugarcane, lychee, and grapes.]