The heavy silence in the Shu Han government office was thick enough to choke a horse.
Wei Yan's face was a mask of grim dejection, his eyes fixed on the cold floor tiles as if searching for a reason to keep holding a spear.
Kongming, however, remained the picture of composed elegance.
He watched the flickering glow of the divine screen with a gaze that had already moved past the immediate horror.
"Wenchang, why worry?" Kongming's voice cut through the gloom.
"Even without our intervention, the Sima clan eventually gets exactly what they deserve. Their names are dragged through the mud for a thousand years, and their precious aristocratic system is smashed to pieces by the weight of its own rot."
He stood up, his feather fan tracing a slow. "The Prime Minister you saw on that screen did his best. Now, it is our turn to do better."
Wei Yan looked up, his heart a chaotic mess of conflicting emotions. He eventually lowered his head and cupped his hands in a silent, respectful salute.
Kongming did not look back. His eyes were locked onto that long, terrifying list of rebellions and disasters displayed on the screen.
In his past life, or perhaps the life he was supposed to lead, he wanted to reunite the world to restore the glory of the Great Han. But now? Now he wanted something more. He wanted to build a New Han that could stand shoulder to shoulder with that future Great Tang.
And to do that, his first task was clear: he had to lobotomize the aristocratic families before they could turn the empire into their private playground.
---
Meanwhile, back in the Ganlu Hall, the vibe was significantly more rowdy.
"The Luo River Bullshit!" Li Shimin's laughter boomed, echoing off the high rafters. "I love it! These people from the future really have a way with words!"
He wiped a stray tear from his eye, leaning forward with a wicked grin. "Think about it. That Sima fellow, the supposed Propagator of Jin, breaks a sacred oath by the river and then acts like it never happened. If that is not a massive, stinking pile of bullshit, I do not know what is!"
The ministers shared a series of awkward, tight-lipped glances.
Their Emperor's language was getting a bit crude, but nobody was about to call him out on it. In fact, most of them were nodding along.
The screen had already branded Li Shimin as the 'Number One Hater' of the Sima-Jin era, and as loyal Tang officials, it was their professional duty to be 'Junior Haters' right alongside him.
For Li Shimin, hating on the Jin was a matter of professional pride. An Emperor's word was supposed to be golden. By swearing an oath and then flushing it down the toilet, Sima Yi had not just cheated a rival. He had committed a drive-by shooting on the very concept of imperial credibility.
As for the stories of aristocratic luxury that followed, Li Shimin barely spared them a glance.
Who cared about silver horse troughs? It was just pathetic overcompensation for a lack of real achievement.
Besides, if you wanted to talk about burning money, there was a much bigger fish to fry.
[Lightscreen]
[This culture of insane aristocratic excess did not end with the Jin dynasty. If anything, it rolled straight into the Sui and helped blow the entire empire apart.
There is a famous anecdote in the Xu Shishuo that captures this perfectly.
One night, Li Shimin hosted a grand banquet in the Tang palace. Lanterns hung everywhere, silk streamers covered the halls, musicians played through the night. The whole place looked like a peacock trying to impress another peacock.
During the feast, he invited Empress Xiao, the widow of Yang Guang, Emperor Yang of Sui.
Li Shimin, in one of his classic "please praise me" moments, asked her with a grin:
"So, how does my Tang court compare to the Sui court of your late husband?"
Empress Xiao merely smiled and said nothing.
Unfortunately for her, Li Shimin was the kind of man who treated conversations like military campaigns. Once he started pressing, he was not going to stop.
Eventually, she gave in.
She described how the Sui court celebrated New Year's Eve.
Outside the palace gates, they built gigantic bonfires that towered like hills. The fires were not fed with ordinary wood, but with sandalwood by the cartload. Rare incense such as Jiajian was thrown into the flames for fragrance. The blaze supposedly rose several stories high, and the scent drifted for dozens of miles.
In a single night, the palace burned through two hundred carts of sandalwood.
Inside the palace, they did not even bother using lamps.
Instead, priceless giant pearls were suspended throughout the halls, reflecting light everywhere until midnight looked like broad daylight.
After describing all this, Empress Xiao turned to Li Shimin and calmly said:
"Your Majesty burns firewood outside and uses oil lamps indoors. To be honest, the smoke is making my eyes sting a little."
That line must have hit Li Shimin like a cavalry charge directly to the ego.
Of course, we should take this entire story with a mountain-sized grain of salt.
Yang Guang absolutely was a legendary spender, but the idea that we know the exact emotional damage Li Shimin suffered in that moment is questionable at best.
The source itself is important.
The Xu Shishuo was written during the Northern Song by Kong Pingzhong, a descendant of the Confucius family and a major scholar from Shandong.
Here is the catch: Li Shimin was a legendary Shandong Regional Hater.
If you are a writer from Shandong, you are not exactly going to write fan-fiction making Li Shimin look like a genius.
Still, propaganda aside, Yang Guang genuinely had a catastrophic governing philosophy.
He did not rule the empire like a state. He ruled it like an enormous private estate owned by the aristocratic clan.
The common people were not citizens in his eyes. They were labor, tax revenue, construction material, and disposable manpower for whatever gigantic project had caught his attention that month.
And the funniest part is that Yang Guang was not even supposed to inherit the throne.
Originally, the crown prince was his older brother, Yang Yong.
Yang Yong lost his position largely because Emperor Wen hated extravagance and disliked the fact that his son enjoyed luxury, women, and aristocratic pleasures.
Which is hilarious, because by the standards of the time, Yang Yong was basically normal.
Yang Guang was not some naturally ascetic saint either. He simply played the role better.
In front of Emperor Wen, he acted humble, frugal, disciplined, hardworking, almost monk-like. Meanwhile, Yang Yong behaved like an actual rich prince from a powerful dynasty.
Emperor Wen looked at this situation and somehow concluded:
"Yes. The fake peasant actor is clearly the trustworthy one."
The real weirdo in the entire family was Emperor Wen himself.
The man practically lived like a Confucian productivity manual in human form.
He kept only one empress, disliked waste, obsessed over agriculture, reduced taxes, stabilized the economy, and spent his reign doing painfully unexciting but necessary administrative work.
For a founder emperor, he was almost bizarrely restrained.
Then Yang Guang inherited the empire and immediately started spending national resources like a drunken immortal who had discovered cheat codes.
The Grand Canal, massive palaces, endless military campaigns against Goguryeo, extravagant court culture, colossal construction projects, luxury spending everywhere. Any one of these might have been survivable on its own.
Yang Guang decided to do all of them simultaneously.
That was the real disaster.
He had the ambition emperor Wu of Han Dynasty, but not the administrative discipline or strategic patience to sustain those ambitions.
Emperor Wu of Han could drain the empire because he also knew how to control it afterward.
Yang Guang only knew the draining part.
The Sui dynasty inherited one of the strongest foundations in Chinese history and still managed to collapse almost immediately.
It was like watching someone inherit a fully upgraded empire save file and somehow trigger a game over speedrun within two generations.]
Back in the Tang court, Zhangsun Wuji cleared his throat. "Your Majesty, perhaps I should arrange to have Lady Xiao moved out of the capital? Just to avoid any... future rumors?"
Li Shimin rolled his eyes. "Since when do I get scared of a few lies written by some Song dynasty hack? Let them talk. The fact that future generations can see through the fake news just proves I do not need to worry about it."
He felt a surge of petty satisfaction. The screen had just compared his rival, Yang Guang, to a fake Emperor Wu of Han, while implying that he, Li Shimin, was the real deal. That was a win in his book.
"Besides," Li Shimin added, his voice dripping with condescension, "that Kong fellow's vision is about as wide as a peasant's back garden. He thinks I would be jealous of Yang Guang? Jealous of what? Jealous of losing an entire empire in two generations? Jealous of being the guy who makes the Sui look like a speed-run of a failed state?"
Feeling particularly magnanimous, Li Shimin issued a decree on the spot. "Lady Xiao has been away from the capital for a long time. Give her some gold, silver, and a palace pass. Let her visit Consort Yang whenever she gets lonely. We are the Great Tang. We do not need to be petty."
Meanwhile, in Chengdu, Liu Bei was having a minor existential crisis.
"The Sui dynasty also fell in just two generations?" Liu Bei rubbed his temples, feeling a massive headache coming on.
"Is this Southern and Northern era just a giant meat grinder for dynasties? I cannot keep track of who is rebelling against whom anymore."
Zhang Fei, on the other hand, was weirdly fascinated. "Man, these Emperors really know how to party. Burning mountains of sandalwood just for the scent? That makes the Jin nobles look like they were living in a shack."
He turned to Pang Tong. "Hey, Shiyuan, do you think the Great Tang only started because Li Shimin saw how cool Yang Guang's bonfires were and decided he wanted a turn?"
Kongming shook his head, his face solemn. "The posthumous title 'Yang' is not a compliment, Yide. It signifies someone who was cruel to the people, neglected the government, and abandoned the state. For a man to be branded 'Yang,' he must have truly earned the hatred of every person in the land. It was not just about small things like burning incense."
Liu Bei nodded in agreement. He was still reeling from the military stats he had seen earlier. If I had even half of Li Shimin's talent for leading an army, would I have lost everything at Yiling? He quickly shut down that train of thought before it made him cry.
"And what is with these Kong clan descendants?" Liu Bei grumbled. "Why are they writing books just to talk trash about a great ruler?"
"Old grudges, most likely," Kongming sighed. "The screen mentioned Li Shimin had a bias against the Shandong region. An Emperor's prejudice can last for decades. But the prejudice of a genius Emperor? That can poison the well for centuries."
[Lightscreen]
[Insane spending was only one symptom of aristocratic decay. The other disaster was the complete collapse of the intellectual class itself.
The old Confucian ideal, with all its lectures about duty, restraint, morality, and serving the people, no longer fit the lifestyle of the Wei-Jin aristocracy. These people wanted luxury without responsibility, status without service, and freedom without consequences.
So they gradually tossed Confucianism aside and became obsessed with Xuanxue, "Dark Learning."
Now, to be fair, Xuanxue itself was not inherently stupid. At its best, it was an attempt to merge Daoist metaphysics with Confucian thought, exploring questions about existence, nature, and the universe.
The problem was what the aristocrats turned it into.
By the late Western Jin, "philosophy" increasingly became an excuse for doing absolutely nothing useful while acting intellectually superior about it.
In practice, it often translated to:
"as long as you are a high-born noble, you can do whatever the hell you want and call it philosophy."
The ultimate mascot of this culture was Liu Ling, one of the famous Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.
One day, a guest came to visit him.
Liu Ling casually walked out completely naked. Not half-dressed. Not "oops, forgot a robe." 100% Completely naked.
The guest was horrified and demanded to know what kind of behavior this was.
Liu Ling did not even flinch.
He calmly replied:
"I take the universe as my house and this room as my pants. So, the real question is, why are all of you crawling around inside my crotch?"
Honestly, that is such an overwhelmingly confident answer that it loops all the way back into greatness.
You can practically hear the guest's brain shutting down on the spot.
Then there was Wang Yan.
Wang Yan was born into one of the great aristocratic clans and essentially spawned into the game with every achievement already unlocked. Government office, prestige, influence, wealth, reputation, all of it was guaranteed from birth.
Naturally, he developed the personality of a man who had never encountered consequences.
His most famous trait was his absolute hatred of money.
Not poverty. Not greed.
Money itself.
He hated it so much that he refused to even say the word "money."
One night, his family covered the area around his bed with piles of coins while he slept.
When Wang Yan woke up and saw them, he reportedly cried out in horror:
"Remove these obstacles!"
Not "coins." Not "money."
Obstacles.
The man treated loose change like a spiritual debuff.
If Wang Yan existed today, he would absolutely dominate social media.
Millions of followers.
Daily philosophical posts.
Minimalist aesthetic videos.
Cryptic captions like: "True wealth is transcending material attachment."
Sponsored by twelve luxury brands.
But then reality finally arrived. The War of the Eight Princes tore the Jin dynasty apart, and suddenly all these elegant aristocrats had to deal with something deeply offensive to their worldview:
actual hardship.
Wang Yan ended up fleeing alongside a massive group of nobles and officials. On paper, these men were supposed to be the guardians of the dynasty.
In reality, it looked more like a panicked evacuation of useless celebrities escaping a collapsing influencer convention.
Eventually, they were captured by Shi Le of the Jie people, one of the future rulers during the era of the Five Barbarians.
And Shi Le was the complete opposite of the Jin aristocrats.
This was a man born into slavery.
At one point, Jin officials literally sold him like livestock.
Everything he achieved came through violence, survival instinct, political intelligence, and military talent.
While the Jin nobles spent decades discussing cosmic philosophy in gardens, Shi Le spent those same years learning how to stay alive.
At first, Shi Le treated Wang Yan respectfully because he had heard of his immense reputation.
But within days, Wang Yan managed to disgust even him.
First, Wang Yan tried to dodge responsibility by blaming everything on other officials. Then he immediately switched tactics and began flattering Shi Le, saying things like:
"A hero of your caliber should proclaim himself Emperor!"
Shi Le was revolted.
At the time, he was still technically serving another ruler. To him, Wang Yan embodied everything rotten about the Jin elite.
According to the records, Shi Le looked at him and said: "You became a high minister while still young, and now you are old, yet understand nothing. The empire collapsed because of men like you."
That line cuts straight through the entire Wei-Jin aristocratic culture.
The Jin nobles loved to present themselves as refined sages above vulgar worldly concerns.
But when the empire was burning, most of them proved incapable of leadership, sacrifice, or even basic responsibility.
And then came the final irony.
Shi Le decided that someone as "elegant" and "refined" as Wang Yan should not die by something as crude as a soldier's blade.
Instead, he had his soldiers push over a heavy mud wall, burying Wang Yan alive. A fitting, abstract end for a man who spent his life pretending the world did not exist.]