The silence inside Ganlu Hall grew so heavy it felt like a physical weight pressing down on every chest.
The ministers of the early Tang, the very men who had helped forge one of the greatest empires beneath Heaven, could only stare at the fading light screen in stunned paralysis.
At this point, Huang Chao's personal ending no longer mattered much to them.
Whether he died by suicide, execution, or betrayal was secondary.
The moment the screen confirmed that he had butchered the aristocratic clans and high officials of the late Tang, his name had already been nailed permanently into history beside the great calamities of the age.
Yet strangely enough, what truly suffocated the hall was not Huang Chao himself.
It was the light screen's final description of feudal society.
"Are we... truly eaters of men?"
Fang Xuanling unconsciously tightened his grip around the ivory court tablet in his hands until his fingers turned white.
The term itself was not unfamiliar. Since ancient times, the feudal order had been built upon noble ranks, hereditary privilege, land grants, and layered loyalties. To men of their era, that was simply civilization itself.
But the future descendants clearly viewed it very differently.
They did not describe it as governance.
They described it as a monstrous structure that had survived for centuries by feeding on human lives, generation after generation.
The more Fang Xuanling thought about it, the colder he felt.
Beneath all the sarcasm and ridicule from the light screen lay an uncomfortable amount of truth.
The great clans controlled the land, the schools, the official appointments, and even the marriages between powerful houses. They drew wealth and labor endlessly from the common people while using their status to shield themselves from consequences.
If that was not eating people, then what was?
For a moment, nobody in the hall could even imagine what sort of world the future generations inhabited if this was how they judged the past.
Wei Zheng and Du Ruhui both lowered their eyes silently.
Nearby, Zhangsun Wuji suddenly became extraordinarily busy.
The senior statesman sat beside the Emperor with the concentration of a man handling a matter of grave national importance. He slowly ground fresh ink against the inkstone in steady, rhythmic circles while maintaining an expression of utmost seriousness.
At some point, he also very naturally borrowed Fang Xuanling's copied transcript of The Lament of the Lady of Qin and placed it neatly beside Li Shimin's desk.
Officially, it was for calligraphy reference.
Unofficially, everyone present understood exactly what he was doing.
After watching the Emperor endure an entire day of emotional devastation from the light screen, Zhangsun Wuji was clearly trying to prevent Li Shimin from collapsing into another migraine.
"Looking at the aristocratic cliques of the Wei and Jin..." Wei Zheng finally muttered in a dry voice, "how can we claim we were not eating people?"
This time, even Du Ruhui offered no rebuttal.
He merely lowered his head and stared at the copied poem resting quietly in his hands. His eyes moved slowly across the lines again and again before he carefully rolled the scroll shut and tucked it into his sleeve almost reverently.
The poem itself was not beautiful.
It lacked the elegant scenery and soaring romance people associated with High Tang poetry.
There were no moonlit rivers, no magnificent mountains, no immortal verses celebrating prosperity.
Every line felt as though it had been written in hot, sticky blood.
It was not poetry commemorating a flourishing age.
It was the final scream of a dying empire.
And Du Ruhui understood that far too clearly.
He himself came from the prestigious Jingzhao Du clan. He was a scholar, an aristocrat, one of the empire's elite.
Precisely because of that, he understood the ugliness hidden beneath the system better than most.
The great clans had never truly viewed commoners as equals.
To countless aristocratic households, peasants were simply part of the estate itself.
Grain came from them.
Soldiers came from them.
Labor came from them.
Generation after generation, powerful families expanded their influence and prestige on the backs of people they barely considered human while the state slowly decayed underneath.
And for many noble houses, clan had always come before country.
That mentality alone had dragged the land through centuries of civil war during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, reducing countless nameless farmers into nothing more than fuel for the ambitions of great families.
Du Ruhui slowly closed his eyes.
In his mind, he could almost see them.
Silk-robed scholars gathering inside luxurious estates across the centuries, drinking wine while composing poetry and boasting proudly about ancient pedigrees and illustrious ancestors, as though noble birth itself were some divine achievement granted by Heaven.
Meanwhile, outside those estates, countless commoners starved quietly in the cold.
And then, amidst the laughter and flowing wine, Du Ruhui imagined a strange figure suddenly appearing among them.
A youth from the future.
The young man stood silently in the middle of the banquet, dressed in clothing completely out of place among the jade pendants and embroidered robes.
He looked at the poetry.
Looked at the wine.
Looked at the noble clans proudly discussing bloodlines that stretched back hundreds of years.
And his expression held nothing but naked disgust.
Then the youth slowly raised a finger toward the gathering and spoke a single sentence.
"Look at them. They are eating people."
Du Ruhui's fingers unconsciously tightened inside his sleeve.
His chest suddenly felt unbearably heavy.
Part of him instinctively wanted to argue back.
The Jingzhao Du clan was not the worst among the aristocratic houses. The Du clan had produced capable officials, loyal ministers, respected scholars.
They were not monsters.
Yet the words still never left his mouth.
Because he remembered what the light screen had shown them.
The future had not revealed these warnings merely so the great clans could survive longer and continue enriching themselves.
The purpose behind it was something far greater.
Nearby, Fang Xuanling and Wei Zheng were still debating governance, aristocratic influence, and the ethics of political power.
But Du Ruhui no longer paid attention to their argument.
He could already feel it.
The Great Tang was like an enormous chariot racing down a mountain road, and the trajectory of its wheels had just shifted by a fraction of a degree.
---
A thousand miles away, inside the government offices of Chengdu, The Lament of the Lady of Qin struck the officials of Shu Han with the same suffocating weight.
The poem's stark, almost brutal style felt completely different from the refined literary traditions of their era.
There were no elegant metaphors hiding the tragedy behind beautiful scenery.
Every line simply tore the wounds open and left them exposed.
As Kongming read through the descriptions of Chang'an collapsing into blood and fire, he felt a chill slowly crawl down his spine.
The Tang dynasty displayed on the light screen no longer resembled the radiant Grand Tang or Majestic Tang from the earlier broadcasts.
After a long silence, Kongming softly repeated one of the future narrator's favorite phrases.
"This... is the collapse of an empire."
The atmosphere inside the hall became strangely heavy.
It was an odd sort of grief.
The Tang dynasty would not even exist for several centuries, yet the horrors described in the poem felt painfully familiar to everyone present.
They had already lived through something similar themselves.
They remembered Luoyang in flames.
Remembered Chang'an drowning in chaos after Dong Zhuo's tyranny.
Remembered refugees filling the roads while warlords carved apart the corpse of the Han.
The distance of several hundred years suddenly felt meaningless.
Zhang Fei, however, had very little patience for poetic sorrow.
He slammed his fist onto the table hard enough to make the inkstones jump.
"This version of the Tang deserved to die!" Zhang Fei roared furiously. "The rebels bribed the generals and walked right through the defenses! The Emperor abandoned the capital to save his own skin! The people feed the state, and in return the state feeds the people straight into a meat grinder!"
His eyes blazed with fury.
"The ministers have no backbone, the generals have no honor, and the Emperor has no courage! What Great Tang? That thing on the screen is just a hollow shell wearing the Tang dynasty's face!"
He jabbed a thick finger toward the light screen.
"And that Huang Chao fellow..." Zhang Fei snorted. "Villain or not, at least the man still had the temper of a Tang poet. Telling that entire rotten dynasty to hurry up and die might honestly be the most reasonable thing anyone said all broadcast."
The room instantly fell silent.
Zhang Fei's words were dangerously close to outright treason, yet nobody present could really refute him.
The capital had fallen.
The Emperor had fled.
The imperial troops were robbing civilians more enthusiastically than the rebels.
The regional governors were hoarding troops like misers protecting private property.
At that point, even the existence of the dynasty itself started feeling questionable.
Zhang Fei gradually realized he might have sounded slightly too supportive of rebellion, so he awkwardly coughed into his fist and tried to salvage the situation.
"What I mean is..." he muttered, suddenly much less aggressive, "does this Tang dynasty seriously not have a single loyal hero left? Nobody willing to actually save the people instead of looting them?"
"Unlikely," Kongming sighed softly. "In the late Tang, the aristocratic clans sat in the center of the empire and drained the provinces dry. To ordinary commoners, the court was merely the name of the thing that collected taxes and abandoned them during disasters. There was no loyalty left for the dynasty to rely upon."
As for the current Great Han...
Kongming tactfully decided not to elaborate too much.
To put it bluntly, the empire presently consisted of heavily armed regional warlords and local elites staring at the Imperial Tripod and quietly wondering how much it weighed.
Very few of them could truly be called heroes.
Liu Bei slowly rose to his feet.
"Kongming," he said solemnly, "make a copy of The Lament of the Lady of Qin and hang it in the main hall. I want every official who enters this office to read it carefully."
His gaze swept across the room.
"Let it serve as a permanent warning."
Kongming immediately stood and bowed.
"Consider it done, my lord."
Liu Bei walked toward the window and looked silently northward.
"The suffering of a chaotic age..." he murmured, "is always borne most heavily by the people living around the capitals."
He thought of Dong Zhuo burning Luoyang.
Thought of Li Jue and Guo Si turning Chang'an into a slaughterhouse.
A hundred years of prosperity, scholarship, and culture could vanish in a single afternoon once armies started setting fires.
Kongming remained quiet.
Because he knew the truth was even crueler than Liu Bei imagined.
Over the next several centuries, Chang'an and Luoyang would be sacked, burned, rebuilt, abandoned, and burned again so many times that future historians would practically lose count.
Pang Tong suddenly cleared his throat.
"Well," he said thoughtfully, "if that is the case, perhaps we should capture Chang'an this year."
The atmosphere inside the hall changed instantly.
Even Liu Bei looked startled.
"This year?" he repeated. "But the troops from Jing and Yi provinces are still exhausted from the recent campaigns."
Pang Tong casually waved his hand.
"Sun Qian recently sent word from the northwest. Ma Chao possesses tremendous talent, but his temperament is unstable. Han Sui is clever, ambitious, and about as trustworthy as a smiling wolf. Liang Province is basically a pile of dry firewood waiting for someone to drop a spark into it."
A sharp glint appeared in Pang Tong's eyes.
"If we continue sitting in Hanzhong waiting for them to weaken each other, Xiahou Yuan will eventually seize the opportunity first. That man is not stupid."
Liu Bei immediately understood the danger.
If Wei consolidated control over Liang Province first, reclaiming Guanzhong later would become vastly more difficult.
The only issue was that Chang'an itself had always been notoriously difficult to hold without securing the surrounding mountain passes.
At that thought, everyone subconsciously glanced back toward the light screen.
Then they remembered Huang Chao smashing through Tongguan in two days.
The expressions around the room instantly became strange.
Since when had the most famous defensive pass beneath Heaven become a decorative folding screen?
Liu Bei slowly looked toward Pang Tong, who appeared extremely pleased with himself, then toward Kongming, whose calm expression radiated effortless confidence.
A strange sense of reassurance suddenly rose in his chest.
With Fengchu and Kongming both at his side, what exactly did he have to fear?
Then another strategist suddenly came to mind.
Liu Bei rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
"I wonder how Xiaozhi is doing up in Hanzhong?"
---
[Lightscreen]
["Was the Emperor of the Later Jin really that hopeless?"
"Shi Chonggui, the one later scholars loved mocking, definitely had problems. He was arrogant, terrible at judging people, and constantly indecisive. But at the very least, the man fought back. He went to war with the Khitan Liao twice. Even when the situation was already collapsing, he still issued an order for a northern expedition across the realm. The man lost badly, but he lost while resisting."
"His downfall ultimately came from betrayal. The general he trusted most, Du Zhongwei, surrendered on the battlefield and sold him out cleanly. You can call Shi Chonggui incompetent. You can call him a failure. But calling him a coward would honestly be unfair."
"Now compare that to the famous Jingkang Disaster of the Song dynasty."
"We seriously do not have enough time today to unpack that catastrophe properly, but the humiliation can basically be summarized in three stages. First: paying the invaders with mountains of silver and silk. Second: selling your own women and daughters to help cover the bill. And third... the Sheep-Leading Ritual."
"The most horrifying part, as usual, was what happened to the common people afterward. A Southern Song physician named Zhuang Chuo personally recorded the scenes he witnessed during the Jin invasion in a book called Remnants of a Broken Rib. He wrote: during the chaos, grain prices skyrocketed beyond reason. A single bucket of rice cost thousands of coins and still could not be bought. Soldiers, bandits, refugees, civilians... eventually everybody started eating each other. Human flesh became cheaper than dog meat. A healthy adult man cost barely fifteen coins. The corpses were dried into preserved meat."
"And yes, people even developed nicknames. Old men were called 'Extra Firewood.' Young women were called 'Better Than Lamb.' Small children were called 'Tender Enough to Eat Whole.' These were not horror stories invented centuries later. These were eyewitness accounts written by someone who actually lived through the disaster."
"So when later official histories accuse Huang Chao of building giant human meat grinders and turning people into paste, modern historians tend to raise an eyebrow. Compared to the Song records, some of those Tang accounts honestly read more like political demonization than reality. Because the historians truly hated Huang Chao. Not just because he rebelled. But because he broke the rules."
"Before Huang Chao, even if dynasties collapsed, the great aristocratic clans usually survived just fine. The country burned, peasants died, emperors changed, but the major families remained standing. After Huang Chao, that old world basically shattered. The warlords kept killing each other. The Imperial Examination system gradually weakened hereditary monopolies. Paper became cheaper. Education spread wider. More commoners entered government service. And the old aristocratic order slowly stopped being untouchable."
"Now, people sometimes ask: what about the Kong clan? Did not the descendants of Confucius remain a great clan for thousands of years?"
"Well... that situation is complicated. There were actually two branches. The Southern Kong branch had principles. The Northern Kong branch specialized in survival."
"During the Jingkang Disaster, the senior line of the Kong clan carried the sacred tablet of Confucius and the genealogy records south alongside the fleeing Song court. From that point onward, the clan split into two very different paths. The Northern branch stayed behind in the north and adapted themselves to whoever happened to be ruling at the moment. To put it bluntly, they became extremely experienced at surrender."
"A fitting couplet for them would probably be this:
'Confucius taught benevolence. Mencius taught righteousness. Today we finally understand: the wise man submits to the times.'
'Yesterday we welcomed the Mongols. Today we welcome the Qing. Tomorrow we will probably already be drafting another surrender letter.'
Horizontal inscription: The Kneeling Aristocracy."
"Meanwhile, the Southern Kong branch had a far rougher existence. When the Southern Song collapsed, many members of the clan followed the loyalists into the sea and died with them. During the Yuan dynasty, the Mongol court repeatedly tried to recruit the Southern Kong descendants in order to legitimize their rule. The Southern branch refused outright. Their response was basically: 'We would rather farm fields than serve you.'"
"Because they refused cooperation, the Northern branch became the officially recognized orthodox line. Later, the Ming restored some honors to the Southern branch and allowed them to continue ancestral rites in the south. Then the Qing invaded. And the Southern Kong immediately joined the resistance again. As punishment, the Qing court eventually stripped away their ritual privileges entirely."
"Over time, the Southern branch gradually disappeared into the common population. No great titles. No noble prestige. No special treatment. They simply became ordinary people. And honestly? That might have been the most peaceful ending any aristocratic clan ever got."
"Whether through rebellion, warfare, social collapse, or simple historical change, the age of hereditary aristocracy eventually reached its conclusion. And it did not end with dignity."]
---
Li Shimin finished the final stroke of The Lament of the Lady of Qin and slowly set his brush aside.
Fresh ink still glistened across the paper.
The entire Ganlu Hall remained silent.
Then the Tang Emperor suddenly stood up.
His robes swept across the floor as he strode toward the light screen, staring at the floating words with an expression that had somehow become even darker than before.
"This Zhao Song..." Li Shimin said slowly, almost in disbelief. "Where exactly did they lose their spine?"
As one of the greatest military rulers in Chinese history, Li Shimin naturally knew what the so-called Sheep-Leading Ritual was.
Strip the defeated ruler bare to the waist.
Wrap him in sheepskin.
Tie a rope around his neck.
Then drag him forward like livestock before the victor.
It was not merely surrender.
It was the complete destruction of dignity.
And according to the light screen, the Song court had not only endured this humiliation, but had even sold women and daughters to help pay indemnities afterward.
Li Shimin genuinely felt sick.
"They inherited the lands of the Central Plains. They inherited the legacy of Han and Tang."
His voice gradually rose.
"And this is how they conduct themselves? They hand over territory without resistance. They ransom peace with silver. They send women to the enemy camp while their Emperor begs for mercy like a whipped dog!"
The more he spoke, the more furious he became.
Even Fang Xuanling quietly lowered his head a little further.
Everybody could already feel it.
The Emperor's blood pressure was climbing again.
"They still dare call themselves the Song dynasty?" Li Shimin let out a cold laugh. "Since they enjoy sending things away so much, perhaps 'Song' is fitting after all. They send away silver. They send away land. They send away their own people. At that point, they are not a dynasty. They are a courier station. The Great Delivery Service of the Central Plains."
Several ministers nearly choked on air.
Even Wei Zheng's eyelid twitched slightly.
The insult was so sharp that nobody dared respond.
Li Shimin, however, was still simmering.
To him, the Tang had inherited the foundations of the Sui and transformed them into greatness through blood and steel.
But the Song described by the screen felt completely alien.
Weak.
Timid.
Obsessed with compromise.
A dynasty terrified of war, yet somehow constantly trapped inside it.
Then his gaze shifted toward the passage discussing the Northern Kong clan.
"Surrender to the Mongols... Surrender to the Qing..."
Li Shimin's expression became increasingly strange the more he read.
"So this is the spirit they passed down? The descendants of the Sage became specialists in welcoming new masters through the front gate?"
He almost laughed from sheer disbelief.
Meanwhile, Zhangsun Wuji silently took two careful steps backward.
Years of survival instincts told him the Emperor was now entering the extremely dangerous phase of righteous fury where random people might suddenly receive unexpected career adjustments.
The light screen was already beginning to dim, signaling the end of the broadcast.
But Li Shimin continued staring upward.
His expression slowly shifted from anger into thoughtfulness.
Then suspicion.
Then irritation again.
Because he suddenly realized a serious problem.
If the future really turned out this ridiculous, then what exactly was he supposed to leave behind for his descendants?
A stronger military system?
Stricter laws?
A better examination structure?
Or should he simply carve "DO NOT BECOME COWARDS" directly onto a stone monument outside the palace gates for future emperors to read every morning?