Li Shimin could swear before every ancestor enshrined within the imperial temple that he truly bore no personal prejudice against the Song dynasty.
He had genuinely tried to judge history fairly.
He really had.
But as a ruler who had conquered the world from horseback and personally shattered the Eastern Turkic Khaganate with steel and blood, he found himself physically incapable of accepting the sheer cowardice currently unfolding across the light screen.
"Was this Song dynasty not obsessed with some kind of Neo-Confucian doctrine?" Li Shimin asked coldly, his voice carrying enough sarcasm to freeze the air inside Ganlu Hall. "They loved preaching that a scholar may be killed but never humiliated. Was that just a marketing slogan?
Did they skip the chapter on basic human dignity and go straight to the tutorial on how to bow so low you hit your head on the floor?"
He rose from his seat and began pacing slowly across the hall while the light of the screen flickered against his robes.
"Even Gou Jian endured humiliation only so he could one day destroy Wu and reclaim his honor. But this Southern Song court..." Li Shimin let out a humorless laugh. "They sound less like rulers of an empire and more like Sun Shiwan's weaker relatives hiding behind the river and praying the enemy loses interest."
The ministers immediately understood the reference.
Sun Shiwan. Sun Quan's infamous nickname. The legendary commander who once marched with an overwhelming force and still managed to produce a catastrophic defeat embarrassing enough to become historical comedy material centuries later.
The fact that the future generations compared the Song court to that level of military humiliation was already bad enough.
The fact they considered the Song even worse was what truly damaged Li Shimin's peace of mind.
"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.
Beside him, Empress Zhangsun quietly tugged at his sleeve.
It was a familiar warning.
Your Majesty, if you keep going at this rate, your headache is going to return.
Li Shimin inhaled sharply, forced down the pressure rising in his chest, and sat back down with visible reluctance.
Throughout the hall, the ministers of Zhenguan shared the same expression.
In their world, honor was not decoration.
It was the foundation holding the state together.
"Those three humiliations..." Li Shiji muttered slowly, his hand instinctively reaching for the sword that was not currently at his waist. "That is no longer mere defeat. That is the spirit of an entire dynasty being broken."
His face darkened further.
"If a state suffers such humiliation and cannot wash it away with blood, how can the court ever face its people again? What loyal official would still willingly die for such a throne? What soldier would still believe in victory if the Son of Heaven himself behaves like this before foreign invaders?"
For the men of early Tang, the answer felt self-evident.
Only months earlier, they had dragged the Turkic Khagan back to Chang'an as a prisoner and offered victory reports before the ancestral temple.
To them, paying for peace sounded less like diplomacy and more like collective insanity.
"Where were the generals?" Li Shiji asked, genuinely unable to understand it. "Did the entire dynasty run out of men willing to fight?"
Wei Zheng frowned deeply.
His thoughts immediately drifted toward the bureaucracy instead.
"And where were the ministers?" he asked quietly. "Was there not a single upright official left willing to speak honestly to the throne?"
The hall gradually fell silent.
Even the light screen did not immediately provide answers.
"The tragedy of Jingkang..." Du Ruhui murmured while staring at the casualty records scrolling across the screen. "The suffering of the common people sounds even worse than the Yongjia catastrophe."
His brows tightened.
"Those nicknames for human flesh... the old, the women, the children. Hearing them described so casually makes my stomach turn."
The surrounding ministers nodded grimly.
To them, those names no longer sounded like historical records.
They sounded like the final screams of a society collapsing into barbarism while its rulers drowned themselves in poetry and factional disputes.
Fang Xuanling suddenly narrowed his eyes as he noticed a detail in the screen's explanation.
"Wait," he said slowly. "Something is inconsistent here. The screen says the Song faced the Jin invaders. But earlier, it said the dynasty signed the Chanyuan Treaty with the Khitan Liao."
The ministers immediately began discussing among themselves.
"Did the northern wars never truly end?"
"Did another power rise after the Liao?"
"If the enemy changed hands, why did not the Song seize the opportunity to recover the Sixteen Prefectures?"
One of the officials frowned in confusion.
"Any competent commander should have recognized the opening."
Another minister hesitated before speaking.
"Perhaps the enemies they faced were simply too powerful. Maybe we are judging the Song too harshly while standing from the position of a victorious dynasty."
Li Shimin snorted dismissively.
His attention had already shifted toward the section discussing the Northern Kong branch.
"Conferring endless hereditary honors upon Confucius's descendants..." he said with open disdain. "My ancestors honored Confucius himself. They did not intend to create some eternal title that survives no matter how many times the clan changes masters."
He looked genuinely irritated.
"In the future, that title sounds less like recognition of virtue and more like an official reward for survival instincts."
Fang Xuanling gave a faint shrug.
"That is likely because the title itself became politically useful. A convenient symbol of legitimacy is valuable to every dynasty. Once a clan becomes useful as a ceremonial ornament, morality stops mattering very much."
---
Across the timeline, inside the Chengdu government office, the atmosphere was even more oppressive than the one inside Ganlu Hall.
Liu Bei sat motionless beneath the hanging maps of the realm, staring at the glowing screen without saying a word.
The descriptions of famine, the horrifying meat prices, and the grotesque nicknames given to the victims repeated endlessly in his mind.
To him, these were not distant historical anecdotes from some future age.
They were the future people of the Central Plains, the descendants of the common folk he had spent his life trying to protect.
Just imagining it made his stomach ache.
"How do we stop this, Kongming?" Liu Bei finally asked quietly.
His voice was calm, but everyone in the room could hear the weight behind it.
"If this is truly the future awaiting the people, then our struggle was never simply about reclaiming the Han throne."
He slowly tightened his grip around the armrest beside him.
"It means we must ensure those scenes never become reality again. No more children being sold. No more people reduced to livestock during famine. We restore the Han not merely for its name, but so the people of the realm can live without ending up in pots and markets."
Kongming did not answer immediately.
The Prime Minister's gaze remained fixed on the screen while his thoughts rapidly traced the deeper causes behind the catastrophe.
Land annexation by the great clans.
Military decentralization.
Fiscal collapse.
Court factionalism.
Regional warlords growing stronger while the central government hollowed itself out from within.
The future disasters no longer looked like isolated tragedies to him.
They looked structural.
Across the hall, Zhang Fei was already on the verge of exploding.
"Big Brother!" he suddenly roared, slamming both palms onto the table hard enough to make the inkstones jump. "When are we dragging that Sun Shiwan brat over here and forcing him to watch this with his own eyes?"
"And Cao Cao too!" Zhang Fei continued furiously. "Tie him beside the screen so he can personally witness what his precious Sima clan and those arrogant great clans eventually turn the world into!"
"I am done with all this talking! Let us restore the Han right now so I can go north and start beating barbarians before future generations completely forget how to fight! I want to fight! I want to win!"
Oddly enough, Zhang Fei's outburst actually lightened the atmosphere.
Several officers nearly laughed.
Even Liu Bei's expression eased slightly.
Nearby, Zhang Song looked particularly energized.
Ever since entering Shu, he had always carried resentment toward the world's obsession with appearances and noble pedigree.
Yet the future displayed by the screen had repeatedly proven that inherited prestige alone eventually rotted entire dynasties from within.
At that moment, Zhang Song suddenly felt as though his own chances to leave behind a great legacy had become much brighter.
Liu Ba, meanwhile, remained unusually quiet.
In the past, he had genuinely considered joining Cao Cao.
From a purely practical perspective, the northern regime had once seemed like the safest choice, the side most likely to unify the realm.
But after watching the future corruption of the aristocratic monopolies and the suffocating political machine that emerged from the north, Liu Ba increasingly felt that following the winning side and following the Mandate of Heaven were not necessarily the same thing.
For the first time in years, he truly believed remaining beside Liu Bei might not simply be loyalty.
It might actually be the correct path.
At the side of the room, Kongming and Pang Tong had become completely absorbed in discussing the phrase "Kneeling Aristocracy."
Pang Tong let out a short laugh, though there was very little warmth in it.
"I have to admit," he said, shaking his head, "that title is absolutely vicious. Welcoming every new dynasty with surrender letters requires a level of consistency that almost deserves admiration."
Kongming lightly fanned himself while staring at the glowing text.
"The frightening part is that it worked," he said calmly. "In later ages, every scholar in the empire would study the Confucian classics. Naturally, they would also look toward the Kong clan as a symbolic center of orthodoxy. Once the Kongs knelt, countless scholars psychologically knelt with them."
Pang Tong immediately understood.
"After the Tang, the Imperial Examination system made Confucian learning the only reliable path into government service," he mused. "The court needed the Kong clan's symbolic legitimacy, while the Kong clan needed imperial recognition to preserve its status. It became a perfectly self-sustaining relationship."
He paused before adding dryly, "Or perhaps a perfectly self-sustaining parasite."
A faint smile appeared on Kongming's face.
"The Sage himself probably never imagined his descendants would eventually turn survival into a hereditary profession."
---
[Lightscreen]
[So, looking back, were the Great Clans truly completely useless?"
The answer was naturally no. History is never that simple. In the early days, the Great Clans were not only useful, they were necessary. The Han Empire was enormous, but the central government's reach was limited. There were too many commanderies, too many counties, too many villages scattered across the realm.
The court could not personally manage every corner of the empire, so local aristocratic clans gradually filled the gaps in authority and administration. In many regions, they became the foundation of local society itself.
During their rise, these clans actually served as a stabilizing force. They possessed wealth, land, education, and manpower. They preserved books during chaotic times, sponsored scholars, maintained irrigation systems, organized militias, and protected local order. Many famous officials, generals, and scholars of the Han were trained or supported through these aristocratic networks.
You could say that, during the empire's healthier periods, the Great Clans functioned like a blood pump for the state.
But over time, the blood pump slowly turned into a parasite. As the clans grew stronger, they stopped merely organizing wealth and began monopolizing it. Land, education, political office, marriage alliances, social prestige, even opportunities themselves gradually became hereditary property locked within a small circle of surnames. And once power became hereditary, creativity began to suffocate.
If you were not born into the correct clan, your talent often meant nothing. The ceiling above ordinary people became almost impossible to break. The Great Clans did not merely control the empire's resources. They controlled what society considered valuable. They admired calligraphy. Admired poetry. Admired elegant conversation and refined aesthetics.
But practical invention? Engineering? Craftsmanship? Those things were considered vulgar.
The Wei and Jin aristocrats could spend entire afternoons discussing the beauty of the Lanting Xu, yet many of them looked down upon the craftsmen who actually improved human life.
As a result, history remembered countless drunken poets and idle nobles, while the names of inventors and engineers quietly disappeared into obscurity.
And this was despite the fact that Han-era China possessed astonishing technological ability. The Han government operated massive state workshops with thousands of craftsmen and artisans. They created advanced looms, sophisticated irrigation devices, mechanical odometers like the Ji Li Gu Che that automatically struck drums every li, and complex water-powered machinery centuries ahead of much of the world.
But today, very few people can name the individuals who built those inventions. Why? Because the aristocratic historians who wrote the records did not believe craftsmen were important enough to remember. The people who benefited from technology erased the names of the people who created it.
One of the most famous examples was a woman from the Han dynasty whose actual name has been completely lost to history. Records remember her only as 'the Wife of Chen Baoguang.' According to historical accounts, she developed an extraordinarily advanced patterned loom capable of producing silk worth enormous sums of money within an incredibly short period of time.
Her invention had immense economic value. But history did not preserve her personal name. Not her birthplace. Not her background. Not even her identity beyond being someone's wife.
That alone says more about aristocratic society than a hundred essays ever could. People today can easily remember the names of famous inventors from foreign civilizations, yet one of ancient China's own greatest textile innovators vanished into anonymity because elite society considered her unworthy of proper recognition.
And the same problem appeared in scholarship. The Great Clans studied primarily for political power and social status, not for understanding the natural world itself. One of the greatest victims of this mindset was mathematics.
Ironically, ancient China was once one of the world's leading civilizations in mathematical thought.
Texts like the Zhou Bi Suan Jing and the Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art were extraordinary achievements. Yet even those works struggled for recognition because many elite scholars considered mathematics beneath the dignity of refined aristocrats. Some authors reportedly attached the names of ancient sages to mathematical works simply to make people take them seriously. The true authors of several foundational mathematical texts were either forgotten, hidden behind pseudonyms, or never recorded at all.
For long stretches of the Wei, Jin, and Northern-Southern Dynasties, mathematical progress stagnated badly because the educated elite regarded practical calculation as inferior to literary elegance. Only figures standing at the margins of aristocratic culture, people like Liu Hui or Zu Chongzhi, continued pushing scientific thought forward.
And even then, they were often treated more like eccentric specialists than the intellectual center of civilization.
It was not until the Sui and Tang weakened the power of the Great Clans that scholarship slowly became more open again.
And when the aristocratic monopoly finally collapsed during the Song dynasty, the intelligence and creativity of ordinary people exploded onto the historical stage. The Song may have been weak militarily, but in commerce, engineering, printing, navigation, agriculture, and scientific innovation, it reached heights earlier dynasties could barely imagine.
That was the great irony of history. Once the rice worms finally loosened their grip on society, the common people immediately began building miracles.]
---
The Ganlu Hall was silent.
Li Shimin stared at the names of the inventions scrolling past.
He had heard of the Dragon Bone pump, of course, but he had never considered the nameless genius who actually sat down and figured out the gears.
He looked at the list of mathematical texts and felt a strange sense of shame.
He looked at his own hands, then at the elegant scroll he had just written.
"We spend all our time worrying about the Great Clans," Li Shimin said, his voice quiet but intense. "But we are ignoring the Wives of Chen Baoguang living in our own streets. We are recording the names of rice worms while the people who build our world are forgotten. We are preserving the art, but we are letting the foundation rot."
He looked at Fang Xuanling.
"Xuanling, I want a new census. I do not just want to know how many people live in a village. I want to know what they can make. Find the mathematicians. Find the engineers. Find the craftsmen whose names no one ever bothered to write down."
His voice hardened with determination.
"If the future says science is the King, then I want the Tang to be the throne where that King sits. I want every inventor to have a name. I want every mathematician to have a voice. Let the Great Clans keep their poetry. We are going to build something that actually lasts."
Fang Xuanling bowed deeply, his heart racing with the weight of the task.
"It shall be done, Your Majesty. We will seek out the hidden geniuses of the Great Tang."