The Son of Heaven moving north? A capital relocation?
Jiang Wan's thoughts immediately drifted back to the light screen, recalling how Cao Cao had panicked so badly after Guan Yu flooded the Seven Armies that he nearly abandoned Xuchang altogether. That hadn't been strategic calculation; that had been genuine, unfiltered fear.
He shook the memory away and glanced at the battle reports still piled on his desk.
"I still haven't congratulated you, Yuanzhi, on flooding out Cao Ren."
There was no envy in his voice, just a quiet acknowledgment of the cost that came with victory. Jiang Wan had personally gone through the casualty figures and supply records, and he knew exactly how much blood had been spilled to make that triumph possible.
The fighting around Fancheng had dragged on for days with neither side getting any real sleep. The attackers kept throwing themselves at the walls like men who had nothing left to lose, while the defenders burned through their reserves of men, arrows, and supplies at a rate that would have seemed impossible before the battle began.
Even with fortified walls, heavy crossbows, and the powder weapons provided by the light screen, several thousand soldiers still died before the city finally fell. When it was over, Zhao Lei collapsed from exhaustion and spent his recovery time in Wancheng, and Xu Shu hadn't fared much better. He had rested there for nearly ten days before coming south, and traces of fatigue still lingered around his eyes.
Xu Shu laughed when he heard Jiang Wan's words.
"Don't praise me like that, Gongyuan. All I did was give a man wet ankles."
Jiang Wan couldn't help laughing too, but the humor faded quickly as both men returned to the matter at hand.
"My guess is that Cao Cao won't move the capital anytime soon," Jiang Wan said. "Jingzhou doesn't have the strength for another major offensive right now. Cao Cao took a painful hit, but his foundations are still solid. Sitting tight and holding the passes is his safest play."
Xu Shu nodded in agreement.
"Merchant gossip won't tell us what the princes and ministers are really planning, but the rumor itself is revealing."
He tapped the table lightly.
"After our lord took Hanzhong, people up north started talking about Emperor Gaozu again."
Jiang Wan smiled at that, because any educated man knew what it meant. The founder of the Han Dynasty had risen from Hanzhong before marching out to claim the empire. The parallel was hardly subtle.
Xu Shu continued, his tone growing more serious.
"And knowing Cao Cao, even if he intends to move the Son of Heaven north, he'll want to strengthen his own position first. Right now, I see only three realistic options."
He raised a finger.
"First, Guanzhong. He pushes into Yongzhou and Liangzhou, or tries another attack on Hanzhong."
A second finger.
"Second, Jingzhou. He masses troops in Yingchuan and Runan, then hits Duyang and Biyang from both sides at once."
A third finger.
"Third, Yangzhou. He cuts a deal with Sun Quan, with Cao's forces attacking northern Jingzhou while Jiangdong moves on the south."
Jiang Wan considered the possibilities carefully, turning each scenario over in his mind, and the more he thought about them, the more his conclusions matched Xu Shu's.
In the end, he simply nodded.
"Yuanzhi, don't worry about me. If it comes to that, Jiang Wan will die with Jiangling."
Xu Shu's expression flickered, becoming difficult to read, but Jiang Wan just smiled.
"I only said it so General Yunchang wouldn't worry."
He looked out the window, where afternoon sunlight was spilling across the city beyond.
"What happened before won't happen again. Not while I'm here."
Over the past months, he had practically lived inside Jiangling's administrative offices, and no one understood the city's strengths better than he did.
The more he learned about its defenses, the harder it was to understand how the city had been lost in the original timeline. Jiangling wasn't an easy city to take. A fortress like this should have made the man who built it famous forever.
Instead, he let the thought drift away without finishing it.
Xu Shu didn't stick around Jiangling for long. After a quick meal with Jiang Wan, he was back on a boat heading north, trying to catch up with the convoy that had already left Gong'an County.
Standing at the prow with the river wind messing up his robes, his mind went straight back to strategy.
Those three possibilities Jiang Wan had laid out kept bouncing around in his head, and on their own, none of them really scared him.
A push into Guanzhong, pressure on Jingzhou, a deal with Jiangdong.
He could handle any one of those.
The problem was that Jiang Wan knew Cao Cao, Xu Shu knew Cao Cao, and Cao Cao's camp wasn't short on smart people either.
If Cao Cao decided to make a move, he probably wouldn't pick just one option.
He'd hit Guanzhong while threatening Jingzhou, cut a deal with Sun Quan while moving troops up north, every move backing up another move, every threat demanding a response somewhere else.
It was exactly the kind of coordinated pressure that Xu Shu and Pang Tong had used during the Jingzhou-Xiangyang campaign.
The one thing that made him feel a little better was logistics.
No matter how strong Cao Cao was, grain didn't just fall from the sky, and keeping up a major offensive in Guanzhong while also putting pressure on Jingzhou would strain even Wei's supplies.
Doing both at full force for very long was unlikely.
But if Sun Quan got involved, the whole calculation changed.
Xu Shu narrowed his eyes as he stared across the river.
If Cao Cao decided to buy Jiangdong's help, what would he be willing to give up, and more importantly, what would Sun Quan demand in return?
That question stayed with him all the way downriver, and he only pulled his mind away when the outline of Jiangxia finally appeared on the horizon.
The ship eased into the dock, and Zhao A muttered a curse under his breath before quickly arranging his face into a polite smile and stepping forward to meet the Jiangxia water-gate officer.
"Same as before," he said. "Grain shipments."
The officer didn't even blink.
"General Lu's standing orders. Every vessel is to be inspected."
Zhao A wanted to roll his eyes, but he kept his expression neutral as Xu Shu stood at the prow and watched the whole thing unfold.
Groups of Jiangdong soldiers boarded all twelve ships and searched them from front to back, checking storage compartments, looking at manifests, poking through cargo holds with the kind of dedication usually reserved for people who really wanted to find something interesting.
They found exactly what Xu Shu had told them they would find.
Grain.
Lots of it.
Sack after sack, all of it headed to Wancheng to keep the northern stockpiles topped up in case things got messy at the border.
The stuff that actually mattered, weapons, armor, and other military supplies, had never been on these ships in the first place.
They had already gone overland through Dangyang and then crossed north by ferry.
Meanwhile, the grain captured from Cao Hong's forces after he died had been sent straight to Duyang, where Huang Zhong and Guan Ping were busy digging in and looking like they planned to stay for a very long time.
The inspection dragged on exactly as long as everyone expected.
Questions were asked, records were checked, a few sacks were opened for show, and one soldier stared into a barrel for several minutes like he expected secret war plans to pop out of the rice.
Eventually, even the Jiangdong officers seemed to realize that rice was just rice.
After the usual bureaucratic back and forth, the convoy finally got the green light.
The sailors cast off the ropes, pushed against the dock with poles, and the ships slowly drifted back into the current.
As Jiangxia shrank behind them, Xu Shu's eyes stayed on the city walls for a moment.
The inspection itself didn't bother him.
The fact that it was happening at all was something else entirely.
Not long ago, Lu Su would have checked these shipments because it was his job, but now Lu Meng was checking them because he was getting ready for something.
The difference was subtle, but Xu Shu suspected it wouldn't remain subtle for long.
The Dangyang crossing had gotten a lot bigger since Xu Shu had last seen it, with supplies and captured Cao soldiers being processed through here in huge numbers and a substantial garrison presence to match.
The locals had noticed, and they'd responded in the most practical way possible.
Whenever they had spare time, people came down to the crossing and set up little stalls doing business with the soldiers.
Laundry.
Mending.
Basic food.
Just enough to put something in the pot without anyone going hungry.
Since no one had banned drinking yet, the garrison supervisor let it slide.
The other kind of commerce hadn't even crossed anyone's mind.
The campaigns at Red Cliffs and Nanjun had ground this area into the dirt, and there were no young people left.
Men or women, anyone with any energy had long since been relocated to Gong'an or Jiangling, so the stalls were run by the old.
An elderly man calling out over his wares.
An old woman bent over the riverside scrubbing cloth.
Xu Shu watched them and felt something quiet and heavy settle in his chest.
These were people who should have been resting in their final years, but instead they were here, working, because they had to.
Their children, wherever those children were, were probably no longer alive to visit them.
The convoy kept moving north.
Next stop was Yicheng.
As the ships passed by, Xu Shu noticed right away that the city gate, the one the giant river crossbows had blasted apart, was still missing.
The opening stood wide and exposed with chunks of broken stone scattered around.
Repairs had started, but there was still a long way to go.
The sight reminded him of an old conversation.
He had once suggested appointing Ma Liang as temporary Administrator of Yicheng, but Ma Liang had shot that down so fast that Xu Shu barely finished talking.
Conflict of interest, he'd said.
Then the famous White Eyebrows had turned around and headed straight for Wuling to deal with tribal affairs.
Looking back, Xu Shu suspected Ma Liang just found that work more interesting.
According to the latest letter, Ma Liang had already found several sharp locals in Wuling and planned to spend another two months training them before sending them east to make connections with the Shanyue communities inside Jiangdong.
Officially, he wasn't trying to cause trouble for Jiangdong.
Not exactly, anyway.
The more Xu Shu thought about it, the more he understood why Ma Liang felt for the Shanyue.
Jiangdong's treatment of them was simple, basically whatever was convenient at the time.
If they felt strong, they launched campaigns to suppress them.
If they just lost a battle, they recruited Shanyue men into the army.
Need more troops? Draft them.
Someone needs military achievements? Perfect targets.
Low on supplies? Take their grain, their timber, their furs.
If you were born Shanyue, your future didn't depend on your own choices.
It depended on whatever problem some Jiangdong commander was dealing with that season.
Compared to that, Jingzhou was a pretty good deal.
The north was already back under control, land was available, families could be resettled, and tribal structures could slowly be broken apart and replaced with normal local rule.
A generation or two later, their kids would just be Han subjects like everyone else.
At least they wouldn't spend their whole lives being someone else's emergency backup plan.
The man running Yicheng now was Liu Min, an officer who had done well under Huang Zhong and earned respect from both soldiers and civilians.
As the convoy drifted past, Xu Shu watched the city in silence.
People moved through the broken gate like it was nothing special.
Some carrying water buckets, some hauling firewood, others just standing around chatting by the walls.
Laughter drifted across the river, and a few people noticed the convoy and pointed.
One bold guy cupped his hands around his mouth and let out a long greeting whistle that carried pretty far.
Xu Shu found himself smiling.
That whistle sounded genuinely cheerful.
Yicheng had been one of the first cities hit during the Jingzhou-Xiangyang campaign.
It had fallen fast and suffered hard, but looking at the people moving through its broken gate, Xu Shu got the feeling it was also one of the first places starting to come back.
The walls still had scars, the gate still needed fixing, but life had already returned.
For a city, that mattered more.
North of Xiangyang, the mood shifted again.
Xu Shu let out a slow breath as the city came into view.
He still remembered Xiangyang as the liveliest place in all of Jingzhou, where Liu Biao had shown up with little more than his own reputation, brought a troubled province to order, and used the city as his base.
From there, he had reached across the Han River region, gathered talented men from everywhere, and become famous for throwing elegant banquets where three cups of wine could turn strangers into friends.
For years, Xiangyang had been the heart of Jingzhou's prosperity.
Liu Biao built his legacy there and died there too, but his decision to favor a younger son over the older heir had planted the seeds for everything that came after.
When the crisis finally hit, Jingzhou collapsed from the inside.
Twenty years of shipbuilding went up in flames at Red Cliffs, a decade of careful governance got swept away by war, and the people he once protected were now scattered, displaced, or dead.
All the noise, ambition, and prosperity that once filled the city felt like a distant memory now.
Xiangyang seemed hollow.
Beyond Xiangyang was Fancheng, and the riverside walls still bristled with bolts from the siege.
Some had sunk so deep into the stone that nobody could pull them out.
Others were lodged too high to reach, so rather than waste the effort, the garrison just left them there.
The battlefield had other reminders too.
East of Fancheng, thousands of small earthen mounds stretched across the landscape.
They were graves.
After the fighting ended, Guan Yu had spent several days helping his soldiers recover the bodies of their fallen comrades, and those men were carried south and buried near Jiangling.
The Cao soldiers got a different fate.
No one knew their names, no one knew where they came from, there were no families to notify and no homes to send them back to, so they were buried where they fell, under simple mounds of earth with no inscriptions.
Xu Shu looked across the graves and tried to remember the faces of the men he had killed during the campaign, but most of them were already fading from memory.
The ships kept moving north in silence, and after a long while, Xu Shu lowered his gaze and spoke softly toward the water.
"Han soldiers. Rest well."
The scenery beyond Fancheng finally eased the weight in his chest.
At Xinye, the military settlers who had once manned the frontier had gradually become ordinary townsfolk.
Farmers working their fields.
Kids playing near the riverbanks.
Travelers resting under the trees.
When people spotted Xu Shu's convoy, they waved and shouted greetings across the water with the relaxed confidence of people who no longer expected war to show up tomorrow.
From Xinye northward, the land west of the river opened into a vast plain.
The fields closest to the water were still rich and fertile, the same soil that had supported Jingzhou's prosperity for generations, but further inland, many plots had gone back to grassland after years of neglect.
From a distance, it looked almost like a northern steppe.
A cavalry formation was racing across those grasslands, and even from far away, Xu Shu recognized the rider at the front.
The red face, the magnificent beard, the crescent-bladed guandao across his back.
It was Guan Yu.
After the victory in Jingzhou-Xiangyang, the captured spoils had included thousands of quality warhorses along with a large number of Cao soldiers, and Guan Yu had barely taken any rest before diving into cavalry training.
He was determined to master a branch of warfare that had never been his main focus.
Even his horse had changed.
His famous steed had been replaced by a larger, more powerful red horse taken from the stables at Wancheng.
Xu Shu figured it probably belonged to some Cao noble who had fled the city during its sudden fall and left the animal behind in the chaos.
Earlier, Xu Shu had worried that moving away from river warfare might frustrate Guan Yu, since so much of his recent success had come from naval operations and controlling the waterways, but now he realized those concerns were unnecessary.
Guan Yu's approach to war had always been pretty simple:
Give him whatever weapon it took to win the next battle, and he would figure out how to use it.