"What about me?"
Li Ji stood in the center of the hall wearing the expression of a man who had spent hours standing in the rain for a grand parade, only to discover it had been cancelled without notice.
The complete destruction of the Xueyantuo Khaganate had been condensed into a single casual sentence. The Goguryeo campaign received only a brief summary. Li Ji had genuinely believed the current broadcast was building toward his legendary rise. Instead, the light screen had sprinted through decades of his accomplishments as if it were skimming footnotes.
By the time he realized what was happening, his entire career had already gone by.
"Why are you so anxious, Maogong?"
The familiar voice belonged to Li Jing. The old commander sounded perfectly relaxed, as though watching history speed past his achievements was the most natural thing in the world.
Li Ji turned toward him and immediately remembered an unfortunate fact. Historically speaking, both of them stood among the greatest military commanders of the early Tang. Unfortunately, only one of them seemed to possess the ability to dominate every conversation simply by existing.
Li Jing's campaigns had become military legends. His destruction of the Eastern Turks was discussed with the same reverence normally reserved for natural disasters and divine intervention. Whenever future generations talked about Tang military achievements, Li Jing appeared automatically.
Li Ji had spent years building a résumé that should have earned equal admiration. Then Li Jing sat down nearby and accidentally absorbed half the spotlight.
"Your achievements are already secure, Maogong," Li Jing continued with an amused smile. "Why concern yourself over a few missing sentences?"
Li Ji stared at him. That was easy for Yaoshi to say. The Duke of Wei had conquered the Eastern Turks, crushed Tuyuhun, and accumulated enough victories to fill several lifetimes. Even when the light screen was not discussing him directly, someone inevitably brought him up anyway.
Do you know what it is like to be the second-best general in every conversation, Yaoshi?
Li Ji suddenly understood how lesser generals felt whenever his own name appeared in a conversation. The realization was unpleasant.
Around the hall, several ministers were trying and failing to suppress their laughter.
Even Hou Junji looked slightly comforted. For the first time all day, someone else's historical treatment seemed more tragic than his own. At least the light screen remembered he existed.
Li Ji, meanwhile, had watched entire kingdoms fall, nomadic empires collapse, and vast military campaigns unfold, only to discover he had somehow been reduced to supporting material in a story he was fairly certain he helped write.
Li Shimin observed the scene with considerable amusement.
"Maogong," the Emperor said, fighting back a smile, "you destroyed the Xueyantuo. You campaigned against Goguryeo. You secured the northern frontier. If the light screen chooses to summarize all of that in a few sentences, perhaps the problem lies with the storyteller."
Li Ji considered this. It was a reasonable argument. Unfortunately, it did not make him feel any better.
A moment later, he looked back at the glowing screen and sighed.
"At minimum," he muttered, "I would like my future accomplishments to receive more attention than a diplomat borrowing an army."
Several people immediately laughed.
Du Ruhui wiped his mouth and straightened his robes. "Maogong, you have conquered nations, shattered khaganates, and rewritten the strategic map of the northern frontier. Surely you can survive one session of being overlooked."
Li Ji turned to face him. "Yaoshi conquered the Eastern Turks. His campaigns are mentioned constantly. I conquered the Xueyantuo. I received a footnote."
Li Jing stroked his beard with the calm assurance of someone who had never been overlooked in his life.
"That is because destroying a khaganate from inside the empire is straightforward, Maogong," Li Jing observed. "Destroying a khaganate while also defending the northern frontier and dealing with the Western Turks is simply good management."
Li Ji's expression shifted through several stages. "The light screen devoted more time to the Tang noblewoman who nearly got married to a Western Turk than to my entire career."
Li Jing looked thoughtful. "She did have an excellent story. The romance. The intrigue."
"I had romance," Li Ji said. "I was not going to mention it."
"See?" Li Jing replied. "Your modesty is your worst enemy, Maogong."
"I am not modest," Li Ji said. "I am simply not receiving enough attention right now."
The hall laughed again.
On the other side of the hall, Su Dingfang felt a wave of relief hit him so hard that he almost had to steady himself.
Three years stationed in Kuangdao Prefecture had already felt unbearably long. Every day on border duty seemed to wear away a little more of his edge. He had watched opportunities pass elsewhere while his own world narrowed to patrol routes, reports, and routine.
Three decades?
The thought alone was enough to make his chest tighten. Sweeping the streets of Chang'an for thirty years was not a future he could even imagine. Whenever he tried, something inside him seemed to go cold.
Three years of garrison service could not compare to a single night riding through the snow behind Li Jing beneath the shadow of the Yinshan Mountains. The thrill of the pursuit, the uncertainty, the danger, the feeling that history itself was unfolding around him. That was a life. Everything else was merely existing.
A complicated mixture of emotions settled in his chest. Gratitude was certainly part of it. Without the light screen exposing the original course of history, he would never have been recalled to the center of events. He would still be sitting in Kuangdao, watching the years pass one after another. At this rate, he might really have ended up sweeping floors simply to break the boredom.
"Dingfang, your best years still lie ahead of you."
Su Dingfang looked up.
Li Shimin was watching him directly. The Emperor's gaze carried a particular kind of weight. It was the look of a man who had already made a decision and expected the person in front of him to rise to it.
"Use them well."
Su Dingfang immediately bowed his head.
"Yes, Your Majesty."
He had no interest in dwelling on the mysteries of the original timeline. Why history had left him sitting on the sidelines for decades was ultimately irrelevant. The opportunity was here now. That was all that mattered. And when opportunity finally arrived, a soldier's duty was to seize it with both hands.
Li Shimin's expression softened slightly before shifting to a different subject altogether.
"These Turkic rebels are infuriatingly fickle."
The irritation in his voice was completely genuine. A moment later, the Emperor seemed to realize exactly how that statement sounded. He cleared his throat.
"The rebels are treacherous, naturally," he amended with slightly forced diplomacy. "But the Turkic people have also produced many honorable and loyal warriors."
The correction arrived just a little too quickly.
Everyone in the hall heard both versions. Everyone also understood what the first version had been.
[Lightscreen]
[Before Little Lu could officially launch his rebellion, the governor of Ting Prefecture intercepted the intelligence and placed the entire plot on Emperor Li Zhi's desk.
Li Zhi reacted immediately. Before Little Lu could mobilize a single soldier, the Emperor invited the rebel's eldest son to Chang'an under circumstances that made refusal difficult. With a valuable hostage secured, Li Zhi opened negotiations. Faced with that pressure, Little Lu abandoned the rebellion before it even began.
Under normal circumstances, that should have resolved the issue. The son would receive an elite education in the capital, grow up surrounded by Tang institutions, and gain a firsthand understanding of the dynasty's wealth, power, and military strength. Eventually, when Little Lu grew old, the son would inherit leadership of the tribe and continue serving Tang interests for another generation.
Then, for reasons no historian has ever managed to explain convincingly, Li Zhi released the hostage.
It was an astonishingly strange decision.
Once the son returned to the steppe, he carried with him a clear understanding of Tang power. Having seen Chang'an from the inside, he knew that attacking the Tang directly was little more than a creative form of suicide. He repeatedly urged his father to abandon the idea.
Instead, he proposed a different target.
The Western Turks.
The campaign became a one-sided slaughter.
Little Lu was serving as a General of the Left Courageous Guard. He understood Tang tactics, military organization, logistics, and equipment better than most of his rivals. Armed with that knowledge, he marched against the Western Turks and beat them so thoroughly that resistance collapsed almost overnight.
Within a single year, he swallowed the entire Western Turkic Khaganate and crowned himself Shaboluo Khan.
You could call it treason with extra steps. You could call it a son successfully talking his father out of one terrible idea and into another. Either way, the result was the same. The Western Turks were once again unified, powerful, and standing directly in the path of Tang expansion across the western desert.
Little Lu wanted independence. He bared his fangs at Chang'an. Li Zhi promptly smacked him across the nose.
In 652 CE, Tang commanders Liang Jianfang and Qibi Heli assembled thirty thousand imperial troops and reinforced them with fifty thousand Uyghur cavalry. The resulting coalition force of eighty thousand men smashed Little Lu's army, pursued the survivors for more than five hundred li, beheaded six thousand enemy soldiers, executed sixty tribal leaders, and returned home victorious.
Three years later, in 655 CE, Emperor Li Zhi found himself in an unusually good mood. Whether that had anything to do with his frequent visits to a certain nunnery is a matter best left to future historians.
Whatever the reason, he decided it was time for another invasion.
The target was the Western Turks.
Cheng Yaojin received overall command. Wang Wendu was appointed deputy commander. Su Dingfang took charge of the vanguard.
The campaign opened brilliantly.
The Tang army pushed deep into enemy territory and secured a series of rapid victories. After weeks of pursuit, both sides finally collided near the Yingsha River. Twenty thousand elite Turkic cavalry crashed into the Tang lines, turning the battlefield into a brutal meat grinder.
The Turks held a significant advantage. Another twenty thousand reinforcements were already racing toward the battlefield. If they arrived in time, the balance of numbers would swing decisively in their favor.
Unfortunately for them, Su Dingfang was resting his forces just beyond the horizon. The moment he heard the sounds of battle, he understood the situation. Without hesitation, he gathered five hundred cavalry, bypassed the main engagement, and slammed directly into the Turkic rear.
The effect was devastating. Already locked in a difficult fight, the Turkic army suddenly found Tang horsemen tearing through their back lines. Panic spread. Formation discipline vanished. Soldiers threw away armor, supplies, and weapons as they fled into the mountains.
Su Dingfang chased them for twenty li and personally accounted for fifteen hundred enemy dead.
From that point onward, however, the campaign entered territory so absurd that even he struggled to understand what was happening.
As he prepared pursuit operations to finish the enemy, a courier arrived with new orders. Retreat immediately. Form defensive positions. Advance no further.
Confused, Su Dingfang returned to headquarters. There, Wang Wendu stepped forward and revealed a sealed imperial decree. According to the document, Cheng Yaojin had acted recklessly and was no longer fit to command. Effective immediately, Wang Wendu would assume control of the expedition.
With Cheng Yaojin offering no resistance, the transfer went through.
The problems started almost immediately. Despite holding every strategic advantage, Wang Wendu ordered the army into tightly packed defensive formations and slowed the advance to a crawl. Deep raids were prohibited. Aggressive operations were forbidden. Every opportunity to exploit momentum was discarded.
The Tang army marched as if it were afraid of its own success.
When they eventually reached the city of Hengdu, the local tribes were so terrified by the imperial banners that they surrendered without a fight and opened their gates voluntarily.
Wang Wendu looked at the surrendered population and reached a conclusion. Barbarians, he declared, possessed the hearts of wolves. Therefore, they would inevitably rebel.
His solution was straightforward. Kill them all.
The surrendered civilians were massacred. Their property was confiscated. The valuables somehow found their way into Wang Wendu's personal baggage train.
Su Dingfang could only watch. He refused to participate in the looting, but he lacked the authority to stop it.
What had begun as a brilliant campaign, built on the momentum created by Su Dingfang's five hundred-man charge, ended in disgrace. The army achieved nothing lasting, squandered its advantages, stained its reputation, and eventually marched home.
The aftermath was swift.
Forging an imperial decree carried the death penalty under Tang law. Wang Wendu was stripped of all rank and reduced to commoner status.
Cheng Yaojin was charged with military negligence and narrowly avoided execution only because of his decades of service to the dynasty. His reward for survival was retirement. ]
"This looks less like incompetence and more like someone deliberately trying to sabotage the campaign."
Zhangsun Wuji stepped forward, his voice cutting through the silence that had settled over Ganlu Hall. He had noticed the emperor's expression immediately and decided it was better to give the outrage a direction before it built up any further. His political instincts were screaming.
"For two supreme commanders to behave this irrationally in the field, something significant must have happened in the capital while they were away," he said. "A military disaster of this scale rarely appears out of nowhere."
His eyes narrowed. The entire situation carried a familiar scent.
"No matter what happens at court, soldiers' lives cannot be treated as bargaining chips." Li Shimin brought his palm down sharply against the armrest.
His voice remained controlled, but only barely. "The security of the state comes first. How could veteran commanders forget something so fundamental?"
Su Dingfang nodded so hard his neck nearly protested. For a brief moment, he felt genuinely unlucky.
He had spent three years rotting away in Kuangdao, finally received another opportunity to fight, and then discovered that his own commanders seemed more interested in losing than winning. Was he truly the only man in that entire army trying to defeat the enemy?
Three years of boredom, and this is what I get? Teammates who are paid to lose?
Across the hall, Du Ruhui was staring at his notes with unusual concentration. His mind had skipped past the military fiasco entirely and locked onto a very different detail.
"Prince Zhi visited a nunnery," Du Ruhui said carefully, as though filing the information into a separate compartment for future analysis.
Fang Xuanling glanced over at the same passage and frowned. "Perhaps Master Xuanzang's return with the true scriptures inspired a surge of Buddhist devotion throughout the empire. The prince may simply have developed an interest in religious study."
Du Ruhui turned and gave Fang Xuanling a look. It was the sort of look that conveyed an entire conversation without requiring a single spoken word.
Neither minister voiced the obvious question. The thought lingered in the air anyway. If the crown prince wished to study Buddhist teachings, there were countless monasteries available. Why, exactly, was the future emperor making repeated visits to a nunnery?
Some questions are better left unasked.
At the head of the hall, Li Shimin was still fuming, although his anger had shifted directions. He reviewed the military details again and let out a short, humorless laugh.
"Yaojin certainly knows how to protect himself."
Unlike many people, Li Shimin could see the shape of the scheme almost immediately. Handing over command without personally verifying the decree. Allowing a massacre that would guarantee criminal charges. Accepting disgrace instead of fighting back. The emperor recognized the pattern because, in his younger years, he had written enough political playbooks to identify one on sight.
Was Cheng Yaojin motivated by greed? Not a single person in the Tang Empire would believe that explanation. Since the day he joined the Tang banner, Cheng Yaojin had accumulated enough wealth, honors, and prestige to make ordinary corruption almost laughable. He was a Duke. He was one of the dynasty's founding heroes. His reputation for courage and battlefield discipline was known throughout the empire.
The idea that a man of his stature suddenly decided to rob impoverished nomads for spending money collapsed the moment anyone examined it seriously.
There was only one explanation that made sense. He had manufactured the crime himself. He wanted the court to remove him.
The old fox.
"Yaojin was sixty-seven years old by then," Qin Shubao said, stepping forward in defense of his old comrade.
His voice carried the weight of decades spent fighting side by side. "His body was no longer what it once was. He was looking for a way to leave."
Li Shimin fell silent. Qin Shubao had used Cheng Yaojin's personal name rather than an official title. That alone said enough.
The emperor looked back toward the light screen and released a long breath. What should have been a successful campaign had ended in the worst possible way. A hard-won battlefield advantage had been wasted. Civilians had died for no reason. The army returned home with little to show for it except scandal.
Prince Zhi was still an infant in this timeline. Li Shimin had no idea what kind of ruler his son would eventually become. But one detail refused to leave his mind. If veteran commanders felt compelled to stage their own political downfall just to escape serving under the future court, that was not a warning sign. That was a siege beacon visible from ten thousand li away.
He understood the logic behind it. The bitterness remained.
"After all," Li Shimin said at last, his tone carrying the weary acceptance of a man confronting a future he could not control, "by that point, I was already dead."
A faint smile appeared on his face.
"None of you would have been my responsibility anymore."
The atmosphere in Ganlu Hall instantly tightened.
The assembled ministers and generals bowed as one.
"Your Majesty!"
"Relax," Li Shimin waved a hand. "I am not dying anytime soon. The light screen says I have a few more years. And I intend to make good use of them."
[Lightscreen]
[Alright, let us peel back the layers on this one, because what looks like military incompetence is actually something far more interesting.
So, why did Cheng Yaojin and Wang Wendu execute this sequence of bizarre maneuvers? The official historical record stays vague. But examining the political landscape of 655 CE reveals a picture considerably darker than a failed campaign.
The year the Tang marched on the Western Turks was the exact same year the Tang court was torn apart by the Deposition of Empress Wang and the Installation of Empress Wu.
Li Zhi fought against fierce opposition from the old aristocratic establishment. He deposed his legitimate wife, Empress Wang, and officially installed Wu Zetian as the ruler of the inner palace. The court was in open revolt. A major foreign war against the Western Turks served as a useful political distraction, pulling attention away from the domestic crisis at the most sensitive moment.
Now consider the personnel.
Deposed Empress Wang belonged to the Wang clan of Qi County in Shanxi, one of the most powerful aristocratic families in the realm.
Wang Wendu, the man who forged the imperial decree on the front lines, also belonged to the Wang clan of Qi County.
What a remarkable coincidence.
Ask the obvious question. Why would Wang Wendu risk forging a decree just to waste grain, annoy his commanding officer, and collect a guaranteed death sentence? Look at what actually happened. A capital offense resulted in a job loss. Two years later the court quietly reinstated him, promoted him to Governor of Ungjin Commandery, and stationed him in Baekje. His career advanced.
Does that sound like a punishment to you?
No. That sounds like a reward for services rendered.
Modern historians have arrived at a theory that the evidence strongly supports.
Wang Wendu was following orders. The deliberate sabotage of the Western Turkic campaign was designed to manufacture a military crisis, destabilize the government, and create maximum problems for Li Zhi and the newly installed Wu Zetian.
Wu Zetian's primary political opponent at that time was the leader of the old aristocratic faction. Zhangsun Wuji.
The timeline of Wang Wendu's eventual end mirrors Zhangsun Wuji's downfall with suspicious precision.
In 659 CE, a memorial accusing Zhangsun Wuji of treason arrived at court. Li Zhi declined to hold a trial. He stripped his uncle of all titles, confiscated his estates, and sent him to Qian Prefecture under what the records politely describe as heavy military escort.
In the seventh month of that year, an imperial secretary traveled directly to Qian Prefecture and informed Zhangsun Wuji that he was required to hang himself.
Exactly one year later, in 660 CE, Wang Wendu died suddenly in Baekje. The documentation of his death was handled exclusively by local officials, who recorded that the Governor had suffered a sudden illness and expired on the spot.
Let us all take a moment to appreciate the timing.
Now, what about Cheng Yaojin? A veteran commander with decades of experience. He saw what was coming. He recognized the political trap. So he played along. He let Wang Wendu take command. He let the campaign collapse. He accepted disgrace and retirement.
And then he lived. He played with his grandchildren. He died peacefully. He received a burial at the Zhao Mausoleum with full honors.
Cheng Yaojin understood something that Su Dingfang did not. Sometimes, the smartest thing a general can do is know when to lose. Cheng Yaojin lost the campaign. But he won his freedom. He won his life. He won his legacy.
That is not cowardice. That is wisdom.
So, what do we learn from this?
First, Su Dingfang was not the problem. He was the only one on that battlefield actually trying to win.
Second, politics can destroy a military campaign faster than any enemy army.
And third, sometimes the smartest thing a general can do is know when to lose.
Cheng Yaojin understood that. Su Dingfang did not. That is why Cheng Yaojin lived to play with his grandchildren, while Su Dingfang spent years wondering why his commanders were actively trying to lose. ]
Inside Ganlu Hall, chairs scraped against stone floors. Men moved backward. Dozens of eyes snapped toward Zhangsun Wuji simultaneously.
The political bombshell had landed in the exact center of the room, and the greatest minds of the Tang dynasty stood completely still in the blast radius, none of them ready to be the first to speak.