Just last month, he had summoned his son and delivered a stern lecture.
"Read military books if you want. Join the army if you want." He paused, his eyes narrowing. "But if I ever catch you getting involved in the imperial family's political mess..."
His voice dropped to something cold and quiet.
"I will break your legs myself. Both of them."
His son had nodded frantically, clearly terrified. Li Jing had watched him leave with the calm satisfaction of a man who had just prevented a future disaster.
The light screen had already shown him the pattern. Fang Xuanling's son. Du Ruhui's son. Men who got too close to princes ended up broken, exiled, or dead. He was not letting that happen to his bloodline.
With zero emotional investment in future succession dramas, Li Jing watched the military analysis on the light screen with the calm of a spectator watching a game he no longer needed to play.
"This Tibetan Chancellor, Gar Tongtsen, is impressive." There was genuine admiration in his voice.
"Harassing the Tang borders through proxy forces while avoiding direct confrontation… that is sophisticated. Frankly, it feels like he has been studying Your Majesty's old notes on how to handle the Western Turks."
Li Shimin stroked his beard, suddenly intrigued. "With talents like his, why stay on that plateau? The Great Tang is vast. Surely we could find a proper position for him."
Du Ruhui coughed. He knew exactly what the emperor meant. Your Majesty... are you planning to poach Tibet's entire management team?
According to the information from the light screen, Songtsen Gampo was destined to die young.
Even Princess Wencheng and the best physicians the Tang could provide would not change that outcome.
And now that Tibet's ambitions had been completely exposed, the chances of the marriage alliance proceeding as originally planned had basically dropped to zero.
The young Tibetan king's future looked alarmingly short.
Once Songtsen Gampo died, a power vacuum would appear.
If the Tang could recruit Gar Tongtsen before that happened, the Tibetan Plateau would probably descend into a spectacular succession crisis.
It was a ruthless approach. Du Ruhui could not argue against its elegance.
He exhaled and shifted to the harder question.
"Now that we understand the depth of the threat, securing a permanent resolution will be genuinely difficult."
His eyes sharpened. "If Your Majesty were facing this exact strategic situation today, how would you approach it?"
Li Shimin closed his eyes. The calculation ran through him. He opened them with the expression of a man who has already reached the end of the problem.
"First. Any faction openly siding with Tibet is to be eliminated without exception."
"Second. Any faction supporting the Tuyuhun will receive generous rewards."
"Third. Station a permanent heavy force in the Hexi Corridor. Become the backbone of the Tuyuhun and keep its borders secure while we wait for the right opportunity."
"Fourth..." A cold smile appeared on his face. "Send elite teams through the Western Regions. Hire Khotanese mountain guides and infiltrate deep into Tibet."
Large-scale troop deployments onto the high-altitude plateau were a logistical nightmare. Small strike teams burning, poisoning, and assassinating? Manageable.
The goal was simple: make the Tibetans feel like their homeland was on fire so they would have no energy left to look outward.
On the edge of the room, Yan Lide slapped his younger brother on the shoulder with visible excitement.
"Did you hear that, Liben? You are a high-ranking minister! You debate military strategy! You are not just a painter anymore!"
Yan Liben did not even flinch. He continued sketching, his brush moving with serene precision.
"I heard it, brother."
"Then why are you not excited?"
"I am excited."
"You do not look excited."
"I am excited internally."
Yan Lide stared at him. "You look like someone just told you the price of rice went down."
"That is excitement for me."
Yan Liben had received the news with profound calm. Now that he knew his artistic talent would make him immortal in the eyes of later generations, his career anxiety had simply evaporated. What was the point of worrying about status when people would still be studying your paintings a thousand years from now?
He glanced down at his current sketchpad. He was capturing the room with precision: the emperor radiating murderous calculation, Zhangsun Wuji wrapped around an imperial leg weeping loudly, Hou Junji working extremely hard not to laugh at Zhangsun Wuji. The range of human responses to institutional crisis was genuinely beautiful.
"What is wrong with being a painter?" he murmured to himself.
His brush moved again.
"Painting is wonderful."
[Lightscreen]
[Li Zhi's prolonged appeasement policy had a name, and that name was disaster.
By the time he finally moved, Tibet had already swallowed the Tuyuhun Kingdom whole. There was no resistance to speak of. Li Zhi dreaded a war with Tibet. Tibet, meanwhile, seemed increasingly eager for a war with the Tang.
Having consumed the Tuyuhun, Tibet now sat in one of the most advantageous strategic positions in Inner Asia. From there, they could march west into the Western Regions. They could strike east into Longyou. Or they could move north, sever the Hexi Corridor, and strangle the Silk Road from the inside.
In 667, Gar Tongtsen died. He left behind two sons: Tsenyö and Trinring. The younger brother, Trinring, eventually took control. The Tang records call him Lön Trinring.
For the two brothers, the conquest of Tuyuhun had been just the appetizer. The real question was simple: how strong was the Tang military?
In 670, they got their answer.
A blood-stained dispatch arrived in Chang'an from the Western Regions. The message was short and devastating. Lön Trinring had launched a full-scale invasion. Eighteen prefectures had fallen. Kucha was gone. The Four Garrisons of Anxi existed in name only.
Slapped across the face by events, Li Zhi could no longer pretend the problem would solve itself. He declared war in April.
Then he did what he did best. He debated. He held meetings. He considered candidates. He analyzed strategies. He set everything aside and started over. The process repeated itself for months.
Let us pause here and appreciate the sheer absurdity of this timeline. He declared war in April. His army did not move until August. Four months. Four months of meetings. Four months of indecision. Four months of the enemy consolidating their gains while Tang officials argued over who would take command.
If you wanted to design a system that guarantees failure, you could not do much better than this.
The early Tang climate was colder than modern times. The high-altitude Qinghai region was unpredictable. The poet Cen Shen, who later served in Anxi, wrote: "In the barbarian lands, August brings flying snow." Winter could arrive at any moment. And Trinring reportedly commanded four hundred thousand men. The Tang forces were badly outnumbered.
Xue Rengui had one viable strategy: strike fast and end the war before the weather ended it for him. Any delay meant freezing or being crushed by sheer numbers.
He entered Qinghai and requested a private meeting with his deputy commander, Guo Daifeng.
Their relationship was famously toxic.
Guo Daifeng was the son of the legendary general Guo Xiaoke. During the Goguryeo invasion, he had served under Li Ji and outranked Xue Rengui.
Judged by bloodline or by military resume, Guo Daifeng viewed Xue Rengui with open contempt.
Xue Rengui knew this. He tried to set the ego aside for the sake of the campaign.
He laid out the plan clearly: "I will take the elite cavalry, push through the altitude, and sprint to Wuhai to shatter the Tibetan vanguard. You stay back. Guard the supply train. Move slowly. Hold defensive positions. Be ready to reinforce when I break their lines."
Then he left the baggage behind, drove his cavalry forward, and hit the Tibetan vanguard. The engagement was savage and decisive. Over ten thousand enemy troops fell. Massive herds of livestock were captured.
Victory was within reach. Xue Rengui sent messengers racing back to Guo Daifeng with orders to bring up the supply train.
What came back was news that stopped him cold.
Guo Daifeng had ignored the plan. Convinced that Xue Rengui was going to steal all the glory, he had ordered his twenty thousand men and the entire supply train to march immediately toward Wuhai.
Halfway there, grinding forward at the speed of a supply column, Guo Daifeng was intercepted by Trinring and the two-hundred-thousand-man main force. After a brief skirmish, Guo Daifeng abandoned the supply train and ran.
Let us reflect on this decision. Guo Daifeng was willing to abandon twenty thousand men and the entire supply train because he was afraid someone else might get credit.
That is not just incompetence. That is a philosophical commitment to failure.
With his supply line gone and no reinforcements coming, Xue Rengui realized that Wuhai was now a death trap. He ordered a fighting retreat toward the Dafei River valley.
When he reached the valley, he nearly had a medical event. He had given Guo Daifeng one explicit instruction: build two heavily fortified camps here. The valley was empty. No fortifications. No timber. Nothing.
Trapped in a valley without supplies or defenses, the Tang army was surrounded. Tens of thousands died in the slaughter that followed. Xue Rengui was forced to ride to the front lines himself and negotiate a humiliating ceasefire with Trinring just to let the survivors limp home.
The reputation of invincibility that Tang had built over forty years, starting with the destruction of the Eastern Turks, was permanently shattered. Xue Rengui was stripped of his rank and reduced to commoner status. The man who had pacified Tianshan with three arrows fell from that height in a single campaign.
So what do we learn from this?
First, indecision is a weapon the enemy can use against you. Li Zhi spent four months debating while Trinring spent four months conquering.
Second, ego destroys armies faster than any enemy. Guo Daifeng did not lose the battle to Tibet. He lost it to his own pride.
And third, a system that rewards personal glory over collective survival is a system that produces disasters. Xue Rengui won the battle. Guo Daifeng lost the war. But both men were products of the same rotten structure.
That is not bad luck. That is bad design. And when you have bad design at the top, you get disasters like Dafei River.]
"This entire situation..."
Li Shimin let out a long breath, the kind taken by a man struggling to suppress the urge to throw something.
"When the Tuyuhun begged for reinforcements, he refused to send troops. When the pro-Tang factions were still fighting and dying for the dynasty, he refused to send troops. Even in spring, with the roads open and the weather favorable, he still refused to send troops."
He raised a hand and counted each point on his fingers.
"Then he waited until the Tibetans had consolidated their gains, until our allies had been crushed, and until the climate itself had turned against us. Only then did he finally dispatch the army."
Li Shimin closed his eyes.
"How could this possibly end in anything other than disaster?"
His voice had risen to the pitch that made the ministers worry about the structural integrity of the hall.
"The immediate responsibility for this catastrophe belongs to the traitor Guo Daifeng."
He paused.
"But Li Zhi created the conditions for it."
Strictly speaking, Xue Rengui also bore a measure of responsibility. At the very least, he should have considered executing Guo Daifeng for insubordination the moment the man decided military orders were optional.
However, none of the ministers had any interest in raising that particular point.
At this moment, every pair of eyes in the hall had suddenly become deeply fascinated by the patterns on the floor.
Li Jing sighed, and the sound carried genuine regret.
"Guo Daifeng's refusal to obey orders is the only reason Lön Trinring became a figure of historical importance."
He shook his head.
"Guo Xiaoke was a remarkable man. Brave, intelligent, and fiercely loyal to the Great Tang. He was a real commander in every sense of the word. How did a man like him produce a son like this?"
Li Shimin also remembered Guo Xiaoke well. Back when he was still the Prince of Qin, Guo Xiaoke had fought beside him during the siege of Luoyang. The man had been fearless in battle and sharp in strategy. Li Shimin had held him in high regard.
Thinking of the father and then looking at the son, he could only sigh.
"Perhaps his father died too early."
The anger in his voice had faded, leaving behind something closer to weariness.
Across the room, Su Dingfang let out a long breath of his own. Its meaning was entirely different.
At last, he could stop complaining about his luck. Apparently, spending ten years sweeping the streets had its advantages. The Light Screen had not exposed any catastrophic blunders from his future career. His campaigns in Goguryeo looked solid, and the latter half of his life appeared equally stable. When the dynasty used him, he delivered.
Compared with Xue Rengui, whose career had soared to extraordinary heights before crashing all the way back to commoner status, Su Dingfang suddenly felt rather fortunate.
At that moment, Li Ji released a long and theatrical sigh.
Su Dingfang turned to him. "And what are you lamenting?"
Li Ji wore the expression of a man carrying the burdens of the empire. "I am heartbroken."
"For what?"
Li Ji looked toward the Light Screen. "Xue Rengui and Guo Daifeng both served under my command during the conquest of Goguryeo. To think that officers from my army would one day bring such humiliation upon the Great Tang pains me deeply."
He even lowered his head. "I can scarcely bear to witness it."
Su Dingfang studied him for a long moment. Then he nodded. "I see."
A few ministers also nodded. The performance was flawless.
Seeing that he had everyone's attention, Li Ji raised his head again. "Therefore, Your Majesty, when the court eventually launches a campaign against the Western Turks and Tibet, I humbly request the vanguard command."
He bowed. "I wish to erase this future humiliation before it ever happens. My heart hurts when I see this."
Several ministers blinked.
Su Dingfang blinked twice. Only then did he understand.
Holy shit. This old fox. You can play like this?
A defeat that had not yet occurred, committed by two men who were not even Li Ji's direct subordinates, had somehow become a reason for requesting command of the empire's next major campaign. The logic was breathtaking.
Even Li Shimin looked amused. He smiled at Li Ji. "So that was your destination all along."
Li Ji coughed lightly. "I merely wish to share Your Majesty's burdens."
"By leading the vanguard?"
"If Your Majesty insists."
The smile on Li Shimin's face widened. "The matter of Tibet remains under discussion."
Li Ji nodded with complete seriousness. "I understand."
"I know that you do."
The two men looked at one another. No further explanation was necessary. The request had been made. The Emperor had heard it. As for whether it would be granted, that was a matter for another day.
Su Dingfang glanced at Li Ji and then looked away.
There are still many things I need to learn.
---
Inside the Chengdu government office, Zhang Fei's jaw was in a position it was not designed for.
"It is terrifying. Kongming, you predicted the exact outcome across centuries. You truly possess something beyond ordinary foresight."
Zhuge Liang fanned himself with the composure of someone declining unearned credit.
"I was simply reading the structural situation, Yide. The light screen itself stated it clearly. After forty consecutive years of unbroken military victories, the psychological foundation of the Tang army had developed a specific kind of rot."
He continued without pause. "Before the battle had even begun, the deputy commander's primary mental occupation was calculating how the post-war credit would be distributed. When that is where a commander's attention is, he has already stopped fighting the actual enemy. He is fighting for personal advancement against his own side."
Zhuge Liang let his fan rest in his hand.
"With that level of institutional contempt for the real threat in front of them, defeat was not a possibility. It was a guarantee. The only question was when and how."