Zhao Yun clenched his fists and kept them firmly at his sides. He watched Liu Bei deliver a well-deserved knuckle sandwich to Zhang Fei's head, and the temptation to add his own contribution was almost overwhelming. Only years of discipline stopped him from joining the assault.
Kneeling beside the desk, the white-robed general leaned toward the military advisor and lowered his voice.
"Kongming, this Tang Dynasty and our Great Han… they are terrifyingly similar, are they not?"
Zhuge Liang slowly waved his feather fan and gave a silent nod.
It made perfect historical sense.
The two dynasties were separated by four centuries. Any founder building a new empire would naturally borrow from the most successful model available.
The Tang's martial ferocity had been forged in the fires of its own chaotic founding, but its civil administration was undeniably built upon the foundations of the Han.
Yet as Zhuge Liang recalled the eventual decline of both empires, he could not help but sigh.
Apparently, you can inherit the best parts of the Great Han, but why did the Great Tang have to inherit the catastrophic mistakes too?
Zhuge Liang sighed.
Some things, it seems, are family heirlooms whether you want them or not.
The strategist turned toward Zhao Yun.
"Zilong, during your years in the north, did you ever meet anyone who truly understood the science of horse breeding?"
Zhao Yun considered the question before slowly shaking his head.
"General Gongsun Zan certainly employed stable masters," he recalled. "But their duties had nothing to do with what the Light Screen calls 'genetic selection' or 'conservation'. They were essentially veterinarians. They shoveled manure and treated sick horses."
Zhuge Liang tapped his forehead and let out a dry laugh.
"My mistake. I briefly forgot that General Gongsun's entire standard for selecting a superior warhorse was whether it matched the color scheme."
Gongsun Zan had famously built his elite Baima Yicong around one criterion and one criterion alone: the horses had to be white.
As for speed, endurance, temperament, or breeding potential...
Those were apparently secondary concerns.
Whether it was a warlord obsessing over matching paint jobs or a Tang Emperor casually inheriting a reserve of seven hundred thousand warhorses, the men of Shu-Han could only sit in silence and burn with envy.
Down south, Guan Yu had managed to seize a few thousand decent mounts during the Xiangfan campaign. He currently treated those horses better than many of his own officers, pampering them like treasured family heirlooms.
Meanwhile, Zhang Fei was still impatiently waiting for Han Sui and Ma Chao to deliver the first batch of promised warhorses from the western frontier.
If one gathered every horse owned by Shu-Han and counted them one by one, the total would barely exceed ten thousand.
Compared to the Tang's seven hundred thousand, they looked less like a kingdom and more like a group of beggars staring at a mountain of gold.
Even Zhuge Liang's feather fan slowed for a moment.
Seven hundred thousand horses.
That number alone is enough to make strategists lose sleep.
Inside the Ganlu Hall, Emperor Li Shimin practically leaped out of his chair.
"When we destroyed the Eastern Turks, exactly how many horses did we seize?" he demanded, his eyes wide.
Fang Xuanling searched his memory for a moment.
"The official records state that approximately seventy thousand horses were incorporated into the imperial pastures."
The Eastern Turkic Khaganate had obviously possessed far more than seventy thousand horses. But conquest required restraint. The Tang still had to govern the surviving tribes. If they had confiscated every single horse on the steppe, they would have driven the defeated Turks into immediate and desperate rebellion.
Seventy thousand had been the acceptable amount.
Li Shimin silently did the math, comparing the starting figure with the seven hundred thousand horses he would eventually leave to his son.
A broad smile slowly spread across his face.
"I never imagined that my Great Tang concealed a genius of this caliber!" he exclaimed, delighted. "Compile every theory on genetic selection and breeding mentioned by the Light Screen. Tomorrow morning, I shall personally write a letter commending Zhang Wansui."
The Emperor paused and turned toward a very specific man in the hall.
"General Yuchi, it is a great blessing indeed that one of your old comrades has secured an eternal place in history through administrative talent alone."
Yuchi Jingde, who had been standing quietly near the entrance, looked momentarily stunned.
Had the Emperor not spoken the name, he might genuinely have forgotten the man.
More than a decade earlier, when the rebel Song Jingang had been defeated, he and Zhang Wansui had surrendered to the Tang on the very same day.
Yuchi Jingde had relied on his martial prowess to rise to legendary status. But Zhang Wansui? The man had simply disappeared. His name never appeared in battle reports. It never appeared on merit rosters.
At some point, Yuchi Jingde had heard a rumor that his former comrade had voluntarily requested a transfer to the imperial pastures, where he spent his days tending horses and shoveling manure.
He had assumed the man had quietly faded into obscurity.
Who could have imagined that this silent and unassuming officer had single-handedly built one of the logistical foundations of the Zhenguan golden age?
Yuchi Jingde's expression became strangely complicated.
For a soldier, earning glory through battlefield achievements was natural. But to spend an entire lifetime among horses and manure, only to leave behind seven hundred thousand warhorses for the empire...
That was a merit no less extraordinary.
After teasing his old general, Li Shimin sat back down.
His gaze drifted toward a particular phrase lingering on the Light Screen.
The Half-Life Wise King.
The smile on his face gradually faded. His mood soured once more.
Judging purely by the catastrophic decline in the imperial horse reserves, the legendary Kaiyuan Golden Age was clearly not the uninterrupted age of prosperity Li Shimin had once imagined.
The reality was far grimmer.
His son, Li Zhi, had inherited the near-perfect foundation of the Zhenguan era, squandered a significant portion of it, and ultimately handed Emperor Xuanzong an empire operating at barely half its potential.
And yet, Xuanzong still managed to restore the Tang to the height of its power before personally driving it off a cliff in his old age.
Li Shimin could only let out a long sigh.
"Of all the affairs of state, winning battles is genuinely the easiest."
The veteran generals standing in the pavilion all nodded in unison and offered polite, strained smiles.
Of course, Your Majesty.
You were the one who won all the wars.
Naturally, you would think they were easy.
Fang Xuanling and Du Ruhui, however, understood the deeper meaning behind the Emperor's melancholy.
The two chancellors exchanged a knowing glance.
At that moment, both men happened to think of their own notoriously disappointing sons.
They immediately found themselves in complete agreement with their sovereign.
Conquering an empire was simple. Raising a competent heir was the truly difficult campaign.
In the corner, the court painter Yan Liben felt his blood pressure rising.
He hated this sort of atmosphere. If he had possessed the political talent to enter the Emperor's inner circle through conventional civil service, he never would have relied on his artistic skills to secure a place at court.
He genuinely loved painting.
But every time these generals and grand strategists exchanged profound, world-weary glances, he could not help but feel unbearably shallow.
Look at them. Look at all of them. They are discussing the rise and fall of empires while I am over here wondering if I should add more shading to this painting of a horse.
The heavy mood lasted only a moment.
Li Shimin was a man obsessed with cavalry, and his imagination had already galloped off to the western frontier.
"If we conquer the kingdoms beyond the Western Regions," the Emperor mused, his eyes gleaming, "do you think Zhang Wansui could breed me a hundred thousand pure Ferghana horses?
Even Li Jing's eyelid twitched.
A hundred thousand pure Ferghana horses?
Was His Majesty trying to build a cavalry force or personally bankrupt heaven itself?
Fang Xuanling and Du Ruhui, however, had long since learned to ignore the Emperor's occasional flights of military fantasy. They immediately focused on the practical implications.
"We should consult the Ministry of Revenue regarding soybean production," Fang Xuanling said in a low voice.
Du Ruhui considered the matter. "Would the Court of Agricultural Affairs not be better suited to oversee feed logistics?"
Fang Xuanling nodded. "Agreed. The Court of Agricultural Affairs it is."
The two chancellors promptly recorded the matter. If the Ming could raise top-tier warhorses in Hebei by feeding them soybeans, then the Great Tang naturally had to investigate the method as well.
As for the Emperor's dream of one hundred thousand pure Ferghana horses...
The two ministers tacitly decided to pretend they had heard nothing at all.
One hundred thousand Ferghana horses. What is next, the Moon?
[Lightscreen]
[During Emperor Gaozong's reign, the collapse of the horse administration produced a fatal consequence.
The Tang military lost its rapid response capability.
Just look at Pei Xingjian's campaign with three hundred thousand men. The Tang army vastly outnumbered the Turks, yet the entire operation turned into an agonizing, slow-moving grind.
Why?
Because the empire was suffering from a critical shortage of cavalry mounts.
Later, Prime Minister Pei Yan twisted the facts, stripped Pei Xingjian of his achievements, and executed the surrendered Turkic leaders in Chang'an. The eastern steppe immediately severed all diplomatic ties.
Just as Pei Xingjian had predicted, the nomads chose war.
Turkic cavalry began raiding the frontier almost every year. They constantly shifted their targets, striking one region and then vanishing back into the grasslands before the Tang army could react.
They were gambling on one simple fact:
The infantry-heavy Tang military was too slow.
And they were right.
It took more than twenty years after Emperor Li Zhi's death for someone to finally solve the problem.
That man was Zhang Renyuan.
He became so sick of playing this deadly game of hide-and-seek that he reached back into history, revived the ancient Han Dynasty beacon tower system, and gave it a remarkable upgrade.
Zhang Renyuan himself is a fascinating figure.
He was originally named Zhang Rendan, but later changed his name to avoid the naming taboo of Emperor Ruizong, Li Dan. More importantly, he began his career as a civil official before becoming a frontier commander, a reminder that the Tang talent pool remained surprisingly deep, even in its later years.
His greatest invention was the suspended beacon tower.
Imagine a small fortified blockhouse built atop a tall rammed-earth pillar. In many ways, it resembled a modern water tower.
The only access was a retractable rope ladder.
If Turkic cavalry attacked, the defenders simply pulled the ladder up behind them. The tower instantly became immune to mounted assault, allowing the guards to safely light the warning beacons.
Zhang Renyuan also completely redesigned the signaling system.
Every tower was required to check in at dawn and dusk.
One fire meant all was well.
Two fires meant enemy forces had been sighted.
Three fires accompanied by smoke indicated a major invasion.
A burning brushwood cage meant the tower itself was under attack.
The system was even more sophisticated than that.
According to the Tongdian compiled by Du You, one column of smoke indicated between fifty and five hundred enemy troops. Two columns meant five hundred to three thousand. Three columns meant three thousand to ten thousand. Four columns meant an invasion force exceeding ten thousand men.
Each tower maintained a permanent staff structure: a chief, an assistant, and five watchmen rotating through shifts, with one man specifically responsible for transmitting official credentials and reports.
If fog, rain, or dust storms blocked visibility, mounted couriers were dispatched to relay the message by hand.
The network never went dark.
Across a three-hundred-mile stretch of frontier, Zhang Renyuan rapidly constructed eighteen hundred of these upgraded towers.
The effect was immediate.
Northern Shuofang became a fortress.
The Turks grew terrified of crossing the border, knowing that the moment they appeared, the entire defense network would know exactly where they were.
Even better, the Tang court was able to reduce the number of border garrisons by tens of thousands of men.
The new system not only protected the frontier.
It actually saved the empire a fortune.
Thanks to this network, a military alert could travel from the eastern coast of Liaodong all the way to the Western Regions in a single night.
Until the invention of electricity, this was arguably one of the greatest long-distance communication systems ever built.
Interestingly, modern archaeology has confirmed Zhang Renyuan's achievement. Radiocarbon dating of organic remains recovered from beacon towers in the Hami region shows that the overwhelming majority were constructed and used during the Tang Dynasty, between 600 and 900 AD.
The evidence matches the historical records almost perfectly.
This was not merely a story recorded in old books.
It was a real, continent-spanning communication network.
Centuries later, during the age of Napoleon, an inventor in France would independently rediscover the same fundamental idea and push it to an entirely new level.
The result was the Semaphore Telegraph.
Like the Tang beacon system, towers were built at regular intervals, usually every five kilometers. But instead of relying on smoke and fire, each tower carried a giant T-shaped wooden mechanism on its roof.
The ends of the crossbar were fitted with articulated arms that could be moved using ropes and pulleys from inside the tower.
Each arm could lock into seven different angles. The central beam could be set in two positions.
Mathematically, the machine could display ninety-eight distinct visual signals.
The operating principle was almost identical to a beacon tower.
An operator looked through a telescope at the neighboring station, copied the position of the arms, and then reproduced the same signal for the next tower in the chain.
The true genius of the system lay in its codebook.
The operators pulling the ropes had absolutely no idea what message they were transmitting. They merely copied shapes.
Only the commanders at the beginning and end of the network possessed the cipher necessary to convert those ninety-eight signals into actual military orders.
It offered remarkable operational security.
Its greatest advantage, however, was speed.
A complex message could travel a thousand kilometers in roughly twenty minutes.
For the early nineteenth century, that was practically magic.
Other nations quickly adopted and improved the system.
Austrian engineers experimented with flashing electric lights to send proto-Morse signals during the night.
Others realized that better telescopes allowed towers to be built farther apart, dramatically reducing construction costs.
For a brief period, the optical telegraph ruled the world.
Then electricity arrived.
The electric telegraph rendered the entire system obsolete almost overnight.
Its inventor, Claude Chappe, became history's first telecommunications magnate, a pioneer of a kind of mechanical internet.
Tragically, after rivals challenged his claim to the invention, Chappe fell into depression and committed suicide in 1805 by throwing himself down a well.
Yet his legacy endured.
The very word telegraph was coined by Chappe himself, derived from the Greek words for "far" and "writing."
The Tang dynasty and Napoleonic France, separated by more than a thousand years, had independently created optical communication networks spanning entire continents.
One relied on smoke and fire.
The other relied on wooden arms and secret codebooks.
Both were technological marvels of their age.
And both demonstrated a timeless truth:
Human beings have always been obsessed with one thing, sending information farther, faster, and more securely than ever before.]
Zhuge Liang stared at the projection, his mind struggling to process the sheer ingenuity of future generations.
The magical screen showed an image of a thick, leather-bound codebook. Liu Bei found the concept dizzying, but Zhuge Liang and Fa Zheng grasped its brilliance almost instantly.
"This cryptographic method..." Zhuge Liang murmured, his eyes tracking the diagram. "It appears to rely on advanced mathematics."
Fa Zheng cared less about the math and more about its battlefield applications. His eyes gleamed with excitement.
"The ability to transmit a detailed order across a thousand miles within a single watch..." he whispered. "For the enemy, that is an absolute nightmare."
Even Zhang Fei had dropped his usual boisterous demeanor. He studied the screen with the focus of a veteran commander.
"Signal fires have too many flaws," he said slowly. "They work best at night. Thick smoke during the day burns through fuel like crazy, and a change in the wind can twist the message into something completely different. Half the time, you end up chasing false alarms. But if you change the medium..."
As a frontline general, Zhang Fei understood the limitations of ancient communications better than most.
Because signaling systems were so unreliable, commanders had no choice but to keep their orders simple. One drumbeat meant advance. A gong meant retreat. A colored flag meant flank.
But a semaphore system was something else entirely.
Imagine being five hundred miles from the main camp and receiving a perfectly clear, encrypted order.
General Zhang. March north one hundred miles. Turn west fifty. Strike the enemy baggage train.
The tactical flexibility would be almost godlike.
"The only problem is this foreign alphabet," Fa Zheng said, scratching his chin as he studied the ninety-eight symbols. "Using those mechanical arms to convey complex Han characters seems rather clumsy."
Zhuge Liang waved the objection aside. He had already moved past the French design.
"The specific characters do not matter, Xiaozhi. There is no need to copy their wooden contraption."
His mind was already racing ahead.
The Light Screen had revealed the core principle. A successful semaphore system required only two things: a cipher known only to the sender and receiver, and a standardized set of visual markers.
There was no need to build giant wooden frames on towers. The same combinations could be achieved with trained soldiers holding colored flags in specific formations.
And then another thought struck him.
A beacon network spanning the empire was impressive. But an encrypted flag system used on the battlefield?
Zhuge Liang's breath caught.
Such a system would be devastating. A commander could direct scattered armies as if they were extensions of his own hands. Reinforcements could be summoned instantly. Ambushes could be coordinated with perfect timing. Entire formations could maneuver without the enemy ever knowing what was coming.
Then, Zhuge Liang's gaze locked onto a small detail mentioned at the end of the broadcast.
Telescope. Glass.
The Light Screen displayed a simple drawing of a man raising a tube to his eye and studying a signal tower miles away as if it were right in front of him.
It requires clear glass...
The workshops of Chengdu could only produce cloudy, impurity-ridden glass. Some pieces were barely translucent.
But during his spare moments, Zhuge Liang had often examined those flawed creations. He had noticed something odd. Looking through their curved edges caused objects on the other side to distort. Some grew larger. Others shrank.
The phenomenon had stuck with him.
In fact, he had already planned a winter trip to Hanzhong. He wanted to carve lenses from river ice and test his ideas about light and vision.
He had not expected the Light Screen to hand him the answer before the first snow fell.
Then it clicked.
You put the glass inside a dark tube... Zhuge Liang muttered, almost to himself. Then you combine pieces with different curves. Convex. Concave. The light bends as it passes through...
His eyes grew bright.
The distortion is not a flaw. It can be controlled. It can become magnification.
He stared at the image on the screen.
Exactly as the broadcast says. It lets the eye see distant objects as if they were close.
For the first time in a long while, Zhuge Liang's composure cracked.
His fingers twitched.
He found himself wishing for a blizzard to hit Hanzhong tomorrow so he could harvest clear river ice and start testing immediately.