Watching little Zhuge Guo practically vibrate with excitement over her dad coming home, Huang Yueying felt the heavy tension in her shoulders finally ease up. All the stress of running a wartime logistics nightmare, from the endless reports and supply shortages to the constant background worry, just sort of melted away for a minute.
"Alright, alright, slow down before you trample my seedlings," she said with a laugh.
She tossed her brush aside like it owed her money, grabbed her daughter by the hand, and hauled her out into the courtyard. Fresh air would not hurt, and she could finally show off her fancy new glass greenhouse setup.
They stepped out into the crisp winter air, and Huang Yueying used the chance to point out all the cool bits about the weird glass structure tucked into the corner of their garden.
Now, growing off-season fruits and vegetables in heated spaces was not exactly breaking news in ancient China.
Huang Yueying could still recall stories from the Former Han Dynasty about a hot spring somewhere near Chang'an. Even when snow was piling up higher than a court eunuch's ego, the ground around that spring stayed as green as a young scholar's robes. The imperial family had promptly seized control of the spot, turning it into their personal winter produce garden to keep the palace kitchens stocked with treats you were not supposed to get until spring.
By the later years of the Former Han, every self-respecting palace had a dedicated heated hall for growing stuff. But here was the kicker. Back then, everyone swore blind that plants only cared about warmth. Huang Yueying thought that was about as accurate as calling a donkey a racehorse.
These days, with commerce booming, basic heated greenhouses were not a palace secret anymore. Rich merchants built their own ugly wood-and-mud warming huts to sell out-of-season crops at ridiculous prices. But Huang Yueying had tasted their produce, and it was awful. Watery, flavorless, nothing like the sun-ripened goodness you would get in season. Some of them did not even look like their regular selves. Take chives grown in the dark, for example. They were pale, spindly, and about as exciting as listening to a Confucian scholar recite the classics word for word.
Thankfully, her husband had her back on this one. In a recent letter, Zhuge Kongming had pointed out something no one else seemed to notice.
My dear Yueying,
I trust this letter finds you in good health, despite the chaos that surrounds us.
I have been thinking about your observations regarding the winter vegetables. Your instinct that something is wrong with the produce from those heated sheds is correct. The merchants may be making a fortune, but they are selling shadows of what could be.
Consider the wild plants on the mountainsides. Those that face the sun grow robust, green, and full of vigor. Those that face the shade are pale, thin, and weak. The soil is the same. The rain is the same. The temperature is the same. Yet the difference is undeniable.
Heat allows a plant to grow. But sunlight teaches it how to grow properly. It is not enough to keep the roots warm. The leaves must see the sun.
I suspect the same principle applies to many things, but for now, I will limit my musings to agriculture. I have enclosed two scrolls that may be of use to you. One contains the method for producing alkali. The other covers the basics of smelting and casting glass. I trust your workshop will put them to good use.
Take care of yourself and our children. I will return before the end of the year.
Kongming
It was like her husband had some kind of cheat code for her engineering headaches.
Zhuge Kongming detects his wife's skill tree bottleneck!
Zhuge Kongming activates skill: Deep Contemplation!
Zhuge Kongming initiates technology transfer protocol!
"Alkali Production Methods" and "Glass Making For Dummies" successfully transmitted – effects OVERWHELMING!
Tacked onto his nerdy rant about sunlight were two ridiculously dense, technical scrolls. One was basically a manual for making alkali. The other was a masterclass on smelting and casting glass.
The practical payoff from that little brain-dump was currently sitting right in her courtyard. Her modest estate now had two completely different test zones. Out back, she had the traditional, opaque mud hut. But right in the middle of the main courtyard sat her pride and joy. A prototype greenhouse built from rough, slightly cloudy, hand-poured glass panels.
Her current winter hobby was basically playing mad scientist with her crops. She tracked tiny changes in leaf color, timed how fast they grew, ran mental calculations on light refraction, and relentlessly tested her own theories. It kept her brain from turning to mush.
But watching Zhuge Guo happily skipping around the glass house, completely clueless about the massive army marching their way, Huang Yueying let out a quiet sigh. They had cracked advanced agriculture. They had literally reinvented glassmaking. Yet here they were, stuck in a blood-soaked era where all these miracles had to take a backseat to figuring out how to build bigger, better weapons.
We really are living in messed-up times, aren't we?
---
Meanwhile, high up on the stone battlements of Jiangling, Jiang Wan stood frozen. He had been staring at the exact same spot for hours.
His eyes were locked on the southern horizon, but his brain was stuck on replay. He could still picture that cramped clerk's office back in Gong'an County, still felt that gut-punch of pure shock when the mysterious light screen had first flickered to life.
That glowing thing had shown him the agonizing future of their original timeline. He had felt his stomach drop thinking about Guan Yu's doom. He had wanted to punch someone when he saw the Cao army's dirty tricks. He had felt sick imagining what was coming for Liu Bei.
And, being honest with himself for once, he had felt a cold knot of terror when he had read the notification about his own early death from some chronic illness.
He had shoved all of that down deep. A chief administrator running a siege did not have time to freak out about existential dread. He kept his face blank.
But right now, watching the sky across the Yangtze turn a bruised, ugly purple from that pillar of smoke, Jiang Wan could not help feeling like someone had punched him in the chest. The flames were chewing through what was left of Gong'an. The ashes from their old workshops were drifting across the water, landing like dirty snow on Jiangling's walls. It felt like watching an old friend get cremated.
If Jiang Wan was feeling poetic and sad, Lu Meng was having something way closer to a full-blown meltdown.
"THOSE ABSOLUTE FUCKING BASTARD!" he hissed, gripping the ship's rail so hard his knuckles turned bone-white.
Lu Meng had one job. Kill Guan Yu. Simple enough. So he had spent the last few months going full nerd mode, obsessively dissecting every battle that went down in the Jingzhou and Xiangyang regions.
Getting solid intel from the northern front was a nightmare.
But by cobbling together tavern gossip, battlefield rumors, and carefully sanitized reports from his moles inside Cao Cao's army, Lu Yi had managed to piece together a pretty decent picture of what went down.
And what he saw was terrifying.
A coordinated river assault. Heavy warships locking down the waterways. Fancheng getting steamrolled. Wancheng getting snatched in a silent night raid.
According to the terrified Cao survivors, Fancheng's "impenetrable" fortress got cracked open by one ridiculously huge warship packing siege crossbows that should not even exist.
The second Lu Meng read that detail, his brain short-circuited. He suddenly remembered staring across the water at Jiangxia, watching this absolutely massive, unmistakable transport ship lumbering down the river.
And just like that, everything clicked. Those insane super-weapons that wrecked the northern front were the exact same giant ballistas he had seen lined up along Gong'an's riverbanks.
Wu had always been the archery capital. Everyone knew it. So Lu Meng, feeling pretty cocky, had sketched out rough measurements of those Gong'an ballistas. He had marched into the military foundries, slapped his drawings on a workbench, and told his master bowyers to copy the design and crank out a bunch.
That plan went down in flames. Hard.
The engineers just stared at him like he had lost his mind. Some said the tension on those limbs broke the laws of physics. Others straight-up ignored his blueprints and tried handing him the same ancient, weak bed-crossbows he had been stuck with for a decade.
Pissed off at his own military's incompetence, Lu Meng tried hiring civilian craftsmen instead. That was when he hit a wall. The best shipwrights, blacksmiths, and bowyers in the east had all quietly packed up and vanished. Following the money trail, Lu Meng figured out they had all been poached by insane paychecks and fancy government workshops. They had all moved to Jiangling.
Fine. If his people could not build the damn things, he would just sail over and steal them.
He remembered that night recon mission crystal clear. Standing on a quiet boat in the dark, listening to the heavy thud of those mechanisms being tested, he counted every single one. At least twenty of those mechanical beasts lined up along the Hudu River.
And the best part? Gong'an's workshop district had zero walls. No defenses. Just an open target. Lu Meng had sailed his fleet upriver feeling like he was about to score the jackpot of all time.
Instead, he found miles of scorched earth, smoldering ruins, and a sky choked with ash. They had burned the whole thing down.
Staring at the blackened ruins, something dark and ugly finally settled in Lu Meng's gut.
"These treacherous dogs," he growled, his voice shaking with rage. "They have been playing us this whole time. They were never our allies!"
In that moment of crystal clarity, Lu Su's face popped into his head. That dopey, annoyingly naive, always-optimistic face of his predecessor.
If that peace-loving idiot had not spent years secretly cozying up to Liu Bei, manipulating their Lord into basically handing over Jiangling, none of this would have happened. Liu Bei would never have grown into this terrifying industrial monster.
If their Lord had just ignored Lu Su's constant whining about alliances and listened to Zhou Yu's cold-blooded brilliance, they would have locked Liu Bei up in Chaisang years ago. They could have slit his throat in the dark, cut this cancer out before it spread. If they had done that, the eastern armies would not be staring down an impenetrable fortress right now.
Piling on top of all that rage was the courier who had shown up from Jianye yesterday. The messenger had brought some seriously messed-up news. Lu Su had vanished. Completely. No trace.
Remembering how nervous the messenger had been, and what that disappearance probably meant politically, Lu Meng found himself gripping his sword hilt so hard his hand cramped.
If they had just ignored Lu Su from day one. If they had struck first. If the eastern army had these insane city-crushing ballistas during that Hefei disaster, maybe their hundred thousand men would have actually breached the walls instead of getting slaughtered in the mud.
Lu Meng shook his head hard, forcing those useless "what-ifs" out of his brain. Dwelling on past screw-ups was not going to crack these walls.
The enemy had pulled a classic scorched-earth move. They had pulled everything behind those unbreakable walls and were settling in for a long, ugly siege. Lu Meng knew exactly how to deal with a turtle hiding in its shell.
He turned to his signal officers, his voice going dead cold.
"Order the main fleet to drop anchor here. We will build our camp on Gong'an's ashes. We sit right across the water and stare Jiangling down."
He pointed north.
"Deploy the assault ships. Form a full blockade around Jiangling's northern water gates. Nothing gets in."
"Send the fast boats. Start round-the-clock patrols of every waterway around here. I do not want a single civilian, soldier, or stray dog escaping that city alive."
"Send the scouts and light skiffs. Push thirty li upriver. Map every inch of that shoreline. Find me their blind spots."
---
Across the river, Jiang Wan stood on the high stone wall and watched the eastern armada get to work. He watched enemy warships drop heavy anchors, engineering crews haul lumber ashore to build a palisade, and scout ships scatter across the water like a swarm of angry wasps.
After a few minutes of watching, Jiang Wan felt a weird sense of disappointment.
"Should not Lu Meng be sailing up here to yell at us by now?" he muttered. "Is that not how this script works? You break a peace treaty, launch a sneak attack, and then shout about how we are all terrible people? Where is the standard military protocol of loudly cursing our ancestors before a siege?"
He leaned against the cold stone, shaking his head. "You literally flip the table and betray us, and now you do not even have the decency to give a proper villain speech? Where is the drama?"
The second the complaint left his mouth, he felt incredibly lonely. Ma Liang, his usual partner in crime for dry political jokes, had long since left with secret orders from Kongming to secure the southern provinces. Zhao Lei, their pragmatic military backbone, had marched north with Guan Yu to fight in the main theater of war.
Jiang Wan was the only high-ranking official left in Jiangling. Realizing he was just talking to himself on a wall, surrounded by tens of thousands of enemy troops, made the isolation hit hard.
Suddenly, a smooth, highly aristocratic voice echoed from the stone walkway directly behind him.
"Rumor has it Lu Meng has personally witnessed the destructive power of our giant ballistas. If he actually sailed his flagship close enough to shout insults, our engineers would volley-fire the entire battery at him. The impact would not just kill him. It would vaporize him so thoroughly the undertakers would not be able to stitch enough meat together to fill a coffin."
Jiang Wan spun around so fast he nearly tripped over his own robes. He stared at the newcomer, temporarily losing the ability to speak.
"General... General Zhenwei?"
It was Liu Zhang.
Jiang Wan clearly remembered the day the former warlord of Yizhou had arrived as a political exile. Back then, Liu Zhang had been a smiling, agreeable man who seemed totally mesmerized by the bustling markets and the wealth of the city. He gave off the exact vibe of a harmless, wealthy tourist.
The man standing before him now was noticeably heavier, having clearly enjoyed Jiangling's luxury food scene. His skin had that pale, pampered look of someone who rarely saw the harsh sun. He looked incredibly soft.
However, this soft aristocrat was currently sporting a dead, terrifyingly calm white complexion. His expensive silk robes were heavily splattered with fresh blood. In his right hand, he loosely gripped a gorgeous, jewel-encrusted ceremonial sword.
In his left hand, dripping a steady rhythm of crimson onto the clean stone walkway, he held the severed head of Zhang Yu by the hair.
Liu Zhang calmly walked up to the frozen chief administrator. He casually lifted his left arm, offering the decapitated head to Jiang Wan like a merchant presenting a slightly bruised melon.
"This arrogant rat gathered a bunch of traitors at his private estate," Liu Zhang explained, his tone completely conversational. "Their grand scheme was to use my political status to force you into a private banquet. Once you arrived, they planned to execute a rather uncreative assassination."
Jiang Wan stared at the dead, glassy eyes of the severed head, his brain struggling to process the absolute absurdity of the situation.
"I sat down and thought about it," Liu Zhang continued, sounding mildly annoyed. "Jiangling is completely locked down. The gates are sealed. There is nowhere for these idiots to run. I decided that dealing with a handful of amateur conspirators was entirely beneath the Chief Administrator's dignity. You have a siege to run. So, I took the initiative and handled the catering myself."
Jiang Wan swallowed the bile rising in his throat. He forced his trembling hands to reach out and accept the severed head. He was a scholar of administration and law. This level of casual butchery was way above his pay grade.
"General," Jiang Wan managed to choke out, checking the man for wounds. "Are you injured?"
Liu Zhang casually wiped the blood from his sword hand onto the inner lining of his expensive coat. He slid the blade back into its fancy scabbard with a sharp click and shook his head.
"Not at all. I simply armed eight of my personal singing girls with repeating crossbows. I had them block the main exits to the dining hall and lay down suppressing fire. While the traitors were pinned down in a panic, Zhou Qun and I drew our swords, walked into the room, and slaughtered them."
He adjusted his collar, looking mildly inconvenienced.
"There are currently seventeen corpses bleeding out onto my favorite imported rugs at the estate. I would greatly appreciate it if you could dispatch a cleanup crew to verify their identities and handle the mess. If we leave them rotting there too long, it will permanently ruin the smell of the courtyard."
Jiang Wan quickly shoved the severed head backward to a horrified guard, aggressively gesturing for the man to run and organize a cleanup crew.
Turning back to the perfectly calm warlord, Jiang Wan offered a deep, genuinely awestruck bow.
"General Zhenwei, your blade is clearly as sharp as it was in your youth. You are truly terrifying."
Liu Zhang let out a short, cynical scoff.
"I am not terrifying. I am just completely out of patience for people trying to manipulate me."
As Liu Zhang turned and began walking casually down the stone steps, clearly looking forward to a bath and a change of clothes, Jiang Wan experienced a sudden, massive paradigm shift. He stared at the retreating back of the wealthy aristocrat.
A chilling thought echoed through Jiang Wan's mind.
Wait a minute. Back in Yizhou, when his entire government collapsed into wildly fractured, chaotic factions that ultimately allowed their Lord to conquer the territory... was this guy playing dumb the entire time? Did he orchestrate that entire political collapse on purpose?
Holy shit