Sun Quan had been getting regular, juicy updates from Lu Meng. As far as the Lord of Jiangdong was concerned, the war in Jingzhou was going swimmingly.
Lu Meng and Lu Xun's grand masterplan: draw a hard line at the Yangtze, split the world in half, build a paradise. And it was actually happening. Step by step.
Sure, Jiangling was being a stubborn, annoying little nut to crack. And for the love of the gods, how did Guan Yu get so paranoid? That man built defenses like he was preparing for the end of the world. But whatever. Once the surrounding territories were fully digested, Jiangdong would have enough resources to starve them out.
If Jiangling could hold out for a month, fine. But six months? A year? Who were they kidding?
The calculation was simple. The moment those walls fell, the river border would be set in stone. From that day on, the Sun clan could rest easy, free from the threat of northern invasion.
Drunk on his own brilliance before the wine was even poured, Sun Quan let his ego swell past the point of no return. To celebrate the coming victory, he hosted a grand banquet. Heavy bronze goblets were filled to the brim, and all his relatives, generals, and political allies were invited to drink his expensive wine.
Incense smoke curled lazily into the air. The potent alcohol painted a rosy, happy flush on the cheeks of the most powerful men in the capital.
Then the mood shattered.
A palace eunuch practically sprinted into the hall, tripping over his own robes. He rushed to Sun Quan, leaned in, and whispered two short sentences.
Those words struck like a thunderclap. The warm, fuzzy buzz of victory evaporated instantly.
"Impossible!" Sun Quan blurted out.
He caught himself a split second later, snapping his mouth shut. He waved a dismissive hand at his confused guests, signaling them to keep drinking, and turned on his heel, marching straight into the private back hall.
Most of the guests assumed their lord had stepped away on some trivial matter and returned to their wine.
Lu Xun, however, quietly slipped away from the crowd and followed.
When he stepped into the dim back hall, he found Sun Quan standing alone. The Lord of Jiangdong had already pulled a heavy, unadorned sword down from its mount on the wall.
Lu Xun recognized it instantly. This wasn't some magical relic forged by gods. It was a practical, ugly killing tool. But it had belonged to the "Tiger of Jiangdong," General Sun Jian. It had witnessed the bloody rise of the Sun clan.
The sword had hung on that wall since they took Jiangxia years ago. Sun Quan hadn't even touched it during the disaster at Hefei last year. But today? He was holding it.
"The eunuch reports a fully armed naval fleet is barreling down the river," Sun Quan said, his voice terrifyingly flat. "They're flying Liu Bei and Guan Yu's banners. And the scout claims the vanguard ship is massive. Like a royal treasure warship."
A "treasure ship" was Sun Quan's personal flagship class. Floating fortresses. Stupidly expensive. Usually too slow and bulky for actual combat, so Sun Quan mostly used his as a luxury yacht.
He couldn't fathom how Liu Bei's forces got their hands on one, let alone why they'd bring a floating palace to a fistfight.
A flicker of genuine shock crossed Lu Xun's face, then vanished, replaced by the flat certainty of a man who already had the answer.
"Something catastrophic happened at the Jiangxia blockade," Lu Xun deduced rapidly. "They bypassed the checkpoint. They're launching a suicide decapitation strike on Jianye to force us to pull back from Jingnan."
Sun Quan nodded grimly. He walked over to his armor stand and started strapping on his combat plates. Lu Xun stepped forward to help with the buckles.
As they worked, Sun Quan started talking, his voice regaining its sharp, cold edge.
"Your assessment is spot on, Boyan. For them to get here without anyone noticing, they must have avoided Lu Meng entirely." Sun Quan pulled a heavy pauldron over his shoulder. "They want to use the shock of a surprise attack to cause panic. They want to throw Lu Meng's camp into chaos."
Something cold and final settled behind Sun Quan's gaze. He made his choice.
"Boyan, draft a decree. My personal seal. Send your fastest rider. Tell him to avoid the river. Take the mountain trails through Baidu Mountain to bypass the enemy fleet."
Lu Xun grabbed a fresh bamboo slip and started grinding ink. He looked up, waiting for the order.
"Order Lu Meng to accelerate the siege," Sun Quan commanded, a cold sneer twisting his lips. "Tell him he is forbidden from caring about the fate of Jianye."
The enemy's tactic was obvious. Sun Quan saw the bold strike for what it was: a cornered animal lashing out with its dying breath.
The more desperate they became, the more convinced Sun Quan was that victory in Jingzhou already belonged to Jiangdong.
Sun Quan was only in his early thirties. He was proud, ambitious, and had a temper. The humiliation at Hefei still stung. Did the world really think he was a spineless incompetent? Did every ambitious fool think they could yank the tiger's whiskers without losing an arm?
Lu Xun paused, his brush hovering. He looked stunned for a second, but kept his mouth shut. He wrote the harsh orders, stamped the heavy jade seal into red paste, and hurried out to find a rider.
Fully armored and radiating murder, Sun Quan marched back into the banquet hall.
The heavy clank-clank of his iron boots finally pierced the drunken stupor of the guests. The sharper minds in the room smelled the metallic scent of a crisis.
One particularly oblivious young noble thought this was a theatrical joke. Assuming Lord Sun was introducing a fun new martial arts game for the party, the young man sauntered over, holding a sloshing cup of wine and wearing a goofy grin, ready to offer a witty toast.
Sun Quan didn't say a word. He simply raised his armored boot and kicked the young man squarely in the chest.
The noble went flying backward, crashing onto the polished floorboards in a tangle of limbs and spilled wine.
The music stopped. The laughter died. The banquet finally woke up.
"An enemy naval force is at our gates," Sun Quan announced, his voice echoing in the dead silence. "They mean to threaten this capital and bleed our frontline armies into a panicked retreat."
As he spoke, Sun Quan slowly drew his father's sword.
It wasn't a well-maintained ceremonial weapon. The blade scraped against the rusted wood of the scabbard, producing a harsh, screeching rasp that made everyone's skin crawl. The terrible noise forced the gathered young talents to hold their breath in terror.
"I believe the outcome of this battle will dictate the survival or destruction of Jiangdong," Sun Quan declared coldly. "Therefore, the army in Jingnan will not take a single step backward!"
A few nobles with survival instincts immediately started nodding frantically. It was unclear if they agreed with the speech, the scary sword, or the ring of heavily armed palace guards that had silently surrounded the hall while they were drinking.
Sun Quan pointed the sword tip at the floor. His voice was slow, lacking panic, layered with terrifying resolve.
"Jianye is in mortal peril. It is our duty to defend this city."
He locked eyes with the terrified aristocrats. "I humbly request that you gentlemen ascend the city walls with me. Today, we shall all share the life and death of Jianye together."
Lu Xun returned just in time to witness this masterful display of political theater.
He understood exactly what was happening. Sun Quan was forcing the powerful local families to physically stand on the front lines. He was preventing these wealthy elites from concocting treacherous schemes or secretly negotiating surrender behind his back.
Lu Xun found these heavy-handed tactics distasteful, but he kept his mouth shut. He simply walked over and stood behind his lord.
The mobilization was efficient. Several brilliant young talents found their legs turning to jelly, their courage dissolved by alcohol. But with the helpful physical assistance of the palace guards, they were dragged up the stone stairs and planted onto the battlements, swearing tearful oaths to live or die with the capital.
At the front of the defense line, Sun Quan kept low behind the thickest section of the stone parapet. He stared out at the warships advancing toward the city.
His eyes locked onto the obscenely oversized silver bell and the garish brocade sail on the vanguard ship. He was boiling with volcanic anger. His face, somehow, went perfectly still.
Out on the water, Gan Gui's fleet systematically approached the docks. One by one, the massive ships rotated, presenting their broadsides to the city walls.
The sight made the eyes of the Jiangdong elites bulge.
Living in a naval superpower, these young lords knew warships. But they had never seen anyone insane enough to bolt massive, heavy-siege bed-crossbows onto the deck of a rolling ship.
The aristocrats whispered in confusion. How were these giant artillery pieces supposed to defend against agile boarding skiffs? They seemed useless for naval combat.
Their confusion was answered a few moments later.
Gan Gui casually waved his hand.
Twang. Twang. Twang.
A horrifying vibration tore through the air. Every person on the ramparts felt the massive stone wall beneath their boots tremble.
A thinner section of the parapet was instantly obliterated, blasted into a cloud of lethal stone shrapnel. Several bolts, each the thickness of a man's arm, punched halfway through solid masonry, their feathered tails vibrating furiously.
A handful of bolts sailed over the outer wall and slammed into the gatehouse tower. A decorative roof eave detonated in a shower of shattered tiles, leaving gaping holes in the structure.
The concussive power was mind-numbing. The proud, wealthy talents of Jiangdong instantly forgot their dignity. Without waiting for orders, they uniformly threw themselves flat onto the stone floor, pressing their faces into the dirt. They desperately wished they could grab a shovel and dig a hole into the stone and bury themselves whole.
From a distance, the proud elites of Jiangdong looked less like noble lords and more like a field of radishes trying to bury themselves deeper into the soil.
From his vantage point on the ship, Gan Gui was throwing a tantrum.
"WE ARE STANDING IN THE ABSOLUTE CENTER OF JIANGDONG TERRITORY!" Gan Gui complained loudly to his crew, waving his arms like a frustrated merchant. "Why in the seven hells did Lord Sun build his walls this thick? Who is he trying to keep out down here?! The bloody barbarians? The gods themselves?!"
He kicked the railing in frustration. "I've seen thinner walls on my grandmother's pantry!"
Old Man Liu, the one-eyed navigator, squinted at the wall with his good eye and spat over the side. "Young master, those walls have been standing since the Qin dynasty. They ain't coming down easy."
"Then we'll just have to hit them harder!" Big Nose Zhang bellowed, cracking his knuckles. "My axe is getting lonely!"
A'Shan, the young carpenter, was already adjusting the aim of the nearest ballista. "Boss, should I switch to the heavier bolts?"
"NO!" Gan Gui snapped. "Keep firing those harpoons! I want that gate!" He turned to A'Hei, the young scribe who was clutching a bamboo slip and looking terrified. "You! Write this down! 'Day one of the siege of Jianye. The enemy is hiding behind walls like frightened children. Their morale is low. Their fashion sense is worse.'"
A'Hei blinked. "Sir, do I really need to write about their fashion sense?"
"EVERYTHING!" Gan Gui roared. "I want a complete record! For history! For posterity! For my father to read and weep with pride!"
Annoyed but undeterred, Gan Gui adjusted his tactics. He ordered a rolling barrage, ensuring a continuous wave of suppressing fire aimed directly at the upper battlements.
General Guan Yu's tactical manual said to batter the walls until the defenders' psychological will broke, then send in infantry. Gan Gui respected General Guan, but he knew this patient strategy didn't suit his chaotic personality.
Gan Gui adopted a simpler objective: just blow the walls up. Erase the cover so the defenders had nowhere to hide.
Hitting a specific target with a siege weapon on a bobbing ship was hard. But brute force and volume eventually compensate for a lack of precision. After an entire afternoon of relentless bombardment, the majority of the defensive parapets were reduced to piles of crushed gravel.
The elites of Jiangdong spent the entire afternoon planted face-down, frantically crawling on their bellies to get away from the edge.
Sun Quan, on the other hand, displayed the terrifying composure of a true warlord. He spent the entire afternoon crouched motionless behind a half-collapsed wall, eyes narrowed, studying the enemy fleet.
The first piece of intelligence he gathered: the rules of naval warfare had completely changed.
These heavy bolts might struggle to sink an armored transport, but they would inflict instant death on any light assault skiff.
Furthermore, as the owner of a gargantuan flagship himself, Sun Quan understood the crushing physical advantage a dreadnought held in close-quarters ramming. The only weakness of these floating fortresses was their pathetic speed. Yet, this fleet was moving with terrifying velocity. They had eliminated the ship's only fatal flaw.
And then there was the silence.
Aside from the initial barrage, the massive flagship in the center had done nothing. It just sat there, ominously quiet. This unnatural patience unsettled Sun Quan more than the bombardment. They were preparing something horrific.
As the sun dipped below the horizon, Sun Quan accepted some dried rations from Lu Xun.
Before he could raise the food to his mouth, he saw it. The behemoth was moving.
Gan Gui barked orders, orchestrating the rotation of the massive ship. He turned the vessel sideways, presenting the bow toward the capital, and commanded the crew to creep forward inch by inch.
They stopped when a diver signaled that the keel was dangerously close to scraping the riverbed. The bow was now less than three hundred paces from the city wall.
Sitting on the front deck was the brand-new toy installed for this expedition.
It was still a heavy ballista, but it looked radically different. It was heavily reinforced with complex iron gears, and the wooden frame was drastically altered to support immense tension.
These upgrades were necessary to accommodate the custom ammunition in the groove.
It was a massively heavy, solid iron spear. The front was forged into a cluster of vicious, backward-facing hooks that gleamed in the moonlight. The tail end was spliced to an incredibly thick, heavy-duty braided rope.
Under sharp commands, the modified ballista was rotated and locked. They aimed the mechanical beast directly at the reinforced timber of the Jianye city gates.
Three hundred paces was point-blank range. But because the iron ammunition was an untested prototype, and the heavy rope altered the flight physics, the gunners missed their first two shots.
Nobody breathed. The only sound was the creak of rope and the distant lap of water against the hull.
A'Shan wiped sweat from his forehead. "Boss, the rope's catching on the..."
"I DON'T CARE!" Gan Gui yelled. "SHOOT IT AGAIN!"
Finally, on the third attempt, they pulled the release lever.
THWACK.
A crisp, deeply satisfying sound of heavy metal biting into solid oak echoed across the water.
Gan Gui threw his head back and laughed maniacally. "HAH! WE GOT THE BASTARD!"
He didn't need to issue the next order. The deck crew dropped the rear anchors, locking the warship in place. Deep in the hull, Zhao A and the engineering crew threw their body weight into the paddlewheel treadmills.
The massive wooden capstan at the rear began to turn in reverse. The gears engaged, catching the thick rope. The rope ran through a heavy iron pulley, across the deck, through the ballista, and stretched all the way to the city gates.
The giant wooden axle groaned. The heavy rope snapped taut, shedding water into the air.
Down below, the tightly sealed city gates began to emit a horrifying, high-pitched screech of tortured wood.
Gan Gui slapped his thigh in delight. "LISTEN TO THAT! THE BASTARDS ARE SQUIRMING!"
Big Nose Zhang was already sharpening his axe. "When that gate comes down, I'm going first!"
"Like hell you are!" Lao Zheng growled, shoving him aside. "I've been waiting twenty years to kick Sun Quan's door down!"
This bizarre contraption had originally been designed to harpoon an escaping enemy ship, drag the vessels together, and force a boarding action. Using it to rip a castle door off its hinges was a spur-of-the-moment idea Gan Gui had on the trip down.
Seeing it function flawlessly was highly amusing.
The visual of a massive ship physically yanking the city gate outward caused cold sweat to pour down Sun Quan's forehead.
The horrific memories of Hefei came rushing back.
As a survivor of that massacre, Sun Quan understood exactly how he had been crushed. If you studied Sunzi or the Six Secret Teachings, the tactical reasons for Hefei were clear. But this? This defied every manual. The city gate was being ripped apart.
For a brief second, Sun Quan felt regret. If he had swallowed his pride after Hefei and engaged in diplomacy with Liu Bei, perhaps Sun Wu could have acquired these technologies.
Sun Quan noted the harpoon system wasn't designed for sieges. After a few moments of pressure, the iron hooks tore through the wood and dislodged.
But since Jianye was in passive defense, it didn't matter. The crew simply reversed the capstan, reeled the bolt back, loaded it, and fired it right back into the weakened timber.
Sun Quan felt an overwhelming urge to scream profanities at the sky. He swallowed his rage. He cast one final look of utter disgust at the field of aristocratic asses currently sticking up into the air along the ruined wall, shook his head, and turned to walk down the stairs.
The destruction of the gate was a mathematical certainty now. He needed to get to ground level and hold the line.
Seeing their lord leave the wall felt like a holy pardon to the terrified elites. A chaotic stampede broke out as the wealthy talents scrambled to escape. In their panic, a few even bumped into Sun Quan, nearly knocking the warlord over.
Sun Quan couldn't be bothered to punish them. A deafening crash echoed from the ground floor, followed by panicked screaming. The gate had finally given way.
---
By the time Sun Quan reached the courtyard, the chaos near the shattered entrance had stabilized under his elite guard. Looking through the ruined timber, Sun Quan locked eyes with the commander of the invading fleet.
He is absurdly young, Sun Quan thought. For a fleeting second, his instinct to recruit talent sparked. But then he saw the heavily scarred veteran bodyguards flanking the boy, and a strange sense of familiarity washed over him.
Before Sun Quan could place the faces, Gan Gui stepped forward, leaned on his weapon like a man leaning on a bar counter, and offered a highly polite, incredibly arrogant suggestion.
"Lord Sun," Gan Gui said, his voice dripping with theatrical courtesy, "would you care to surrender? I promise we'll be gentle. Mostly."
Sun Quan was engulfed in fury. He leveled his heavy sword at Gan Gui's face.
"No Sun has ever knelt. We die standing, or we don't die at all!"
Gan Gui's face immediately dropped, displaying clear disappointment. He quickly masked it and casually pivoted, as if changing the subject at a dinner party.
"Say, Lord Sun," he said, scratching his chin thoughtfully, "why don't I see General Gan Ning standing anywhere in your ranks? I was rather hoping for a family reunion. He owes me money."
Hearing that name, and recalling the obnoxious silver bell and gaudy sail, the puzzle pieces clicked in Sun Quan's mind.
"You are Gan Ning's son? Gan Gui?"
Gan Gui didn't find this surprising.
His father had never been part of Sun Quan's inner circle. It was natural Sun Quan paid little attention to him. Honestly, the fact that Lord Sun remembered his first name was a pleasant surprise.
Seeing Gan Gui nod, Sun Quan was so angry he actually started laughing.
"Gan Xingba commits treason and secretly defects to the enemy, and you have the audacity to ask me where he is?"
Gan Gui blinked, turning to look at his bodyguards in stunned silence. A second later, the old pirates erupted into uproarious cheering.
"THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT WE EXPECTED FROM THE OLD BOSS!" Lao Zheng shouted gleefully, slapping his knee.
"THE OLD MAN'S STILL GOT IT!" Big Nose Zhang howled, swinging his axe in a victory arc.
Gan Gui's face broke into a massive grin. The confirmation dissolved the heavy knot of anxiety in his chest. He had spent the whole voyage talking tough, but deep down, he was terrified Sun Quan might drag his father out as a hostage.
With his primary concern eliminated, Gan Gui looked past Sun Quan. His eyes scanned the pathetic, shivering mass of Jiangdong elites cowering in the courtyard.
Once upon a time, Gan Gui had craved a seat among those wealthy talents. Looking at them now, covered in dirt and weeping, he found the concept hilarious.
He shook his head slowly, a smirk playing on his lips.
"Lord Sun, consider this little bombardment today a polite greeting. A thank you, if you will, for the past hospitality you showed my father." He paused, letting the words hang in the air. "I will return tomorrow to commence the actual siege. Do try to have a nice evening. Maybe polish your sword. Write a will. Whatever takes your fancy."
Sun Quan stood frozen, gripping his father's sword, silently watching Gan Gui withdraw. The silence after the boy's departure felt heavier than the siege itself.
---
Even though Gan Gui promised to attack tomorrow, the exhausted defenders couldn't drop their guard. The city remained on high alert through the dark hours.
But when Lu Xun knocked on his bedroom door early the next morning, he wasn't carrying reports of a naval assault.
Lu Xun looked utterly exhausted, clutching a desperate military dispatch.
"My Lord, urgent crisis report from Wu Commandery! The Shanyue tribes have launched a massive, coordinated rebellion. They have completely overrun Yangxian, and their main army is currently laying siege to Piling!"