[Lightscreen]
[Liu Rengui and Sun Renshi's "fishing operation" worked far better than expected.
Fearing that Zhouliu City might fall at any moment, the Wa reinforcements came fast—and came hard.
The vanguard was astonishingly brave.
The instant they spotted Tang warships, they charged at full speed.
Then they smashed themselves to pieces.
Corpses and shattered hulls drifted across the river.
The Wa army's morale collapsed on the spot, and they hastily pulled back.
The Tang fleet didn't pursue.
They simply continued sealing off Baijiangkou.
Liu Rengui was perfectly clear-headed.
This battle was nothing more than the simplest tactic in the book:
Surround the point. Strike the reinforcements.
He wasn't worried in the slightest that the Wa wouldn't attack.
After all, the Wa expeditionary force numbered forty thousand.
The Tang forces in Baekje were under twenty thousand total—and with troops split up, fewer than ten thousand ships remained at Baijiangkou.
Numerically, Tang held no advantage.
When the Wa main force arrived the next day, their confidence instantly exploded.
"Numbers?"
"We have forty thousand. Tang doesn't even have ten."
"Warships?"
"We have over a thousand. Tang has only a hundred and seventy."
Wa commanders laughed openly.
"If we charge together, the Tang will flee in terror!"
The advantage is ours!
So they charged again—without the slightest hesitation.
And once again, the charge was cut down cleanly by the Tang fleet, which stood unmoving as a mountain.
Only when the Wa ships paddled close did they realize the truth.
Tang warships were huge.
So huge that ramming them did absolutely nothing.
Worse still, those ships carried weapons the Wa had never even heard of—devices that casually shattered Wa vessels like rotten wood.
Falling into the water didn't help.
Tang ships towered overhead.
Boarding them was impossible.
Once the Wa offensive momentum was broken, the Tang fleet split into two wings.
One hundred and seventy ships swept in from both flanks—
—and surrounded more than a thousand Wa warships instead.
Tang ships formed a complete encirclement, forcing the Wa vessels to bunch together.
Then, from the upwind position, Tang forces calmly began launching fire arrows and incendiary bombs.
The Wa commander, Abe no Hirafu, ground his teeth in fury.
He personally charged the front line, engaging Tang light vessels in boarding combat, hoping to rally morale.
He was cut in half—man and blade—by Tang warriors in a single exchange.
Ships burned.
The commander died.
Wa soldiers panicked, drowning by the countless.
Ships tangled together, crushed against one another, unable to retreat.
They could only watch as flames spread from ship to ship.
Smoke surged into the heavens.
Fire reflected off the waves.
More than four hundred warships turned into fuel for the sea.
In this single battle, the Wa expeditionary army was utterly annihilated.
With their reinforcements erased, the Baekje Restoration Army trapped in Zhouliu City had no options left.
They surrendered.
And with that—
Baekje was erased from history.
"Four victories. Four hundred ships burned. Smoke filled the sky. The sea turned red. The enemy utterly collapsed."
That is all the Old Book of Tang records of this battle.
Twenty-one characters.
Concise. Cold. Efficient.
The traditional style of Chinese historiography.
Just another ordinary, overwhelming victory.
But viewed from a higher vantage—
This battle's significance was immense.
In the short term, it decisively determined who ruled East Asia, cementing the Tang Dynasty as the unquestioned core of the regional order.
In the long term, it violently altered the developmental trajectory of Wa itself—
—and with it, the direction of East Asian history for a thousand years.
Liu Rengui thus became, in the truest historical sense,
the first man to exterminate Wa.]
Zhuge Liang blinked slowly.
Then his eyes lit up.
"Naval warfare is nothing like land battles," he said thoughtfully.
"Numbers matter less than the ships themselves—
no… more precisely, the engineering gap."
He fanned himself, growing more animated as he spoke.
"Consider the giant vessels we used in Jingzhou.
On rivers, a thousand small craft can't even scratch one great ship.
No ballista needed—just sail straight through them."
His thoughts accelerated.
"And if those ship-mounted ballistae were replaced not with bolts…
but with iron shot powered by fire and thunder…"
Zhuge Liang could see it.
One ship.
Just one—
—and Jiangdong's entire navy would vanish.
The future lay open before him, dazzling and real.
His entire body thrummed with excitement.
If, in this lifetime, I can help the later generations carve out a true path in engineering… that alone would be enough.
But to walk that path, mathematics was unavoidable.
And that road would not be easy.
From a purely scholarly standpoint, Zhuge Liang and Liu Ba had discussed this many times.
Their conclusion was grim:
Contemporary mathematics was fragmented—
more technique than discipline, far from becoming a true "Dao."
It was like seeing fruit without knowing the roots.
Whether the Nine Chapters or the Zhoubi, the classics merely described the results—not the foundation.
They were blind men feeling their way backward from the fruit, at best touching the leaves.
Yet judging from later generations' understanding and its subordinate position among sciences, mathematics must have a central "root."
The problem was—
They had no idea how to grasp it.
They weren't alone in this struggle.
Zhang Song had once unearthed bamboo slips from Shu—a lost work called The Book of Calculations, dating back to Emperor Wu's era.
Zhuge Liang and Liu Ba painstakingly transcribed and corrected it, only to realize it derived from the Nine Chapters.
An unnamed author had attempted to unify the "fruits" into a single root.
And failed.
Later, they acquired fragments of Xu Shang's Arithmetic and Du Zhong's Arithmetic.
The same frustration echoed through all of them.
Watching Zhuge Liang sigh repeatedly, Pang Tong grew restless.
He could tell—
Zhuge Liang had advanced again in studying later-generation knowledge.
And Pang Tong could no longer keep up.
His jaw clenched.
So what if it's mathematics?
When they left this time, he'd borrow a full set and read it cover to cover.
He refused to lose the name Fledgling Phoenix.
Ganlu Hall.
Li Shiji felt his heart sink the moment he saw Liu Rengui's record.
My position as Naval Commander…
And sure enough—
Li Shimin's response was swift and brutal.
He clapped Liu Rengui on the shoulder.
"Zhengze, do you wish to try your hand with the navy?"
This routine was one Li Shimin knew well.
In later terms: money in hand, straight into a combo attack.
"Goguryeo harbors wolfish ambitions, repeatedly violating our borders.
Baekje and Silla play both sides—bowing to Tang while secretly colluding with Wa."
He painted the stakes grimly.
"If left unchecked, Goguryeo may swallow both kingdoms.
Once unified, they will hunger for the Central Plains."
"If they seize Baekje's coastline, mere skiffs could strike Hebei and Jiangnan.
Piracy would rise. Our soldiers would exhaust themselves chasing fires."
Liu Rengui's expression darkened.
Suppressing his shock at the future knowledge, he had to admit—
This outcome was frighteningly plausible.
"However!" Li Shimin's tone surged.
"We already train naval forces at Yizhou.
Once complete, they will pacify the seas."
He paused.
"Tang does not lack generals on horseback."
"But we lack a generals on the deck of a warship."
The meaning was unmistakable.
Liu Rengui's blood surged.
He stepped forward immediately.
"Your servant requests command of the naval forces—
to pacify the seas and expand Tang's frontiers!"
After all—
If the light screen was right, his entire life hinged on chance:
exile, near death, one narrow victory.
One misstep and he'd be buried abroad.
Better to seize the helm himself.
Li Shimin nodded, satisfied.
He took Liu Rengui by the hand, smiling.
"Your loyalty is well known to me."
If not for Li Shiji's mournful face nearby, it would have been a perfect scene of ruler and minister in harmony.
[Lightscreen]
[In hindsight, Tang's dominance over surrounding states stemmed largely from technological gaps.
Mingguang armor. Tang sabers.
Naval engineering was no different.
Excavated Tang shipwrecks show vessels nearly twenty meters long, five to six meters wide, all with watertight compartments.
Even if a Wa ship rammed them to destruction, it could breach at most one or two compartments—posing no real threat.
And then there was firepower.
At the pinnacle stood Tang's greatest naval creation:
The Five-Tooth Tower Ship.]