"I... I secured an imperial title for Sun Quan?"
Kongming was genuinely stumped. He could fathom many things, but how on earth did this lord's Sun Shinwan ascension to the throne have anything to do with his own military maneuvers?
"As expected of the Military Advisor!" Zhang Fei shouted, flashing a big thumbs-up, a gesture of praise he had picked up from the Light Screen and now used with reckless abandon.
Kongming offered a pained smile, his eyes fixed on the screen, desperate to understand the mechanics of this historical absurdity.
[Lightscreen]
[Among all the Prime Minister's Northern Expeditions, the second one is undoubtedly the most bizarre.
In the spring of 228, the first campaign collapsed at Jieting, forcing a retreat to Hanzhong.
Yet, by December of that same year, the Prime Minister was back, knocking on the gates of Chencang. He spent a month playing a lethal game of 'siege warfare' with Hao Zhao and then just... went home.
This second expedition is a masterpiece of the surreal. First, the timing was all wrong. December is the dead of winter, a time historically considered suicidal for a military campaign.
In the ancient world, The cold alone was a killer. Soldiers got lost in the snow and froze to death before they could find their way back to camp.
Frostbite claimed fingers and toes and noses with indifferent cruelty.
Supply lines became treacherous and unreliable as mountain passes filled with ice and snow, Soldiers eat more in the cold just to survive; charcoal and winter furs are massive overhead costs.
Even if he had taken Chencang, what then? To the west of Chencang lay the Longyou Road leading into the Longyou region, but that road terminated at Shanggui, where Guo Huai was waiting at Shanggui with his garrison intact and his defenses fully prepared.
To the east? Three hundred miles of the Guanzhong Plain, open ground where Cao Wei's heavy cavalry could trample the Prime Minister's infantry into the mud with ease.
Cao Zhen, after stabilizing Longyou, had made a logical assessment: 'They failed at Mount Qi, the Shu Han forces would not attempt the same approach again.
They burned the plank roads, meant that the road to Xie Valley is blocked. If they attack Guanzhong, they must take Chencang. Who can hold Chencang? Only Hao Zhao.'
Cao Zhen's logic was flawless, but even he didn't expect the Prime Minister to attack in the middle of a literal ice storm.
Secondly, the attitude of the siege was... polite.
Usually, an unexpected winter strike relies on a lightning-fast assault. Instead, the Prime Minister sent Hao Zhao's old friend, Jin Xiang, to try and talk him into surrendering, he did this not once, but twice. He gave the startled Hao Zhao plenty of time to finish his breakfast and fortify every single brick.
Then, the two sides settled into a rhythmic display of military engineering: You push a cloud ladder, I release fire arrows.
You drive a battering ram, I drop giant grindstones.
You build a siege tower, I build an inner wall.
You dig a tunnel, I dig a counter-tunnel. It was a spectacular, high-stakes sandbox game.
But the sheer noise of it terrified the young Emperor Cao Rui.
He panicked, summoning Zhang He, the hero of the last campaign, showering his army with wine, meat, and rewards, and ordering him to save Chencang.
Zhang He, however, remained perfectly calm. He took one look at the situation and made a bold prediction: 'I'll bet my salary the Zhuge Villager is out of food. He'll be gone before I even get there.'
Sure enough, while Zhang He was still on the road, the Prime Minister retreated.
He even had enough time and composure during the retreat to turn around and kill Zhang He's vanguard general, a man named Wang Shuang, in a sharp and bloody ambush.]
"It is indeed strange," Guan Yu mused, stroking his magnificent beard. As a man from the north, he knew the bite of winter all too well. In such weather, a general is considered successful if his men don't mutiny out of misery, let alone conduct a siege.
"Unless... this expedition was never about the battlefield," Guan Yu whispered to himself. If the goal wasn't territorial gain, the strangeness vanished.
"A response to the East?" It was the only logical conclusion.
Guan Yu continued his analysis.
"If Zhang He was summoned as a reserve, it means he wasn't in Guanzhong. But he was close enough to Luoyang... was he stationed at Xiangyang or Fancheng?"
"Yunchang's insight is sharp," Kongming praised. "That must be it. A grand display of force to relieve the pressure on Eastern Wu."
Zhang Fei didn't care about this "brother-in-law's" problems. He just leaned over and gripped Ma Su's chin, forcing the young man to look up.
"Look closely, Youchang! This is how you hold a position! Learn something!"
Ma Su didn't dare make a sound; he just nodded, his eyes wide with the reflection of the screen.
"What exquisite cloud ladders!" Huang Yueying whispered in awe. As a woman obsessed with mechanics, she saw the beauty in the design. These weren't the crude, hacked-together ladders the current army used. These were foldable, shielded, and equipped with top-mounted grappling hooks.
"The things my husband creates... they are truly beyond this era," she murmured.
Kongming looked a bit sheepish. Did I really build that?
It wasn't a lack of confidence, but the siege towers and rams on the screen were leagues ahead of anything currently in their arsenal. With the roads in Hanzhong being what they were, how did they even transport those behemoths?
But he didn't hesitate for long; he started sketching. Whatever they were, he'd learn to build them now.
As for the defenders using oil-soaked rags on arrows, that didn't surprise him. After developing the Eight-Ox Crossbow last year, he'd already designed a "Fire Bolt", hollowed out and filled with tung oil, with a charcoal plug that ignited upon impact.
And old Huang Zhong loved them.
[Lightscreen]
[To understand why the Prime Minister fought such a weird campaign at Chencang, we have to look at one of the great mysteries of the Three Kingdoms: Is the 'Second Memorial on the Expedition' a forgery?
The First Memorial on the Expedition was a masterpiece, the kind of text students are still 'required to memorize in full' centuries later.
But the Second Memorial on the Expedition? To put it nicely, it's heroically tragic. To put it bluntly, it's full of 'negative energy.'
Written only a year after the first, you'd think the Prime Minister had suffered a total annihilation like the defeat at Yiling. But as we've seen, after he executed Ma Su and returned, the elites of Shu thought it was a victory! People were mobbing his house to congratulate him, forcing him to write 'To Those Who Congratulate Me.'
In this reality, Liu Shan thought his 'Father-Minister' had done his best. The people thought he was a genius. The soldiers blamed the failure on that 'noob' Ma Su. Everyone was ready for round two.]
Ma Su lowered his head so far he nearly touched his knees, wishing he could plug his ears.
But Zhang Fei's hand was a vice on his chin.
"My big brother said it, Youchang: know your weakness to find your strength. Don't look away."
[Lightscreen]
[The truth is, if the Prime Minister had been the sort of man who collapsed into despair at the first serious setback, there would never have been a sixth campaign. There would never have been that final, fateful autumn at Wuzhang Plains when a star fell and an era ended.
Furthermore, this second memorial isn't found in the official Shu histories; it was preserved in an Sun Wu collection, which is highly suspicious. But what if it was written for Sun Wu?
In 224, before the alliance was fully restored, Sun Quan's envoy Zhang Wen visited Chengdu. He spoke of 'harmonizing hearts and plans like the flowing river,' making it clear that coordinated strikes were the bargaining chip. So, in early 228, the Prime Minister's plan looked like this:
In the West: Kongming strikes Mount Qi.
In the Center: Meng Da revolts in Jingzhou.
In the East: Sun Wu crosses the Yangtze as a threat.
A three-pronged strike. How could Cao Wei possibly cover all three?]
"But the gears jammed," Guan Yu lamented.
"If this plan had worked, Zhang He would have been pinned down in Jingzhou. Even if Cao Zhen sent reinforcements to Guanzhong, he wouldn't have had enough men. The Military Advisor would have had all the time in the world to take Shanggui. Perhaps..."
He didn't finish the sentence, but everyone knew what he meant.
A heavy sigh filled the hall.
Kongming felt a sting of memory, Pang Tong's earlier barb: "You just think the restoration of the Han is more important than the alliance!"
Had he truly been too lenient with the East?
He didn't care if the Second Memorial was "real" or "fake."
He was Zhuge Liang; the truth of the text was whatever he decided it would be.
He sighed because he couldn't understand how such a perfect plan, a "win-win" for both sides, could fall apart.
As Guan Yu said, Wu didn't even have to fight; they just had to park their army on the north bank of the Yangtze and look scary.
Why was that so hard?
[Lightscreen]
[As everyone knows, the King of Wei's Wu has three great hobbies: backstabbing, submitting to masters, and declaring himself Emperor.
Sun Quan was never content to be a supporting character. Remember the retreat from Xiaoyao Ford? He just had to play the hero and stay at the rear, which is how he nearly got captured by Zhang Liao.
Faced with the Prime Minister's Northern Expedition, Sun Quan, now forty-six years old, saw his chance.
After Yiling, he hadn't dared call himself Emperor because that 'madman' Liu Bei was still alive. But now? Zhuge Liang was a man of reason, and Cao Rui was just a green kid on the throne. If not now, when?
But an Emperor needs a victory to brag about. Luckily, Zhuge Liang had sent word of the Northern Expedition. The 'Great King' decided to go big; he wanted to be the lead actor! He sent a secret letter to Zhou Fang, telling him to find some local tribesmen to fake a surrender to Cao Wei and lure them into a trap.
Zhou Fang thought, 'Tribesmen aren't reliable. I'll do it myself!'
He sent letter after letter to the Wei general Cao Xiu, praising him to the skies while cursing Sun Quan.
To sell the act, Zhou Fang and Sun Quan staged a public falling out; Zhou Fang even cut off his own hair and knelt at the envoy's door to beg for forgiveness.
Cao Xiu fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. He marched his army straight into the trap to claim his 'merit.'
The Three Kingdoms never lacked for smart people. Advisors like Man Chong and Jiang Ji saw the trap, but Cao Xiu wouldn't listen.
And it wasn't just because Cao Xiu was 'dumb.' It was because the Wei commanders were thinking exactly like Sun Quan: 'Why shouldn't I be the lead actor?']
"These digital maps... I cannot get over how useful they are!" Guan Yu praised. Since he had been training the naval forces lately, he spotted the flaw in Cao Xiu's advance immediately.
"Marching like this? A great lake to the north, the Yangtze to his flank, and no navy to speak of! If the Wu fleet comes out in force, Cao Xiu is a dead man."
Zhang Fei added gloomily, "My decoy plan worked on the Cao dogs once, and they never fell for it again. But this 'biting the hook' trick from the East? Why does it work every single time?"
Kongming was tracing the power dynamics.
"The Light Screen doesn't call him 'Cao Xiu,' it calls him the 'Wei Commander'... was it a coordinated strike on their side too?"
"It must have been the Xiangyang garrison!" Huang Zhong concluded. "If the armies of Xiangyang and Hefei had moved together, then even if Cao Xiu was ambushed, he wouldn't have taken such losses."
The logic was simple: if Xiangyang didn't move, the Wu troops meant to guard that front could all be diverted to surround Cao Xiu.
Liu Bei, putting himself in the shoes of the young Cao Rui, felt a sudden wave of exhaustion.
"No wonder the Light Screen said that if Kongming didn't attack, Cao Wei might have collapsed from within. Xiangyang and Hefei, they should be one shield, yet they plot against each other for glory? They serve the same throne, yet they act like the alliance between Wu and Han."
Zhang Fei slapped Huang Zhong's leg again and laughed. "Let them, brother! Let them fight! Whoever wins or loses, it's a victory for us!"