[Lightscreen]
[After the chaos of Meng Da's failed rebellion, Sima Yi sent a memorial to the Emperor.
His logic aligned perfectly with the Prime Minister's: Let the Hefei garrison march out and serve as bait to draw the attention of the Wu, while Sima Yi himself secretly built a fleet in Xiangyang to strike Xiakou and the Dongguan. It was a solid plan for a total victory.
Emperor Cao Rui loved it.
But Cao Xiu, the boss of the Hefei Military Region, basically said, "Screw you!"
Both of us are Ministers of the Regency, so why the hell should I play support for you?
Why shouldn't your Xiangyang forces draw the attention while my Hefei army drives a spear straight into the heart of Jiangdong?
Faced with this ego clash, Sima Yi simply hunkered down and did nothing. The Battle of Shiting, triggered by Zhou Fang's fake surrender, started in August.
Sima Yi watched the show from the sidelines, only half-heartedly mobilizing his troops in late October.
Then, after marching a few miles, he cancelled the whole thing. His excuse to Cao Rui was that the water was too shallow in winter for ships.
Cao Rui probably wanted to spit blood: if the water was too shallow in winter, what were you doing in August? But since Sima Yi was a pillar of the state, the Emperor could only let it go.
Cao Xiu's side was much simpler. Halfway there, he realized he'd been played, the whole thing had been a lie from the very beginning. Zhou Fang had played him completely.
Consumed by rage, he refused to turn back. He would crush these Jiangdong scammer and make them pay for their deception..
But the results were disastrous. Because he had moved on a whim based on Zhou Fang's lie, he had not marched with his full army, his troop numbers were too low. His supply lines were stretched thin
Sun Wu, on the other hand, had gathered ninety thousand combat-ready troops with overflowing granaries.
Lu Xun was in command, and Sun Quan himself had personally driven the carriage to send him off in style. This was a public gesture that sent a clear message. This man speaks with my voice. Follow him as you would follow me.
After a brief stalemate, the Wei forces began to buckle. Lu Xun executed a beautiful night raid that sent the Cao army into a panicked rout.
Much like his night raid at Yiling, Lu Xun pursued relentlessly, claiming ten thousand heads, ten thousand chariots, and the entirety of the enemy's baggage train.
If Jia Kui hadn't arrived to save him, Cao Xiu might have been buried at Shiting. For Jiangdong, this was an undeniable victory.
Lu Xun, being a competent commander, wanted to exploit this momentum. Before the battle, he had already planned a five pronged northern offensive. One force would push into the Huai River region. A second would strike at Hefei. A third would threaten Xiangyang. A fourth under Lu Xun himself would move against Mei Fu.
And the fifth prong? That one required the Prime Minister to march into Guanzhong and draw Wei's attention westward.
Looking at the timeline, Shiting began in August and ended in September. News from Jiangdong reached Shu-Han by November because it had to travel upstream. This was likely the exact moment the Prime Minister wrote the Later Memorial of Expeditions.
The entire text is essentially one long complaint. He writes about how scarce talent is, how bankrupt the state is, how much the local clans oppose him, and the sheer weight of the pressure he's under. This memorial to Liu Shan was, in essence, a political statement to Sun Quan: "Look, Sun Shinwan-ge, please stop your scheming. We are allies, not your subordinates in some backwater province."
This is the only way to explain why the Later Memorial sounds so different from the First Memorial.
The Later Memorial was not just Zhuge Liang the strategist speaking. It was Zhuge Liang the politician, sending a very clear message wrapped in the formal language of a court document.]
"Ahh, Kongming..." Liu Bei wanted to say something, but he realized that no words could equal even a fraction of Kongming's toil.
He simply patted Kongming's hand to offer some comfort.
The mess he had left behind was truly forcing Kongming to exhaust his very soul.
He had to raise money, fight wars, farm the land, train the youth, and babysit the allies.
And when he finally thought he'd found a protégé like Ma Su to lighten the load, the boy turned out to be all talk.
As for Sun Quan's eventual declaration of emperorship, Liu Bei found he did not really care anymore.
The attitude of future generations had made it clear: the title of Emperor meant nothing next to the legendary nickname "Sun Shinwan-ge."
Guan Yu, however, was deep in thought as he analyzed the Battle of Shiting.
There was professional respect in his eyes, but also a hint of pity.
"Lu Xun is truly a commander worthy of succeeding Zhou Gongjin. But it is a tragedy that the men of Jiangdong remain trapped in their own narrow-mindedness."
Zhang Fei was getting restless.
"But this Lu Xun... we still haven't found a trace of him! His fame in the Light Screen doesn't even start for another eight years. He can't still be a student, can he?"
"What's so hard about that?!" Huang Zhong shouted, slapping Zhang Fei's leg with enough force to make him wince.
"General Zhang should take eight hundred of his personal guards, march straight into Jiangdong, round up every male member of the Lu clan, and interrogate them one by one! Simple!"
Zhang Fei bared his teeth, ready to fire back, until he saw his brother looking over.
He subsided with a grumble. "Old General Huang, what kind of talk is that? I'm not an idiot..."
Invading the Sun Wu was obviously out of the question.
Mi Zhu looked hopeful for a second, then slumped.
If it were a minor clan, they could buy the information from a branch member, but the Lu clan was tight-knit and powerful.
It was a dead end.
Jian Yong sighed. "Kongming is a gentleman. The Marquis of Sun... is decidedly not."
Everyone frowned.
Their mindset, ever since Zhou Gongjin broke Cao Cao at Red Cliffs, had been that the Jiangdong was a necessary partner in the fight against the Cao Wei.
But looking at everything from Xiangyang to Shiting, had Sun Quan not simply exploited that mindset to demand whatever he wanted from the Shu Han?
Zhang Fei could not help himself. " After Yiling, Lu Xun urged Sun Shinwan-ge to declare himself emperor. Shinwan-ge refused. But was that refusal genuine? Or was he just keeping that King Wu title as a backup plan in case his bigger ambitions failed?"
Guan Yu was the first to take a stand."Brother, we must do as Gan Xingba said. We must be prepared for a war with Sun Wu at any moment."
Liu Bei nodded solemnly.
[Lightscreen]
[Despite his reluctance, the Prime Minister marched. And he handled the job with his trademark precision. The key moment of this 'weird' campaign at Chencang was the death of Wang Shuang.
Wang Shuang is actually a fascinating character.
He first appeared in 222, when Cao Pi was throwing a tantrum after Yiling and launched a three-pronged invasion of Wu.
Cao Ren attacked Ruxukou, and the defender, Zhu Huan, played it cool with an ambush. He killed hundreds of Cao Ren's men and captured one general alive: Wang Shuang.
After being captured, he was sent to Wuchang. During the Three Kingdoms period, switching sides was completely normal, Wang Shuang wasn't a big name, so he likely surrendered and served Wu.
How did he end up back under Zhang He's command?
Most likely, he got captured back by the Wei. Zhang He's records show him breaking a Wu force in 226 alongside Sima Yi. Wang Shuang must have been stuck there until Cao Rui frantically called for reinforcements at Chencang.
In a rescue mission like that, sending a vanguard to rush ahead is standard. Wang Shuang, eager to prove his loyalty after switching sides twice, was caught in the Prime Minister's counterstroke. He became the Prime Minister's merit.
From Wang Shuang's trajectory, we can see that the Prime Minister fulfilled Sun Quan's request perfectly: Zhang He was pulled away from the Xiangyang front, which directly relieved the pressure on Sun Wu. This is why the Second Expedition at Chencang looked so strange. It was a diplomatic favor masquerading as a siege.]
"This Wang Shuang..." Zhang Fei used a phrase he'd heard on the screen. "He's a real 'unlucky dog,' isn't he? Switched sides twice just to get ahead, and then... snip."
Huang Zhong snorted coldly. "Yide, remember what you said before? Why are you crying over a Cao dog's coffin? Cao Ren's troops slaughtered everyone in Wancheng during the Xiangyang campaign. Wang Shuang likely had a hand in that."
Huang Zhong had spent seventeen years under Liu Biao. There was not a corner of the Southern Commandery he did not know.
He had zero sympathy for anyone associated with those massacres.
Zhang Fei understood.
He simply sighed for the waste of it all.
Liu Bei did not speak.
His thoughts were elsewhere.
The sin of slaughtering a city lay with Cao Ren, but did a man like Wang Shuang have the power to refuse orders?
He could not ask men like that to die for righteousness.
He could only work to end this chaotic era sooner.
If men like Wang Shuang had land to farm and families to love, they would not be forced into such impossible choices.
[Lightscreen]
[But for a man as meticulous as the Prime Minister, achieving a single goal was never enough.
The Collected Works of Zhuge Liang includes an essay of self-reflection. While the elites of Shu thought Chencang was a win, the Prime Minister classified it alongside the failure at Mount Qi.
He concluded that the failure at Mount Qi was due to the quality of the troops. At the time, the Shu Han army significantly outnumbered the Wei, yet they still lost. He blamed himself first, and the soldiers second.
So, after Mount Qi, the training began in earnest. Chencang was a display of those results.
The 'high-tech' gear was meant to compensate for the soldiers' lack of experience, but it still wasn't quite enough.
But if the siege wasn't working? Fine. Let's go scavenge some resources. This was the Prime Minister's second objective: transitioning into the Third Northern Expedition.
The grand siege at Chencang wasn't just to distract the Wei for Sun Wu; it was to distract them for a real land grab.
In early 229, Chen Shi was ordered to attack Wudu and Yinping. The Prime Minister himself marched to Jianwei. Guo Huai, seeing the trap, bolted before he could be pinned down. Thus, the two commanderies fell to the Han.
Let's look at the timeline:
October, get the message from Wu.
November, submit the Later Memorial to vent frustration.
December, march to Chencang and play 'siege warfare' with Hao Zhao for twenty days.
Then, in early 229, Chen Shi hits Wudu and Yinping.
Guo Huai rushes to help, gets into a bloody brawl with Chen Shi, only for the Prime Minister to take a 'detour' on his way home and pop up at Jianwei to back Chen Shi up.
In essence, the Prime Minister used Chencang as the bait for a 'Surround the Point and Strike the Reinforcements' play.
Unfortunately, Guo Huai didn't take the bait fully, but he did lose the territory. So, after a long winter of hard work, the Prime Minister pocketed two commanderies and went back to Chengdu to rest his weary body.
At this point, he has only five and a half years remained before he would die of illness at Wuzhang Plains.]
The veterans had been ready to congratulate the Military Advisor for turning a diplomatic loss into a territorial gain, but the final note from the Light Screen killed the words in their throats.
Kongming himself was surprisingly calm.
"Starting tomorrow, I think I'll spend some time with the Divine Physician Zhang Zhongjing to learn about 'wellness' and longevity."
Liu Bei forced a smile. "Kongming, aren't you going to say 'that is the Prime Minister' this time?"
Kongming shook his head with a quiet laugh.
"Kongming command of the art of war is evolving at a frightening pace," Guan Yu observed.
"Looking back, the failure at Mount Qi was indeed a mistake of strategy. He should have left a secondary force to threaten the peripheral cities and struck Shanggui with his main force. Taking Shanggui would have secured the Longyou Road, and the rest would have followed. Losing those days at Mount Qi let Guo Huai seize the initiative."
"And secondly," Guan Yu continued, his eyes glancing briefly at a cowering Ma Su, "the failure at Jieting was also a mistake of command. The Mount Qi plan was built on caution, yet at Jieting, a place of such vital importance, Kongming abandoned caution and gambled on an unproven general. It was a mistake of personnel."
Zhang Fei added with exaggerated drama,
"But Kongming had a backup plan! He gave Ma Su four generals! Four! And if four men couldn't talk sense into him, what else could he do?"
He turned to the man behind him.
"Ma Youchang, you're the expert on military theory. Tell me, what do you do when a man is that stubborn?"