BST - Chapter 4

Chapter 4: I Absolutely Refuse to Believe This Hea... Guards!

Hearing the words "save his life," Wang Xun's brow twitched involuntarily. "You already believe what the Heavenly Screen says is true?"

"It is not a matter of belief or disbelief; I am simply taking the matter as it stands," Wang Shen'ai replied. "Everyone knows that if the Xie clan of Chenjun, with their 'fine orchids and jade trees growing in the courtyard,' stand for purity and non-interference, letting their scions flourish as they will, then we of the Wang Clan of Langya are the cunning hare with three burrows, adept at weathering rise and ruin. We never rest until every angle is covered and we have friends in all quarters."

"If someone supplanted the Sima and made himself king, the Xie clan might well survive intact. The Wang clan would not necessarily."

"Suppose this new sovereign despises evil as he does his enemy, rewards and punishes with perfect clarity, and cherishes the ambition of bringing peace to the realm. Looking at the conduct of the Wang Clan of Langya through the ages, I doubt it would endear us to him. What does my uncle think?"

Wang Xun: "..."

Seeing him go on without answering, Wang Shen'ai cleared her throat and raised her voice a fraction. "Uncle?"

Wang Xun started as though waking from a dream. "Yes... what you say makes sense."

Whether by coincidence or not, the expression "adept at weathering rise and ruin" that Wang Shen'ai had used was the very one others had used to describe one of the great figures of the Wang Clan of Langya.

That man, together with his elder cousin, had helped Sima Rui ascend the throne of the Eastern Jin. He had performed countless meritorious deeds in his lifetime, and upon his death received the posthumous name "Wenxian," with a funeral on the scale of Huo Guang's. His name was Wang Dao.

He was Wang Xun's grandfather as well.

After Wang Xun entered official service, eager to make his mark quickly, he had served on the staff of the Grand Marshal Huan Wen, handling the camp's confidential military affairs. After Huan Wen's death, he had gone from one suppression campaign to another, won the favor of Sima Yao, and risen steadily through the ranks, establishing himself with a smooth and adaptable touch. It would be no exaggeration to say he resembled his grandfather in temperament.

Wang Shen'ai's remark seemed merely to analyze the future of the Wang clan, yet how was it not a blow straight to his weak spot!

A smooth, adaptable manner could be useful at times; at others, particularly in a time like this that plainly heralded upheaval, perhaps not.

Run into a sovereign with a heavy killing streak, or a deeply suspicious one, and it became a catastrophe.

Wang Xun thought of this, and looked at Wang Shen'ai once more.

Her features, light and spare as an ink-wash painting, were the very image of her father Wang Xianzhi's. They also brought to mind the year the family house caught fire: everyone else had rushed out in a panic, but Wang Xianzhi had remained perfectly composed, unhurriedly summoning the servants and strolling out at his leisure, a tale the literati still told with admiration.

Yet her decisiveness in handling matters was unmistakably more like that of her mother... who, if she wanted a thing, was bound to get it.

"Uncle," Wang Shen'ai said, putting a little more weight into her voice, "you do not have that much time to hesitate."

Wang Xun turned his head and saw that Sima Daozi had already summoned his trusted men before him.

Sima Daozi had plainly realized that if he did not want to be torn apart by five horses, as the Heavenly Screen foretold, by that Emperor Yong'an, he must save himself as fast as he could.

Even though the Heavenly Screen's appearance had cut his prestige to an all-time low, he would never simply sit still and await his doom!

He was the younger brother of the last emperor, the Prince of Kuaiji of the Sima clan. He was no one's prey!

Sima Daozi had never been a stupid man, and with his life hanging in the balance his mind worked far faster than usual.

He gave orders to his trusted followers: "Send word to the Administrator of Tangyi and the Administrator of Wei Commandery, and fetch the consulting aide to the General of Agile Cavalry."

The Heavenly Screen had mentioned that he heeded sycophants and scoundrels, and let underlings like Wang Guobao, Zhao Ya, and Ru Qianqiu run rampant. If he were executed, those men would certainly get no mercy either.

He had to warn them at once.

Of the three, Wang Guobao, though Xie An's son-in-law, was deeply loathed by Xie An for his disgraceful conduct, and had entered Sima Daozi's service in pursuit of rank and fame.

Zhao Ya had originally been an opera actor, and Ru Qianqiu a petty officer who caught thieves. Because they understood thoroughly the ways of bribery and won Sima Daozi's favor, they had risen to high office at court.

The three of them could depend on him alone; now they ought to stand with him against the unknown danger.

Among the ignorant masses, too, there were bound to be some who could not make out what the Heavenly Screen was saying and who, because of his status as regent, would obey his commands.

This was his confidence in defying the Heavenly Screen's prophecy.

And...

Only now had he finished sorting through everything the Heavenly Screen had revealed, and he realized there was another possible set of allies. He began searching the crowd for one particular figure.

No!

Perhaps "possible allies" was not quite the right way to describe him. Those hounds who heeded his commands were at best shields he could use to keep himself alive. This man was the real help he needed if he meant to fight back and turn the tables.

Wang Xun's lineage was distinguished, and he was a general besides. Though he stood outside the lamplight, he still cut a far more striking figure than those around him.

Sima Daozi could not help cursing inwardly for a good while, for he saw that the meaningful, friendly look he had cast had landed on a blind man.

Wang Xun had already left Wang Shen'ai's side and withdrawn to his original place. At this moment he was watching the Heavenly Screen "with rapt attention," as though fearful of missing a single word it revealed.

[To sum up: at this point, there was really nothing decent to be seen in Emperor Yong'an's own camp.]

[A fatuous ruler absurdly put to death, a feeble-minded and incompetent successor, an imperial kinsman who brought ruin upon the state and its people, ambitious noble houses, a Buddhist nun who had seized military command, an army waiting for the highest bidder, and one shattered and helpless Emperor Yong'an... pfft, forgive me for using the word "shattered."]

[Anyone who has studied the history of Emperor Yong'an should know that a manuscript volume in Emperor Yong'an's own hand was excavated some years ago. It is said to be a diary from Yong'an's early years, thirty-seven entries in all, twenty of which end with the words: I'm going to crack apart.]

[You could say it was pretty desperate.]

Sima Daozi, absorbed in thinking how to win Wang Xun over, plainly could not grasp the information in that sentence. Wang Shen'ai's eyes, however, gave a start.

Ever more certain, she concluded that this Emperor Yong'an, who had achieved such great feats, must be, just as one of her earlier conjectures suggested, a transmigrator come from a later age!

She simply did not know what identity the other currently held, to have reached the point of "holding the Son of Heaven hostage."

That was no easy feat.

But even though this line of conjecture had now yielded a fairly definite answer, Wang Shen'ai still dared not relax her guard and passively wait for the Heavenly Screen to reveal the other's identity.

If she wanted to live, she could rely only on the scant information she had and her present position, and act faster than everyone else.

She could not count on anyone reaching out a hand to her.

"Cousin..." Sima Dewen began haltingly.

"What is it?" Wang Shen'ai suppressed the storm rising in her eyes and put on her best "kind and benevolent" elder-sister face.

At Sima Dewen's age, he was far from understanding what it meant to change one's face so quickly.

Meeting that gaze at close range, he looked down at the tips of his shoes for a while and squeezed out one sentence. "I... I want to go see Father."

"Wait a little longer, all right?" Wang Shen'ai pointed to the imbecile crown prince nearby. "Elders before youngsters. Only after your royal brother has paid his respects to the late emperor may you go over."

"But..."

But Sima Dewen felt that his brother showed no sign whatsoever of going up to pay his respects!

He might not even understand that their father was dead.

The palace servants, at least, did their duty, and even served that vexing imbecile crown prince a late-night meal.

He spread his cloak on the ground, sat down on it, and fell to with gusto.

With food filling his belly, Sima Dezong's patience came back to him, and he listened with great interest to the immortals of the Heavenly Screen babbling away.

While he was at it, he admired the sight below the Heavenly Screen: some weeping, some laughing, and a whole crowd struck dumb. What a spectacle!

However you looked at it, it was far more amusing than usual.

If Sima Yao could see this scene, he would probably be angry enough to come back to life.

But in any case, making this idiot son his crown prince had been his own choice, and there was no one else to blame.

Sima Dewen fell silent for a moment, then could only accept reality and shrink back to stand at the side.

Having dealt with the two brothers, Wang Shen'ai kneaded her fingertips, forced away the scant drowsiness already in her mind, and concentrated on catching every word from the Heavenly Screen.

For what came next was still not good news.

[But in this period, the danger did not come from within the realm alone. The darkness before dawn enveloped, for Emperor Yong'an, the whole of the Chinese world. The true danger lay still further north.]

[The Great Qin Heavenly King Fu Jian's dream of invading the south was shattered by Huan Chong, Xie An, and Xie Xuan acting in concert, and the Former Qin regime fell apart at the seams. Then things got interesting.]

[The man he had once carried off and kept as a male favorite, Murong Chong, raised an army in rebellion, and after taking the throne stormed Chang'an.]

[His general, the Qiang chieftain Yao Chang, killed him and then proclaimed himself emperor.]

[His general, the scion of the Former Yan imperial house Murong Chui, fled back to his old lands, restored his state, and declared himself king.]

[The Xianbei noble chieftain Tuoba Gui likewise seized the chance to restore his state and declare himself king.]

[...]

On the Heavenly Screen's map, blocks of color lit up one after another, grinding against one another, some vanishing again with astonishing speed.

[Everyone ran on one creed: if you've got the nerve, you dare to be emperor. If you can't be emperor, then be a king.]

[After more than a decade of warfare in the north, what remained in the end were Later Qin, founded by Yao Chang; Later Yan, founded by Murong Chui; and Northern Wei, founded by Tuoba Gui.]

[Of course, at that time they still called themselves Qin, Yan, and Wei respectively. Add Jin to the south, and Western Qin and Liang in the Gansu-Longyou region, and you could more or less stage a simplified version of the Six Kingdoms contest.]

[The one most worth noting among them, or rather the only one worth noting as a victor, is Wei and its founder Tuoba Gui.]

[Let us remember this name.]

[There is this line in Emperor Yong'an's journal: The Sima clan that founded the Jin dynasty back in the day seized power from the hands of Cao Wei. Now a fellow who also calls himself King of Wei has come to collect the debt, and become the southern court's greatest rival. Who can say this is not fate?]

[Cao Cao, could he know of it in the underworld, ought to feel gratified. Perhaps as gratified as Liu Bang when he heard the Xiongnu had named their state Han.]

Beneath the Heavenly Screen, a finger that had been tapping lightly on the armrest suddenly stopped.

Its owner had the quintessential face of a Xianbei man.

Ten years as King of Wei had given this face, weathered somewhat by wind and sun, an air of majesty that needed no show of anger.

Even though King of Wei Tuoba Gui was, this year, only twenty-six.

His eyelids lifted slightly, and in his dark gaze flashed a hawk's keenness. "Minister Cui, that isn't a compliment, is it?"

Cui Hong, singled out by name, froze on the spot: "...Ah."

He could not possibly answer that.

Wei was a foreign regime in every sense of the word, yet he, its Gentleman of the Palace Gate, was the legitimate main line of the noble Cui clan of Qinghe in the Central Plains, a sixth-generation descendant of Cui Lin, the Cao Wei Minister of Works, and a subject who had only just been snatched up by Tuoba Gui.

When it came to literary scholarship, he stood far above Tuoba Gui, so of course he could hear the barb buried in those words.

Although it seemed to have insulted both sides at once.

That hardly sounded like something a man who calls himself "about to crack apart and shatter" would say.

He wiped the cold sweat from his brow. "At the very least, the Heavenly Screen says you are the most important man in the north. If you asked me, the name Wei suits the Tuoba clan of today far better than Dai ever did."

Tuoba Gui let out a cold laugh. "Heh! If I grew complacent on the strength of that one sentence, wouldn't that mean I also had to believe that in days to come some Emperor Yong'an would fight his way north and wipe me out?"

He would never believe that!

Before this strange Heavenly Screen appeared, he had just won an exceptionally important battle.

Just as the Heavenly Screen said:

[Before Tuoba Gui's rise, no one imagined that this small state, thrown together on the steppe out of necessity, could prosper in the hands of a sixteen-year-old ruler.]

[At first, Tuoba Gui and his Wei depended on the far more powerful Yan to support them. Murong Chui, that charitable investor, even sent his own son to help Tuoba Gui defeat the Gaoche, Helan, and other tribes and carry off great numbers of horses, cattle, and sheep, propelling Northern Wei in a single leap to the foremost power beyond the frontier.]

[It was not until ten years after Northern Wei's founding that Murong Chui finally sensed something amiss. In campaigning abroad and coordinating at home, developing agriculture, studying the Han system, establishing rites, and registering the common people into households, Tuoba Gui performed splendidly in all of them, showing nothing like what one expects of a young man in his teens or early twenties. With an iron hand he dragged the Tuoba Xianbei behind him, step by step out of the frontier and into the Central Plains.]

[So to curb Tuoba Gui's expansion, Murong Chui dispatched his own son Murong Bao to lead a great army against Northern Wei.]

[But here was the problem: Northern Wei was a nation of nomads. Though Murong Bao had some small experience commanding troops and was not simply marching out to be slaughtered, he actually took the great army and spent three months without finding Tuoba Gui's main force. After all that thrashing about, the army's morale fell into such disarray that they could do nothing but choose to withdraw.]

[Tuoba Gui had been waiting for exactly this moment. The instant the other side turned about, he personally led his picked troops in pursuit.]

[The outcome of this battle needs no elaboration. Every last soldier and general Murong Bao had brought with him perished at Canhe Slope, while Murong Bao himself fled home alone on horseback.]

[Fortunately, Yan still had some reserves in its coffers. When the son lost, the father could be summoned to avenge him. Murong Chui did ample justice to his reputation as a general of a hundred battles: he marched in secret, cut a road through the Taihang Mountains, and drove straight for Northern Wei's Pingcheng. With fine troops and able commanders falling on the city, the Northern Wei general defending it was slain, and the thirty thousand troops within were absorbed into Yan.]

[Tuoba Gui lost officers and men and came close to being abandoned by all. Yet at precisely this moment Murong Chui, over seventy years of age, died of illness. Not only did this give Tuoba Gui a chance to catch his breath, it gave this formidable strongman his opening for a counterattack.]

[The counterattack that followed utterly changed the fates of Northern Wei and Later Yan, raising the curtain on Northern Wei's unification of the north, until at last it bared its savage fangs at the south.]

As Tuoba Gui listened, a smile spread slowly across his face.

All three battles the Heavenly Screen spoke of had taken place within these past two years, and since he had nearly always campaigned in person, most had unfolded before his eyes.

No one could better feel the mighty fortune of destiny that had seen him through the loss of Pingcheng and back into this seat.

Moreover, the death of Murong Chui as a rival had prepared the ground for his swallowing Yan piece by piece.

Yet it was precisely at this moment that he suddenly heard the Heavenly Screen say:

[More than once Emperor Yong'an remarked to the great general with deep feeling that his single greatest regret was that he had not gone north in person to kill Tuoba Gui, to stamp him and certain of the crude customs he had instituted underfoot; by then Yong'an himself had already died at his own son's hands.]

[But no one can deny that at this moment, with Sima Yao's passing, the scholar-gentry of the south still lingered over the elegance of composing poems and inscribing calligraphy, while the formidable enemy in the north had already shown the edge of a hegemon. To an Emperor Yong'an bent on strengthening the state, this was a colossal obstacle...]

Tuoba Gui shot to his feet.

The muscles along his cheeks tightened for an instant, and a sentence burst from his lips: "Men! Bring Tuoba Si and Tuoba Shao before me!"

Tuoba Si was his eldest son, five years old this year; Tuoba Shao was his second son, three.

They were also the only two sons he had to this day.

Seeing the attendants below hesitate and shuffle forward slowly, Tuoba Gui turned his head and bellowed toward the source of a certain sound: "Minister Cui, what are you muttering about over there!"

Cui Hong wanted to wipe his cold sweat again. "You said a moment ago, my lord, that you did not believe any of this..."

Ah. So why do you believe it now?

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